Halloween Chillers: A Boxed Set Bundle (Halloween Man, the Words, the Nightmare Chronicles)
Date: 2012-09-30 04:00:00+00:00
Description: Just in time for Halloween -- three chilling ebooks in one! From Bram Stoker Award and International Horror Guild Award-winning writer Douglas Clegg come three works of horror and the supernatural! Nearly 800 pages (if in print) of fiction, including the full-length novel Halloween Man, the novella The Words, and the award-winning full-length collection, The Nightmare Chronicles. This special bundle provides edge-of-your-seat reading with this fantastic boxed set of ebooks. Halloween Man "A brilliant novel, up there with the best of Straub, King, and Koontz."* From award-winning author Douglas
Publisher: Alkemara Press

Halloween Chillers

A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense

Douglas Clegg

Contents

A Note from the Author

The Halloween Man

Praise for The Halloween Man and Douglas Clegg

Get the Free Newsletter

The Halloween Man

Prologue

PART ONE
the damnation highway

Chapter 1

Chapter 2
he whispered…

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

PART TWO

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

INTERLUDE

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

PART THREE

INTERLUDE

Chapter 27

COMES THE HALLOWEEN MAN, REAPING

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Epilogue

Also by Douglas Clegg

Contact Douglas Clegg

Disclaimer

Publication Credits

About the Author

The Nightmare Chronicles

Praise for Douglas Clegg’s Fiction

Discover Douglas Clegg’s Fiction

Want More?

Author’s Note

Underworld

White Chapel

1

2

3

4

5

O, Rare and Most Exquisite

The Little Mermaid

The Rendering Man

1

2

3

The Fruit of Her Womb

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

The Night Before Alec Got Married

1

2

3

4

5

Only Connect

1

2

3

4

5

6

The Ripening Sweetness of Late Afternoon

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Chosen

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Damned If You Do

The Hurting Season

1

2

3

4

5

I Am Infinite, I Contain Multitudes

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Want More?

Get the Newsletter

Also by Douglas Clegg

About the Author

Disclaimer

Publication Credits & Copyright

The Words

1.
The End Is Like This

2.
Before the Night

3.
The Night Begins

4.
The Deer

5.
Shelter

6.
The Church

7.
In Darkness

8.
The Party

Also by Douglas Clegg

Get the Newsletter

About the Author

Disclaimer

Publication Credits & Copyright

A Note from the Author

Dear Reader,

I have always loved October and the Halloween season. The pumpkins, the scarecrows, the ancient stories of spirits and goblins, the sense of witches astride broomsticks, the masks, and the idea of the dark harvest and the coming of All Souls Day.

I’ve gathered three books together for you who also love Halloween as a season, an event, a place of the mind.

First, the novel, The Halloween Man is set on the coast of New England in a strange town called Stonehaven. Then, my Bram Stoker Award-winning collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, containing thirteen stories and novelettes of dark places and haunted people. And finally, one very dark night of friendship and transformation between two young men in The Words.

I hope you enjoy these journeys into the heart of October itself.

Best,

Douglas Clegg

DouglasClegg.com

Praise for The Halloween Man and Douglas Clegg

“Clegg’s stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby.”

—Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author.

“Douglas Clegg has become the new star in horror fiction.”

—Peter Straub, author of Ghost Story and, with Stephen King, The Talisman

“The Halloween Man is one of the best horror novels that I’ve read in years...I had never read anything by Clegg before reading this novel, but now I’m going to go out and get the rest of his books. If you’ve never heard of Clegg either, or are a fan of horror fiction, get this book right now.”

—Pixel Planet

“Clegg gets high marks on the terror scale...”

—The Daily News (New York)

“Every bit as good as the best works of Stephen King, Peter Straub, or Dan Simmons...”

—Hellnotes

“Packed with vivid imagery; a broadly-scoped but fast-paced plot; powerful, evocative writing; superb characterizations; and facile intelligence...Douglas Clegg has given horror lovers the best Halloween gift possible—an entertaining spinetingler written with unique style...”

—DarkEcho

Get the Free Newsletter

Get book updates, exclusive offers, news of contests & special treats for readers—become a V.I.P. member of Douglas Clegg’s long-running free newsletter.

Click here to sign up.

Click here to explore more fiction by Douglas Clegg.

The Halloween Man

A Novel of Supernatural Horror

Prologue

The shattering of glass and metal—as some unseen intruder broke the window—did not wake him.

A voice in his head whispered, “Your soul.”

The boy shivered in his sleep. Rain and wind blew in across the near-desolate room, across the old woman’s face as she remained in some dream. The crunch and squeal of a door opening, of glass being stepped upon, all of this played at the edge of the boy’s consciousness but he could not tug away from the dream that had grabbed him.

The voice whispered, “Your heart.”

His eyelids fluttered open for a moment, and then closed, as if the real world were the dream, and his inner world, the truth.

Even the mindpain was only a shredded curtain, blowing against a window of the dream.

The boy dreamed on. His inner eyes opened onto the other world, the one of insane geometries, of orange lightning, of fire that rained from trees like leaves falling, of the birds rising from the water their impossibly pure white wings spreading across the burning sky. As the sky filled with bloody swans, he saw the dark ram with its golden eyes shining as it galloped towards him across the surface of the unbroken water. Then the eels wriggling across the glassy surface, turning the brown water red with their wakes. The ram rode across their backs, its hooves beating like knives on stones. The Azriel Light came up from its breath, forming crystalline in the mist of air, and then burned across the world. What was unspeakable found voice and its bleating froze the air for a moment hacked from the fabric of time as the secret of all stabbed at his ears.

Someone tried to wake him from it. The mindpain came back like a bolt of lightning, burning along his neural pathways. The boy’s eyes opened, his dream torn apart.

The man shook him awake and held a hand over his mouth. The room came back with its shadows of curtains and half-opened cupboards. The shroud of dawn. The room that always seemed too small for all of them. The others slept on around him.

The man wore a dark leather jacket and jeans, and the smell from him was almost sweet—like sage on the desert after a rain.

“You Satan?” the boy asked in a hushed tone of reverence.

“I could be,” the man whispered, his breath all cigarettes. “If you keep quiet, you’ll live. Understand?”

The boy nodded. The mindpain blossomed against his small skull. When it came on, as it usually did after one of the Great Meetings, it would blast within his head like the worst headache. Sometimes his nose would bleed from it. Sometimes he’d go into convulsions. He never knew how hard it would hit; he just knew it was PAIN. He knew it HURT. The mindpain didn’t let go until it was good and ready to.

The boy felt something pressed against his side.

Cold metal.

“That’s right,” the man whispered. “It’s a gun. I will kill you if you make a noise or try to fight me. Or if you try to do what I know you can do.”

The boy began shivering, and wasn’t sure if he could will himself to stop. He wanted to be back in his dream. It felt like ants were crawling all over his arms and legs. Ants stinging him all over, and then tickling along his neck. He wanted to swat and scratch, but he was afraid the man might use the gun. The boy had seen a jackrabbit get shot clean in half once. He didn’t need to imagine it happening to himself.

But the markings on him, the drawings...

He knew they were moving, the pictures on his shoulders. He wished he could scrape them from his flesh. He wanted to tell the stranger with the gun about them, about how they meant bad things when they began moving, but the boy knew this would do no good.

The man grinned as he lifted the boy up, wrapping a shabby blanket around him. The boy’s last view of what he had come to call home was the old woman lying there staring at him. Blood sluiced from between her lips, and tears bled down in rivulets from her eyes. The mattress beneath her was soaked red. Her fingers were still curled around a small amulet she kept with her, nothing more than a locket, a good luck charm.

The boy was too tired to fight, and weakened, too, by the previous day’s performance. Mindpain always came after the show. Mindpain was like what the Great Father had called a hangover. It was the morning after. That was a problem for him, it sapped him of strength, and even when he had tried to kick out at the man, he could barely move his legs.

The man would probably kill him. The boy knew this is what kidnappers usually did. He had watched late night TV shows and knew that kidnappers rarely kept a kid alive.

The boy tried not to think of the gun.

Tried to remember the Great Father holding his arms out, his hands open to him. “I will be your comfort in the valley of the shadow,” the Great Father had said.

This was the valley of the shadow of death. This kidnapper and his gun and his blanket and the red stain on the mattress with the old woman’s mouth wide open.

Thinking about it, the boy winced. The hammering in his head grew stronger.

The pounding of the rain on the roof seemed unbearable. It was a terrible rain, it had come at first as ice and then tiny pebbles hitting the corrugated tin roof, until finally, it was just water. God is pissin’ on us on accounta our sins, that’s what the old woman who took care of him would say, her Texas twang increasing with her years. She was dead now. She was in whatever Great Beyond existed, the boy knew. She was in the pictures that covered him now, as were all things that were no more. If the mindpain hadn’t descended that night, weakening him further, he might’ve been able to struggle against this evil man who took him. Even though the blanket covered the boy’s ears, it was as if the hoof beats of wild horses were beating down upon him from heaven.

The kidnapper threw him into the backseat of a car. Slammed the door. As they drove off, the boy glanced back at the place he’d called home and knew in his heart he would never see it again. Dawn was just bursting from the far horizon. Rain accompanied it, the first fresh drops hitting the car windows, dirt rinsing down. The pain in the boy’s head grew, and he could feel the tingling begin along his back and shoulders. He knew that whatever was supposed to start, all the things that he’d been warned about by the Great Father, would come to pass now.

Through him, the radiance would come, like electricity through the idiot wires of the gods.

His skin felt molten.

PART ONE

THE STORM KING

“Down came the golden ship, plowing into the fallow earth as if planting a new crop in a dry field...”

From THE STORM KING: INTERGALACTIC KNIGHT, Vol. 12

the damnation highway

“It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey.”

—On The Road by Jack Kerouac

Chapter One

THE KIDNAPPER

1

You can’t ever take this back.

The kidnapper heard the voice in his head.

You can’t ever undo this. You must now follow it through, what you’ve started.

You must now take it to its logical conclusion.

Try not to picture what you’re going to have to do to the kid.

The only emotion the man felt was an indefinable revulsion, not even fear, for an adrenaline rush overcame his cowardice. His sweat had dried up; his body no longer trembled with the knowledge of what he had to do. It was no longer a plan, or a plot; it was an action in fact. Yet he had to have control over himself, or he would lose it. He might just go over the edge, and then all that he’d worked so hard to keep in place for so many years—the lurker beneath his own skin—all would run wild.

If a place could have an aura, this one did, and it was the aura that caused his revulsion. An aura of darkness, and it was almost like a physical heaviness to the place. A halo of nightmare, all around the periphery. He’d do right by the world if he poured kerosene at its edges and torched the whole place, and the dozen or so people sleeping there. The Rapturists, they called themselves, but for people of God they had quite an arsenal stored out in New Mexico. The Feds were already surrounding their Quonset huts just outside of Las Cruces, out in the dusty hills, ready for a showdown, at least according to the media. But the Rapturists had pockets all over the United States and parts of Central America. They were a big family of loons whose religious zeal tended towards forming militias and announcing messiahs with every change of weather.

This enclave, small as it was, and apparently as harmless, contained the only messiah that the man wanted:

The boy they called Shiloh or Prophet.

Funny that no one’s standing guard. Funny that they don’t feel the need to protect their little messiah from men like me who might want to do something terrible to him.

He had one final protection with him in case they did catch him, one little parachute of sorts.

Don’t think about it.

All you want is the boy.

Funny though that no one is waking up, and funny about that woman lying on the mattress. Too dark to really get a look, but why didn’t she wake up? Why didn’t she try to stop him?

Don’t think about that either.

Don’t think about what might have been done last night, perhaps as some kind of God ritual among them, some kind of Kool-Aid laced with People’s Temple cyanide, or some other nasty little “let’s go to Heaven together, shall we?” party.

These Rapturists were that crazy. Their whole sense of religion is built around death anyway. No big surprise if by sunrise all of them will be found dead.

All but the boy.

What had Fairclough called it?

Oh yeah, the Azriel Light, which was suitably biblical since Azriel was the Angel of Death. The Azriel Light was simply a phenomenon of idiot humans going crazy and killing themselves when in the presence of the light of Holiness. Leave it to Fairclough and the Rapturists to describe their lack of survival skills to some bogus religious phrase. “The Azriel Light,” the blonde on the Christian show had said, “is the warm glow of God’s love, but it is not of the flesh, but of spirit. The flesh is a covering, like this blouse and skirt I’m wearing, and we must shed it to move into the eternal light.”

This was a place of darkness. No dawn, and no damn Azriel Light was going to make it any brighter.

I know another name for the Azriel Light, he thought. Moonfire.

All he wanted was to get the boy in the car and get the hell out of this enclave of rundown homes out in the middle of a Texas nowhere. The stink was everywhere—Stony Crawford could smell it like the scent of old blood, the way you knew that something or someone was dead, had been dead a long time and had just lain there in the excrement of death as if waiting for resurrection. He couldn’t wait to get out from among the shacks and mobile homes, and back into his car. And those cages, full of rattlesnakes, all still and eerie beneath the trailer that sat upon cinder blocks. Christ, that was creepy. People who would keep fifty rattlesnakes for their church social weren’t people you wanted to mess with.

The kid stayed put, which was good for both of them. Stony had to make sure that no one followed.

Damn Death Cult. Damn superstitious backwoods New Ager Gospel spouters believing in snake oil and storm clouds and little boys who make rain come down over parched land.

He trembled as he slid into the front seat. Thought he saw a man standing off behind one of the shacks, just watching the spectacle.

The Kidnapping Of A Twelve Year Old Boy. The Miracle Worker kid of the Southwest. The Boy Who Predicted The Assassination. The Boy Who Healed The Sick. The Boy Who Raised The Dead. The Boy Who Made The Blind See and The Lame Walk. The New Messiah Of Texas And The World, Shiloh Incarnate.

Stony had read all the cheap magazines and lurid newspaper reports, seen the television show that dragged the kid before the cameras while some platinum blond with mascara for brains tried to suck money out of the viewers. “The Rapture is coming, and Prophet is our savior!” she cried, “Send ten dollars, twenty, five hundred, whatever you can, be part of this great convergence of heaven and earth!”

I guess I must be the Devil for stealing the Messiah.

I must be worse than the Devil, because I’m gonna take this kid and...

Don’t picture it. You weaken when you think about it. You start thinking stupid-ass warm fuzzy thoughts about the innocence of childhood and about love and about care and about how this is just after all a little boy, and for all you know you didn’t even get the right little boy, you did what you did last time, you grabbed the wrong kid.

The voice within him whispered, you got the wrong kid last time, remember? You were a dumbass twenty-year-old then and you grabbed the tot, and ran, and when you got out to the place where you were gonna blow him to kingdom come, turns out you had just grabbed some kid who was nothing but a kid. Ordinary. Sweet. Goofy. Scared. And you had to shut him up somehow, but you knew only killing him would do it.

So, instead, you just showed him something horrible. You showed him that place inside you that no one wants to see and stay sane. You let that kid see it, knowing it would fry his little four-year-old brain and then he’d spend half his childhood hoping that Hell wasn’t going to open up right under his feet.

Some wonderful as shit world you gave that kid, the wrong kid.

And you’re so damn sure this one here is the right one?

Who’s the monster, Stony?

“I am,” he whispered aloud.

2

They traveled by car, an old beat-up Mustang he’d bought for a hundred and fifty-seven bucks in a town farther south called Causeway Center. The old man selling the car had told him he was a fool to buy it even at that price, and it wouldn’t take him all the way up the coast, but it might get him as far as North Carolina, and from there, “You’re on your own. Only God or Fate is gonna take care of this beat-up old piece of scrap metal from there on.” The old man reminded him—too much—of his own father, not in the eyes, but in the mouth, that jug-chinned hangdog kind of mouth. He hadn’t really trusted the old man. He never really trusted anyone. But he double-checked his various maps, and he knew the Mustang was as good as any car he could find after he’d smashed up his other one. He didn’t have a lot of cash left, and now he had this mission.

That’s what it was. A pure mission.

Stony Crawford glanced at the glove compartment.

Don’t think about it.

Even thinking about it might make him know it’s there.

He ignored the image of it that his mind conjured. Keep your mind on the road. In the rearview mirror, the boy slept. The backseat was outfitted with pillows and blankets. He didn’t want the boy to be uncomfortable. He didn’t want the kid to get too scared of him, not yet. The boy had dark hair, almost too long. His skin was a deep tan on his face, from the Texas sun. His pupils, when Stony had seen his eyes go wide, were large and dilated as if someone had been putting some sort of eye drops in them to increase the boy’s sensitivity to light. But otherwise, Stony had recognized the boy almost immediately. The shock of it almost threw him backwards. He’d been searching for this kid for just under twelve years, and finding him, he knew. He knew why the other kid had been the wrong one, because he’d been looking for all the wrong qualities. But seeing this boy was like thrusting his hand into a bucket of electric eels.

He had arrived at the small one-room schoolhouse on the edge of a shit-dust town, and seen the boy from the back of the room. That death stink was all around, and the idiots there had brought in three corpses, as if the boy would actually be able to raise them back to life. But oh, those fundamentalist believers wanted to know that either Christ or the Antichrist had returned, Hallelujah, it didn’t matter which. They just wanted the fulfillment of a book written a long time ago, they didn’t want the truth of what the boy was. They didn’t want his totality.

Hallelujah, he makes the wine taste like water! Hallelujah, he maketh the lion to lie down with the lamb! Hallelujah, he knows the fires of hell, and the fate of the world is written upon him! Praise the Almighty, we found our li’l savior and now let’s praise him before we put him up on some cross and kick the living soul right outta him!

But Stony had seen him clearly. Known him, known what he had to do with the boy.

This particular child.

His fingers tensed around the steering wheel. He tried an old relaxation exercise, but the fear of what he must do came back to him.

He blinked, and in that split-second blindness:

saw the red birds burst out of the skin, spreading across the sky, swirling in the wind and then coming together again, a wall of fire, its heat so intense it melted glass.

“It was long ago, my friend,” the comforting voice within him told him. The voice of an old friend, someone he had internalized over the years.

Nora.

“A long time ago, and what’s past is past. All you can do is look down the road and decide if it curves and if you’ll take the curve.”

It rained like the devil from Texas to Arkansas. The land turned from plains to hills, with great pine forests springing up. Even the rain seemed unnatural for northeast Texas, pouring down like the heavens had opened up. The trucks ahead of him splashed water up onto his windshield. The wash of color turning to gray-brown mud, splattering across his vision as the day grew darker with the overhanging clouds. The wipers swiped at it, but the road did not clear from the blur of water and gray.

The rain stopped just outside Little Rock. Traffic was light, and there were several motels along the roadside. Their bright red flashing vacancy signs beckoned to him, but he could not sleep. He could not sleep, and would not let himself rest. Because he knew if he did, then he might let the boy go. He might just stop, out of fear. Or out of a sense that maybe he was wrong, maybe all of it was a bad case of insanity, that his ever-present memory that swirled around inside him was, in fact, fantasy.

He might kill himself, in whatever way it was possible to do so.

To sleep for a thousand years, a voice in his head whispered. To be part of the nothing, the emptiness, and the everything. The enormity of existence, spread across it like fire. To not have to be trapped inside this prison of flesh and bone.

Nora, in her inimitable way, scoffed at this voice of dissent. “There you go, ready to jump in a pond with a two-hundred-pound weight tied around your neck when all you have to do is take it off. You have made cosmic suffering an art, and you’re just too talented in that direction. Stony, when are you gonna just take responsibility for yourself and turn these demons around?”

By then, his hands were tense on the steering wheel. He hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could go. He tasted what he thought might be blood in his mouth. It wasn’t just the fear or stress; it was the knowing. The knowing of it. Not of what had been, but of what must be done. He glanced in the rearview mirror constantly. He half-expected to see a police car following him. Or maybe the people from that awful place back in a small Texas roadside town, the middle of nowhere, a blind spot on the map. The kind of place where things like this might take hold.

Those people.

The people who worshipped the boy.

I am kidnapping a kid from Texas, and dragging his ass halfway across the country, I have a gun, I have a...

(don’t think it and it won’t really be happening—don’t look at the glove compartment.)

“Why do you live in me?” he asked the Nora-voice once. Knew he was crazy for even asking one of the voices in his head about itself.

“Because,” came her reply. “You won’t let me go.”

Tried not to listen to the chaos of voices inside him. “I’m not crazy,” he said, and then realized he’d said it aloud.

Glanced back at the boy in the rearview mirror.

I am a kidnapper. Felony.

I may be a murderer. Felony.

Oh, but worse. There’s a law beyond the law, and a justice beyond human justice.

Damnation is my only highway.

3

At some point in driving, he began seeing things on the road, like movies sprayed across his windshield. Just images from the past, people’s faces, the big summerhouse out on Juniper Point. He had to force his concentration to see the highway through them, to see what was up ahead.

Moonfire burst across his vision—
the yellow-white moon, corona of red around it like sunbursts—

A flashback as sure as if he’d dropped acid back when he was a teenager.

Moonfire, searing, almost blinding him—
the vision of her,

Her face encased in a liquid white sac, the blue veins, like a spider web, through it. The pulsing of the life fluid.

Then, it was gone as quickly as it had arrived. The road ahead was dark and straight.

The sky lightened as storm clouds became as insubstantial as a dream across the reality of midday.

The smell of steamy autumn in the air, the humid moss of a warm October, caught in his throat. After the storm, the moisture evaporated in the brilliant sun. He wiped his sunglasses off, looking up at the open sky. A vast big blue empty that stretched for miles. There was no end to it as he glanced across the horizon. No clouds ahead. Nothing in the beyond but clear skies, no apparent darkness. It was a relief, for the rain had been like the pounding in his head since he’d found what he’d been searching for.

When the rain stopped, the memories quieted.

The rain had been like nails hitting stones in his head.

Or the soft thud of nails in hands.

Sometimes, it was just rain.

“I’m hungry,” the kid in the backseat said.

“Later on.”

“There’s a war goin’ on,” the kid said.

“Yeah right.”

“There is. Between Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell,” the boy said as if this had been drilled into him since the age of three. “All of us is part of it, and my part is like a fire across the seas.”

“And he bound the serpent for a thousand years and—”

“You know Scripture?” the boy asked, shocked.

“You ain’t the messiah, kid, so just shut up about those chuckleheads we just left behind,” Stony clucked. Then, “Sorry, kid. I guess you could say I’m just in a bad mood.”

The silence in the car became overbearing. Stony switched on the radio. The choices were country or preachers. Country won, hands down. Stony tuned into the end of an old Charlie Pride tune, “Kiss An Angel Good Morning.” The kid began singing along softly to it from the backseat.

4

“How about over there?” Stony pointed to the Waffle Hut off the highway.

“I guess,” the boy said. “You still in a bad mood?”

“Kid, I’m always in a bad mood. Waffle Hut?”

“McDonald’s would be okay.”

“You want to wait for the next McDonald’s? It might be a half hour.”

“Okay, whatever you say, you’re da boss,” the boy said almost cheerfully.

“You don’t mind that I’m taking you,” Stony said after he’d parked in front of the Waffle Hut. “You don’t mind that a stranger put you in his car and is driving someplace you have no idea of.”

The boy shrugged. “You’re the one with the gun, not me.”

5

Inside, the Formica table coated with a thin layer of grease, the boy glanced at the spattered-plastic menu. “My eyes must be bigger’n my belly. I want everything I can get.”

“Easy, kid,” Stony said. “Keep it under five bucks, okay?”

When the waitress came over, she wiped down the table, took the orders, and the boy said, “Grits, two sausages, three eggs, two pancakes. Big glass of milk.”

Stony checked his wallet. Depressingly few bills remained in it. A small photo from the past: the fifteen-year-old girl with the dark skin and dark hair. Pretty eyes. Sweet smile. Around her neck, a small gold cross. “Nothing for me, thanks. Wait, maybe some toast. Yeah, just some toast. Toast and coffee.”

The boy glared at him. “I got to eat.” He took a sip from the glass of water. “Your car is a shitkicker, mister.”

6

He could fix the car every time it died—which it did, and often. Once, at a truck stop outside Memphis, and he’d burned his right hand getting the distributor cap off. Acrid smoke filled the air, but he managed to toggle some switches and buy a new temperature gage, and it ran all right for the night. The boy had to piss five times in the space of six hours, and still he refused to give up his two-liter plastic bottle of Coke which he clung to as if for dear life.

On the road, no one really looked at the boy, who mainly kept to himself in the backseat, flipping through the stack of Time and Life magazines that had come with the car, pulling the blanket over his head when daylight came—and Stony assumed he slept. At the rest stops sometimes a nice big-haired Southern woman patted the boy on the head as he ran by her on his way to the snack machines. “Your son is a real popgun,” one woman told him, smiling a smile full of Georgia peaches and Southern-fried warmth. If only she knew. Every few hours, the boy complained of hunger. He devoured two Big Macs at one sitting that night, and then downed a large fry, a Coke and a chocolate milk shake. The kid was an addict for Coke, with a secondary addiction to Snickers bars. The candy wrappers littered the backseat, and when Stony stopped for cigarettes or gas or a decent cup of coffee, the kid always had to get him to buy some more Snickers. A healthy appetite for junk food for a twelve-year-old. At truck stops, the kid did his business, washed his hands, stayed near him. As if boy were afraid of the rest of the world more than he was afraid of him. That was good. He knew the boy would stay with him. He knew the boy would stick to him like glue.

That frightened him when he thought about it too much.

He tried not to think of it at all. He was not a man used to showing his fear to anyone, let alone a kid.

They didn’t say much, back and forth, front seat to back. It unnerved him to think of the kid in the back, wondering what it would all come to when they reached their destination.

They passed the Virginia state line at four A.M. Stony was tired, but he wanted to wait until the sun was well up before finding a place to sleep. The kid had no problem sleeping, and seemed to be content with watching the stars and other cars and the blur of trees and houses and the great white blank spaces of the highway north.

Finally, as the sun was coming up, and he was too tired to keep going, the boy asked, “Where you taking me anyway?”

He almost cracked a smile, glancing in the rearview mirror. The boy’s accent was the Southern cracker, he would grow up redneck maybe, and he would grow up and drive a truck and own a gun and maybe have a Labrador retriever in the back with some beer cans rolling around. He grinned—God, he was tired. Tired and restless at the same time.

“Hey,” he said. They’d barely said two words to each other in nine hours. “I’m thinking of pulling off the road and sleeping. You mind?”

The boy shrugged. “Whatever. Long as I don’t have to keep smellin’ your nasty cigarettes.”

“Motel 8 or maybe an Econolodge,” Stony said, keeping his eyes on the road and then glancing up at the boy in the rearview mirror.

For a half second, the boy’s face changed, but it might’ve been the shadows of early dawn.

Might’ve been sleep deprivation, too, for all he knew.

Something shifted on the boy’s face.

Could he have really smiled like that, that kid? Could he have smiled so it looked like all his teeth were sharp like little knives?

“Watch out, mister,” the boy said.

He had swerved the Chevy onto the shoulder. It skidded along the gravel. He took his foot off the accelerator, regaining control, and pressed down on the brake. “Hang on,” he said. But the car slowed easily, and came to rest at the roadside.

The boy whispered something, and it sounded to him like a prayer of some sort.

“What?” he asked.

“The Madonna of the Highways,” the boy repeated himself. “Out there.” The boy tapped on the window glass.

Stony glanced out in the direction the boy had been looking. There was a closed-down roadside stand, gas pumps as ancient as the pyramids, with an enormous sign that read, “SEE THE MADONNA OF THE HIGHWAYS! WHO IS SHE? WHERE DID SHE COME FROM? WHAT IS HER MYSTERY?”

“Can we go in?” the boy asked.

“It’s closed,” he said. “See? Sign says closed at five.”

“Later on I mean,” the boy said.

Stony said nothing. He glanced at the small shack, painted a brilliant sky blue with its tarpaper roof coming off. Out in front, several statues of Greek youths, all cheesy imitations, flamingos and plastic geese. On a wide flat plywood board, a painting of the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus. She wore a blue robe, and a diadem of stars across her forehead. The Baby Jesus held a red jewel in his tiny hand. The morning sunlight, coming up in the east, flashed across the chrome of old hubcaps that surrounded this painted plank, like round mirrors of distortion. Flashes of sunlight burned like fire on the round shiny metal.

A sign by the highway, Food-Lodging, 3 mi.

“You ever gonna tell me who you are?” the boy asked, sounding only mildly interested.

He glanced at the boy in the rearview mirror. He was already bundling under the thin blanket, getting ready to fall asleep.

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, I will. Later on.”

He wasn’t sure if he would tell the boy anything.

He wasn’t sure if he himself knew why we was doing this.

Why he was going home again with a boy he had taken from a shack in Texas.

7

The motel was a Mom & Pop outfit, twenty rooms, and no other tenants for the day. The middle-aged woman at the front desk glanced at the Chevy parked in the shade off to the side of the parking lot. “How many are there?”

“Just one,” he said. “I’m exhausted.”

“Traveling all night?” she asked, slowly reaching for the key.

He nodded. “Going to Baltimore to see my sister.”

“I’ve never been there, but I heard it’s some place. I heard that the traffic’s terrible,” the woman said. She held the key up, its huge orange tag hanging down, jingling in her hand. “Room 15. First floor. If you open it without pushing, you won’t get in. You must push and turn the key. If you don’t, you’ll end up jamming the lock. Then I have to call a locksmith and it’ll cost me twenty dollars for a room that only goes for twenty-two dollars.”

“Yes,” he nodded, holding his hand out. Thanks for the Southern hospitality.

“15,” she repeated, “to the left and down. Put out your do not disturb sign for the maid.”

Feeling slightly punchy, he said, “Couldn’t you just tell the maid not to go there?”

“I’m the maid,” she said. “But I will forget, Mister...” she glanced at the card he’d just filled out, “Rogers. I have a thousand and one things to keep track of this morning and I have yet to drink my coffee. You must put out the do not disturb sign.”

“Sure,” he said. Mr. Rogers. It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood, he thought. That’s me.

“Fifteen,” she repeated, as he took the key from her.

8

He kept the blanket wrapped around the boy, carrying him into Room 15. Once inside, with the boy snoring lightly, Stony locked the handcuffs around one of the table legs near the television set. Some inner compulsion led him to do this. He didn’t think the boy would run, and the boy had acted so far as if they were old friends or family. But something within him told him that he needed to tie the boy down. It’s not that he was afraid of the kid running away; it was what the kid might do to him, or at least attempt. The kid knew about the gun. He didn’t know about the other things, like what was in the glove compartment.

He set up a series of pillows around the boy’s head. Then, he sat on the double bed. In seconds, he lay back, staring at the ceiling. He would have to fall asleep, but something within him didn’t want to.

He watched three or four houseflies gather in the air just above him. He smelled the musty yet clean smell of the motel, hearing the buzzing of the large black flies. Somewhere nearby, he heard car doors slam open, the click of high heels out on the sidewalk as guests left their rooms. His eyes fluttered closed, but behind their darkness, he was still staring at the flies gathering in the still air above his head.

When he awoke, he was in a sweat.

The boy sat at the edge of the bed watching him. He held the handcuffs in his hands, free. “It’s an old trick I learned from this book on magic tricks,” the boy said. “You just raise your hands so the blood drains out of them. If you got small wrists and hands like I do. After about an hour, you get loose.”

He felt the old fear, as if it had always been caged up inside him.

The boy reached into his lap, bringing up a wallet. “I went through your things, too,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’re a cop.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sort of. I’ve been a cop, among other things.”

“Your name is Stony Crawford. You’re twenty-eight, almost. You live in some town in Arizona.”

“Outside Winslow, yeah.” A slight nervousness crept into his voice.

“Don’t worry,” the boy said, looking slightly beat, as if what he’d learned from the contents of the wallet was not what he wanted to find out. “If I wanted to do anything I already woulda done it. I held your gun. I don’t like guns all that much. So, am I under arrest or something?”

“No,” he said.

“I don’t get it. You bring me here, you’re actually kinda nice and okay if a little squirrelly.”

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“You killed the old woman who took care of me, Stony?”

Stony Crawford shook his head. “No. But I know who did.”

The boy glared at him. He started making goofy faces. Then, he glanced at the clock on the bedside table. The boy shook his head. “I guess we got time, you and me. You one of those men who does nasty things to kids?”

He shook his head. “Jesus, no.”

“Then why? Why me?” The boy, who must’ve been nearly twelve, looked wholly innocent for the moment.

Stony wondered, how could he not know?

It seemed so obvious, from the moment he’d seen heard the stories in the mountains, the miracles, the boy wonder, the little boy they called Prophet. Then, at a fair in the valley, nearly nine months before, they’d taken him down there to show him off, to show off that power that they knew radiated from him. He recognized the boy without ever having seen him before. Others would recognize him, too. The wrong kind of others, like the family who lived among the rocky crags at the Mentirosa Pass. The way the boy walked, the smile, the hair, the eyes. Almost everything about the kid. And then, those people who he was with, the wild people who had somehow kept him to themselves, like a totem, like a fetish. They knew, too, which was why they kept themselves secret.

They even kept the boy’s own identity secret from him.

“If I told you, it might frighten you,” he said, finally, sitting up. “Mind if I smoke?”

The boy shrugged. “Like I could stop you. That’s a nasty habit. Mind if I take a leak?” Then, he got off the bed, and went into the bathroom. When the bathroom door was shut, Stony heard the tap turn on. He lit up his Camel, and breathed in the smoke. He was not a habitual smoker, but took it up in times of stress. Then, he went and opened one of the small suitcases. Underwear, some colored T-shirts, and a newspaper. The newspaper was folded over on itself, a string tied around it. He pulled it loose, opening the paper.

On the front page, a photograph of three men examining what looked like the foundation of a burnt-down house. A cloudy day. They wore rain slickers. Behind the men, a lighthouse. Nothing remarkable in that photograph. Beneath the picture, an article.

9

THE VANISHING ON HIGH STREET

By George Crandall, Special To The Day

In the aftermath of Hurricane Matilda, the mysteries at Stonehaven are still unraveling. This is not an ordinary hit from a hurricane, and the fires along Land’s End were not set by lightning. What remains the biggest mystery is the disappearance of an entire town, not unlike the disappearance of the Roanoke Colony in Virginia in the 1600s. Could everyone in this place actually have been swept out to sea?

10

He turned the newspaper over. An ad for men’s shirts adorned the back page. He didn’t want to read the articles after all.

The hunting knife.

Souvenir from a memorable night.

A way to never forget what had happened. Or what he had done.

Slipped it back in the newspaper, which he wrapped over it. Tied the string around it. Dropped the newspaper back in the suitcase, shutting it.

“Some world,” he said, as he squatted beside the suitcase. When he stood up, he heard the water in the bathroom.

After two cigarettes, he called to the boy, but there was no answer. This worried him. He went to the bathroom door, turning it, but it was locked.

“Open up,” he said. He felt sweat break out on his neck, but he told himself to stay calm.

Was there a window in the bathroom? He couldn’t remember seeing one, but maybe there was one behind the shower curtain. Shit, he hadn’t counted on this. In the fourteen hours they’d been on the road, the kid hadn’t seemed interested in running.

He took a paper clip off his wallet, twisted it and thrust it into the lock. Turning it slightly, the door popped open.

The bathroom was empty, and as he pulled the shower curtain back, the boy huddled, weeping, in a corner of the tub, in his underwear, his jeans and T-shirt wadded up behind him like a pillow.

“What is it?” he asked.

The boy wouldn’t open his eyes. “They used to do some bad things to me, those people down there.”

“Like what?”

The boy lifted his arm up, showing him the scarred flesh.

“Is that a tattoo?” he asked.

The boy shook his head, working to keep his teeth from chattering. “It’s them. What they do. If I touch it sometimes, they move. They know where we are. They’re gonna find us.”

“No,” he said. “They can’t.”

“They can,” the boy said. “They have the power.”

The man shook his head, crouching down beside the tub. “No,” he said flinching slightly as he looked at the way they’d cut a design down the boy’s side. “It’s you. You have the power.” He didn’t want to explain this. Or dwell on it. Not till they reached their destination. “Let’s get out of here and get something to eat. Okay?”

The boy’s vestigial eyelids, like a gossamer skin, flicked down over his eyes for just a second.

The man blinked, too. Had he imagined it?

Or was it there?

He watched the boy’s face, but the boy seemed to betray no knowledge of what the man had just witnessed.

Chapter Two

THE MADONNA OF THE HIGHWAYS

1

“You get hungry,” Stony said, watching the boy as he seemingly swallowed the sandwich whole. Stony stubbed the last of his cigarette out in his coffee cup. A thin ribbon of smoke curled up from it. The tar caught in his throat. His tongue tasted of ashes.

“And you get smoky.” The boy tapped his fingers next to the ashtray. “That’s three in a row in the last ten minutes. Maybe it’s time to kick the habit, huh?”

“Just finish your sandwich, kid.”

“I’m Steve. Them people, the Rapturists, they call me Prophet, sometimes they call me Shiloh, but they ain’t my real names.” The boy chomped another bite of bread and turkey.

His name is Steve. Can’t even call him that. Can’t think of him as a little Stevie. Not with what I have to do.

“I know,” the man said. “I’m Stony. But my real name is Stephen, too.”

“Yeah, funny, huh? They wanted to call me something else. But I knew my name. I wouldn’t let them. They had all these weirdo names and stuff. Hey, I got a good joke. You know ‘Confucius say’ jokes? I love ‘em. The old lady’s brother used to tell me them. Here’s one: ‘Confucius say, he who fart in church must sit in own pew’.” He grinned. “Don’tcha think it’s funny? You never been in church and wondered why they call ‘em pews?”

Stony dropped a dollar bill on the tabletop, and slid out of the booth. The boy followed him. As he opened the door to the Biscuit Heaven coffee shop, he asked the kid, “Why’d you stay with them if you didn’t like it?”

The air outside was fresh and cool, with a slight nip in the air. The parkway beyond was still green, with full trees thick with leaves. October hadn’t hit the South yet. That’s what Stony had always liked about the desert. On the desert, there was no October; there was only summer and hell.

“Where the hell else was I gonna go?” the boy asked. “You tell me. They took care of me, it was the place the Great Father told me to go to, and they treated me better than you do.”

They got in the car, the boy sliding across the pillows and blankets in the backseat. The car stank of cigarettes and old junk food, and maybe a little bit of body odor as well. It had come with the requisite stink of old men and whiskey when he’d bought it. The layers of its interior smell were like excavations in an ancient cave. Stony rolled down all the windows. “Comfortable back there?” Stony asked.

“Mmm-hmm,” came the reply. In the rearview mirror, all Stony saw were the kid’s eyes shining like red marbles, reflected through the late afternoon sun.

Stony scratched the back of his neck. “You’re pretty agreeable. I don’t know who kidnapped whom.”

“You ever hear that song, ‘You Can Steal Me When You Wanna’?”

“Nope, can’t say that I have.” Stony had to keep telling himself that this was just a kid. This was a little kid. This was not some terrible creature. This was not some monster. This was a kid, and he was a kid-napper. Likelihood was, he would do something terrible to this boy before their trip together was over. Likelihood was, he’d take the hunting knife and plunge it into this kid’s heart, or slice it across his throat. Likelihood was, the kid was just a kid who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And what if it was all a big damn mistake?

Self-doubt. The destroyer of all men, he chuckled to himself.

“It’s an old country song,” the boy continued. “It goes like—You can steal me when ya wanna, but’cha cain’t take me where I ain’t already gonna.” The kid’s voice was a pretty good alto, and he even managed to put in the country twang and break his voice mournfully at the high note. “‘Cuz I been down this highway many times. And if runnin’ off’s a crime, then I better serve my time, ‘cuz yoo-hoo can steal me when ya wanna.”

Stony clapped his hands twice. “You are the next Garth Brooks. So, you trying to tell me you wanted me to take you from that place?”

Then, the boy glanced at the dashboard clock. “It’s almost four. That roadside place closes at five. Can we go? I want to see the Madonna of the Highways.”

“Okay. Maybe for ten minutes. If it’s cheap.”

“Sure,” the boy said, grinning for once like a kid his age without malice or darkness or enigma.

2

The grin didn’t fade until they’d paid the eighty-cent admission, and gone through the turnstile. “You believe in the Madonna?”

Stony laughed. “Well, I like some of her songs. Like A Virgin?”

“Ha, before my time old man, before my time,” the kid said, moving ahead. For just a moment, Stony figured the kid might escape through this maze of darkly lit rooms. He had to walk fast to keep up with the kid. The hallway was strung with the story of how the gas station curio shop had gotten hold of the Madonna, where she had been “Ven-er-ate-ed by man-y” the boy read aloud as he went. “Venerated sounds like venereal disease, which I only know about on accounta I heard that VD’ll kill ya from the Great Father who had it from time to time.” They passed through several small rooms, each with various religious paraphernalia. “Lookit,” the boy said, pointing to a glass-encased rusty nail. Then, he read the placard below it. “This is from the Holy Land, Jerusalem. From the Place of the Skull, this is one of the nails from the kind of cross that Jesus was crucified on. Wow.”

“No way,” Stony said. “It’s just a nail. Trust me, this place wouldn’t have the real thing.”

The boy shrugged. “I guess you ain’t a believer,” he said, and went off to the next room.

Stony glanced at the iconography along the walls, of saints and virgins and martyrs. In the next room, a poor imitation of a Bosch painting of hell, complete with little devils poking red forks at a naked Adam and Eve.

“Eve has a rack,” the boy said. He pointed to something mounted on the wall. “What’s that?”

A shamble of white feathers, a beak, all crusted over and dried up.

Stony walked over to stand behind him. “Looks like a dead dove.”

“Gruesome,” the boy said, a thrill in his voice.

A brass plate sat beneath the stuffed dove, its eyes perfect small marbles, its wings spread outward.

“The Holy Spirit came to them as a dove from heaven,” Stony read aloud. He scratched the back of his head. “What kind of sick person put this display together?”

Then, he noticed the bottle of water set on a high table. The water looked as if someone had put yellow and red dye in it. It was almost like a lava lamp. A banner beneath it read: “From the Miracle Waters of Lourdes, France where the Sick crawl on their knees for miles to be healed. One drink of this water will heal the sinner.”

Stony looked at the bottle for a moment, the red and yellow swirling mixture.

The miracle of Lourdes.

The miraculous water of France, right up there with Perrier and Vichy.

Then it struck him hard, like a punch in his gut.

The miracle of Lourdes. The mother of God. The miracle...

“Dead doves and holy water, weird huh? I want to see the Madonna.” The boy ran to the dark room at the end of the corridor.

Stony followed. He stepped into a room lit entirely in deep purple. The boy stood before a glass case.

No, Stony thought, it’s a coffin.

A small, shriveled mummy lay beneath the thick glass. THE MADONNA OF THE HIGHWAYS—TOUCH HER FOR GOOD LUCK! was written on the placard set atop the coffin display.

Her skin had tightened like papier-mâché around the small skull. The only modesty allowed her was a long blue cloth that was loosely draped across her bones, and then rested like a pillow behind her head.

In her arms, what might have been a mummified baby.

“This is ghoulish,” Stony said. Then he laughed, clapping his hands together. “I can’t believe how sick this is. This is some little old lady and some little old monkey they’re trying to make look like the baby Jesus.” He shook his head. “Some people will do anything for eighty cents a customer.”

The boy tapped on the glass. “How can anybody touch her for good luck when she’s in this glass coffin? Ain’t this against the law?”

“You’d think.”

“A dead woman all wrapped up like that,” the boy said. “And a baby. Cool.”

Stony Crawford glanced at the Madonna of the Highways, and tried to shake the image out of his mind—the image forming from the jigsaw pieces of the past.

Nora’s voice in his head whispered, “It’s just something you see. It’s not real. They’re just pictures like movies or TV. Don’t start fearing the dark, Stony, not now, now when you got so much light in you.”

But behind his eyes, he saw the statue of another Madonna. He saw the crushed flower in her hand.

3

THE MADONNA OF THE HIGHWAYS! SEE HER! TOUCH HER! FEEL THE MIRACLE OF HER EXISTENCE! WHO IS SHE? WHERE DID SHE COME FROM? HOW CAN SHE CURE THE SICK? HOW CAN SHE MAKE THE BLIND SEE? HOW CAN SHE MAKE LEPERS CLEAN? YOU MISSED THE TURN OFF—TAKE THE AMHERST EXIT AND GO BACK ON THE SERVICE ROAD NINE MILES. FREE LITER OF COKE WITH EVERY FILL-UP.

Stony glanced away from the last sign advertising the Madonna of the Highways. The road ahead was all that mattered. The road and the descending gloom.

“What’s in the glove compartment?” the boy asked.

“Nothing.”

“Why you lock it then?”

“You try to get into it?” Stony asked.

The boy was silent for a moment.

The boy looked at Stony’s reflection in the glass. “Who are you anyway? Besides your name and stuff.”

It was time. The boy was not going to fight him. The boy was not going to try to run back to the others.

He told the boy, “Look at my face.”

“Seen it,” the boy said, but he turned around anyway. A slight recognition seemed to come across the boy’s eyes, like the light of a distant fire. The boy walked over to him and touched his chin. The boy’s fingers were cool.

“Are you my father?” the boy asked.

Stony Crawford’s eyes were dry, and his throat seemed to go parched at that moment.

“Where are you taking me?” the boy asked, and then asked it again when they were back in the Chevy

“North,” Stony Crawford said.

“What’s there?”

Stony said nothing. He felt better for having let the boy find out for himself these things, he felt that somehow all this was a sign—as if the universe were not the malevolent force he’d believed it to be.

Stony finally told him when they got onto the New Jersey turnpike, and it was nearly dawn again.

“A town called Stonehaven, up on the coast almost to Rhode Island.”

The boy cried out, briefly, as if something had shocked him.

“You okay?”

“It’s the pictures on me. They’re moving. It means something bad is gonna happen.” But the boy said this as if this were nothing out of the ordinary.

“Why did they torture you?” Stony asked, keeping his eyes on the road.

“They said it was for my own good. That I needed to let something out. It itches when the pictures wriggle. Like snakes or something.”

“It hurt bad?”

“No.”

“You hate me?”

“No.”

“I hate me,” Stony said. “For what I did. For what I had to do.”

“Whatever,” the boy said. “Tell me about this place we’re going.”

“Not yet,” Stony said. “We’ll be there soon enough.”

“Tell me,” the boy in the backseat said, and again Stony felt that something was changing—the boy’s voice was deepening, and the turnpike ahead seemed less a road than a river full of trawlers where there should’ve been trucks.

“It’s almost dawn,” Stony said. “I’ll tell you at dawn.”

“Now,” the boy said.

“All right, all right,” Stony said. “I wasn’t much older than you, back then, maybe sixteen—no, almost sixteen, but just fifteen. It was probably the happiest time of my life.”

“Yes,” the boy said from the backseat, his voice so startlingly adult that Stony felt a slight shiver as if someone had traced ice down his back. “I’ll tell you about what you saw back then, Stony, I’ll tell you everything that happened in that place. Because I know the secret, Stony, I know that secret. Sometimes it’s good to take off the mask, Stony. Sometimes telling all is the right thing. Want me to whisper it to you?”

Stony kept his eyes front—an eighteen-wheeler was trying to cut him off from the fast lane, and the bright headlights in the rearview mirror were blinding in the dark purple predawn dusk. He felt the boy’s breath on his neck.

“Here’s the secret of your past, Stony,” the boy said, only it was not the boy, not his voice, not the Southern cracker accent, not the uncertain pitch of a twelve-year-old, but the voice was much older, the voice of an October day, sweet with late sap, the yellow jackets buzzing around it, the smell of burning leaves in the air, of time itself, turned back years to that moment when he went from child to man. The voice seemed to be of a woman’s timbre, and he remembered, with a shock, as if he’d forgotten the old woman, working at her loom, or sitting by the potbelly stove, sewing up trousers—it was her voice.

It was Nora. Only her voice was no longer in his head—

At least I don’t think it’s in my head. I think I’m not going mad. I think I’m still sane, hanging on to that last shred of clarity before the wrecking ball inside me smashes it all to hell. Watching the kid form the words with his lips but with her voice—

Nora, is that really you? Inside him? Coming up from his throat like a bird escaping its cage?

Then, the boy whispered the secret of all that had ever happened to Stony Crawford.

And you want to know what he whispered?

He whispered,

“Once upon a time, long ago, there was a village by the sea...

“The mystery of our birth is the mystery of those who brought us into the world...”

—Montague Thomas, Jr., The Seven Seals of Mankind, 1884

Chapter Three

I AM BORN

1

...And in the village, something remarkable happened, at least once that anyone knows of, but it may have happened a few times. Maybe never—you can never tell from legends whether there’s much truth to them or whether they’re just lies told by storytellers of a suspicious nature. There are many tales from the past, and many legends of Stonehaven. The one that began years ago and ended with the hand of God destroying the town—so say those who lived at its periphery and saw the squall, heard the wind, felt the power—began even before the beginning of Stony Crawford. The village of Stonehaven was founded in 1649. Imagine the coastline then, with its ragged uninterrupted line of primeval woods, rocky slopes, the touch of the rich sea, and the scattering of newly settled villages above and beneath what was then known by an unpronounceable Pequot word that meant, “Walk Alone.” This was the year that Charles I lost his head, and John Haynes was appointed governor of Connecticut. Silas Crowninshield was an Indian interpreter and displaced gentry from Sussex, England, who was originally given the acreage that is now the village, as well as ten acres of planting fields off the bogs in what is now Wequetucket. Then, it was considered Old Pequot territory, a haven for Indians and rascals, but Crowninshield carved out a large seaside plantation by 1650. Others followed, exiles from the North, up around the bay in Massachusetts, a few families with gold, servants, and the ambition to create a purer puritan. There was fishing along the coast of what would later be called Connecticut, and the peculiarity of Stonehaven’s geography—as if it were a thumb thrust slightly into a sound between a few barrier islands—made it an ideally inhabited place. The local Pequot Indians were, by and large, friendly, and in fact, none of the natives quarreled with the intruders taking the lands from Wequetucket Woods all the way to the water. The Pequot would not settle that land, although the new owners of it found it quite a successful place to live. In those days, the borough consisted of seven houses surrounding a Common. The various epidemics that broke out along the coastline on long hot summers would decimate the small population of the fledgling village, but children were born every season, and with them, hope. As the years went on, and revolutions were fought, the village grew to nearly two hundred homes. In the 1800s, Spanish and Portuguese fisherman came in, and helped establish an even more thriving fishing trade than had been known before, but most of these families settled outside the borough in nearby Wequetucket, for real estate was hard to come by in the borough even then. An ordinance had been passed the previous century, one that was never challenged, which limited the growth of the borough. Only the summer homes out at Juniper Point were added, and this because the Point was not officially in the borough proper. The famous writer Arland Bishop, a best-selling novelist of the early part of the twentieth century, wrote a short article for Liberty Magazine on Stonehaven’s charm. Bishop owned a house just off the cove, and wanted to attract his New York friends up to the borough with tales of its quaint and peaceful existence. But the residents of the village were none too pleased with his depiction, such as the line about “the local color here is both of New England and almost totally without color.” Or his damning praise of the village’s lazy approach to house maintenance, “The rooftops are in disrepair, the porches crumble, the clapboard warps, yet the houses along Water Street are like its people. Sturdy, long-lasting, ill-tempered.”

Stony Crawford’s great-great-great-great-grandfather ran the Custom House near the heart of town, and many is the time his grandfather, when alive, would tell Stony of the old piggery, or the great fire out at Land’s End, or the blizzard of ‘32 that just about wiped Stonehaven out, or the time the cove froze over with swans still stuck in it, and how his grandfather and four other young men had to go out with guns and put the birds out of their misery. “How we wept,” his grandfather would tell him, “for their plumage was beautiful, and we hated destroying any kind of beauty. But they were suffering and there was naught else to do.”

“Did they have to die?” Stony, age four had asked, sitting on his grandfather’s lap, looking up at the old man, hunched over, the twin smells of whiskey and cigars emanating from his yellowing skin and silver hair. Stony liked to reach up and touch the silver hair, and watching the laughing eyes.

His grandfather touched the top of his head. “All of us die, Stony. I’ll die someday, too.”

“I’ll never die,” Stony said, and was determined to mean it.

When his grandfather died, Stony Crawford’s world changed, but there were things that changed the world of Stonehaven before he had even been a glimmer in his father’s eye.

2

Years before Stony came to be, in a distant country, a man of forty-two stood outside what appeared to be a cave, but on closer inspection was something of a cloister. Many nuns had lived much of their adult lives within these dark holes, and their paraphernalia had been abandoned when they had left nearly a hundred years previous.

The man stood outside for a moment, before entering the cavern, with his workers and his feeble light and his absolute knowledge that a great and forgotten treasure lay within these rocks.

He had been sent to see what the workmen had found beneath the rough-hewn chapel at the heart of the cavern. The bones of some creature embedded in an amber-like substance, a hardened resin from forgotten millennia. The superstitious townspeople were calling it “dragon.” Archeologists from distant places assumed it would be the bones of some dinosaur. Word had just leaked out, and the man had arrived from London on the first flight he could book, and then had rented a car from Paris, driving all night until he arrived on what seemed to be a lost and empty village. It had taken him three hours, beginning at dawn, to assemble a work crew, for he knew that if he did not get what he had come for, and quickly, then others would soon descend.

Since he’d heard the reports from one of his search agencies, he had barely slept or eaten anything. His energy seemed stronger, even so. It had begun simply as a report of boys playing inside an old cloister. Finding the cave paintings. Finding the relics.

Hearing about the light of dawn coming from two hundred feet beneath the ground.

The Azriel Light, that’s what it was called in one of the old musty tomes he owned. Crowley? Fairclough was positive that Aleister Crowley had been the one to call it that, the Azriel Light, and the darkness that spread from it. Azriel, Angel of Death. Azriel, Servant of God. Azriel, symbol of the Radiance beyond understanding.

Azriel, demon.

Azriel, Angel of Death and of the Magnificent.

Finding a bit of what lay beneath the flooring that the French sisters had laid down years earlier, perhaps three centuries back. Beneath this, where the rock wall had caved in at one time.

He knew he would find something in this dark stone world. He hoped it would shed light on the studies that had swept him up since he’d been a young man.

But when this man entered the flare-lit cavern, he did not expect to find what he had spent his life seeking. Only its shadow.

His name was Alan Fairclough, and he had once upon a time been a monk, and then an academic, and finally, now retired, a man of some wealth, acquired through inheritance, and much leisure.

He turned to one of the workmen. “I’ve had so little to celebrate these past few years,” he murmured, half to himself. “And now this feels so close. So close.”

“Oui, monsieur,” the workman nodded, only half understanding the language.

In French, Alan Fairclough asked the worker if there was anyplace a man could go in one of the local villages to satisfy certain appetites. He attempted to make it sound as if he were interested in religious matters.

The workman nodded, giving him an address.

That night, Alan Fairclough tied the woman’s wrists as tight as the torn strips of her blouse would go, and leaned over her, whispering, “You cannot even guess, ma chère, how long this night will be for you. But do not be afraid. I will not mate with you. I am saving you for something finer.”

The nun, whose mouth had been sealed shut with putty and tape, closed her eyes and Fairclough was certain she had begun to pray.

This was in southern France, thousands of miles and several years from the small town on the Connecticut coast where a boy would be born one spring morning.

3

In the village on the Connecticut coast, in a secret place, there was a room that was always dark, lit sometimes with candles, but even they did not vanquish the inner night. Several rows of pews, side by side, an aisle running between them. Two small steps up to an altar made of primitively cut stone. The smell was thick, incense and musk. Some wild animal was caged nearby. Some beast from the nearby woods, snarling and snapping.

Upon the altar, a slaughtered lamb, its blood draining into a chalice kept beneath the stone slab.

The little girl, her eyes wide with terror, as her father guided her hand into the place where the animal’s heart still beat. She brought her hand back swiftly, wiping it across her mouth, her small face, flickering in the candlelight, painted dark with blood.

Shadows flickered in the candlelight behind the altar.

The little girl looked above the altar and prayed that it would be over soon. When she opened her mouth to speak, her tongue seemed to give off words other than what she wanted to say, words that no three-year-old could possibly speak, and the languages she used were many.

On the altar, the obscenity began.

This was long ago, before there was light, before there was summer, before the day when Stony Crawford was born.

4

When you live in a village with just a few hundred residents, legends of births and deaths tend to take on mythic proportions. When Old Man Randall died, he didn’t just fall down the front steps and go, he keeled over and cried out the name of the Savior three times, and as he lay bleeding, his nurse from over in Mystic saw a flight of starlings take off over head and then vanish into fog. “Starlings carry the soul to heaven, but if a hawk was to get even one of ‘em, than the soul remains earthbound,” she’d tell folks outside the Stonehaven Baptist Church after Sunday service. She fudged on the story, because she had actually seen a hawk take out one of the starlings, and she suspected that Old Man Randall still tried to pull up her skirt when she made the rounds of her patients down at the nursing home in Ledyard. When Tamara Curry’s widowed sister Jerusha gave birth to twins, they weren’t just stillborn, they were exhumed from Jerusha’s forty-six-year-old body and breathed one gasp of Stonehaven air. Then in their angelic wisdom, they got the hell out of this awful world as soon as they could. Jerusha followed several minutes later. Even at a distance, myth bloomed like an April crocus. It was said that when Chad “Mad-Dog” Madigan died in Viet Nam back in the ‘60s, he raised his hands to heaven and called out to his girl Martha Wight at the distance of all those thousands of miles. She sat up in her chair on the front porch, clutched her heart, and heard his dying words which were, “I’m gonna miss those tits of yours, baby.”

Even the Doane sisters’ border collie’s death was an event worth talking about. “He went out to the dock on the cove lookin’ for Alice’s old boat, and then he gave one last ki-yi and dropped down to the wood planks. He was gone. That fine dog was gone. It is a mystery to us why he went so soon. But he called to us one last time. As if to say, ‘God take me!’ “

Angels visited the dying; Jesus came to those who wept; even Fiona McAllister swore up and down on a stack of Bibles that she’d seen a vision of Mary, the Mother of God, when she came down with pneumonia one winter.

Legends and belief intermingled, and from them grew a small village’s identity within itself. The mythology of Stonehaven was as thick with significance as anything Homer had ever sung about.

Stony Crawford’s birth was no exception.

With all the stories surrounding his birth, you would’ve thought Stony Crawford was the Second Coming, that’s what mean old Tamara Curry said, her of the twenty cats and the prodigious breasts who covered them so well they looked like great pumpkins beneath her many scarves. She swatted Stony whenever she saw him, and she’d tell him, as she wiped down the counter at her ice cream store, that if he’d been born a second sooner he’d have hit the pavement and gotten brained and that would’ve been the end of his stealing candy from beneath her nose. “I wasn’t there, mind you, but I heard plenty. I heard you were ugly and looked like a demon out of hell and all hairy, disgusting that good women like your mother would want to bring you into this world, Stony Crawford.”

His real name was Stephen, after his maternal grandfather, but even at birth, they called him Stony because it was in the Borough that he first cried with life, laid out on the cobblestone walk. Being small-town New Englanders, and sea folk, and in a borough all but isolated from the rest of the Connecticut coast, they seldom mentioned how they felt about anything other than weather, work, and scandal. They had a history of silence, since 1698, when the borough was officially founded by a small group that included the Crowninshields, the Randalls, the Clements, and the Glastonburys, back when all of Stonehaven was literally a stone haven, from the rocky point to the granite of its quarries. The village was born in silence, and only later would it tell its secrets. As he grew up, no one ever mentioned that he was born on the same day that Daniel Madigan threw himself off the top of the Land’s End lighthouse because of his unreturned love for Jenny Lee Baker, daughter of the owner of Baker’s Dozen Bakery. Or that the Crown family had come early that year to their palatial summer home out on the Point the night before, and that their five-year-old daughter had bruises all over her body that no one thought to question. The summer people were different than the locals. They had different ways, different means. A bruised little girl from the big summerhouse on the Point was just a phantom as her family drove through town in the early evening. No one mentioned that Book Ends Books & Cards would be set on fire later on in the day, after the rain, when Alexandra Shoal dropped her cigarette in the wastebasket, and then her cocker spaniel had knocked the basket over. Some later might’ve mentioned that this was Alexandra’s way of collecting insurance, others might’ve said that it was her way of clearing her unsold stock of books in one fell swoop. And the cries of hundreds of birds, as if all of the swans on the cove had flown at once up into the air and had been silenced also at once—like a miraculous ascension. All was forgotten later, even his own mother, Angie Crawford, didn’t tell him the other thing that happened that day.

The only thing his grandfather would tell him about his birth was, “It was special. I saw a dozen shooting stars the night before, and I knew you were going to be someone I’d want to get to know.”

They talked about the storm, and Johnny Miracle, and the beer, and the priest—whenever they talked about the day he was born.

Angie Crawford was on her way to the Package Store down on Water Street to get the weekend’s beers when she felt the jolt within her. “I had been watching the Holy Brigade on Channel 9 just the night before, and they’re all talkin’ about how the Antichrist was comin’ and me thinkin’, with my big belly, oh Lord why bring another child into the world if it’s going to hell so fast? And then, not ten hours later I hear you knockin’ to get out. I was wearing my whites,” his mother told him, “because I was still on call even though I was eight months along.” She dropped her purse right at the doorstep to the store, and clutched the edge of the doorframe. She tried to call out to someone for help, but the pain hit her fast. Her young son, Van, looked up at her and asked, “Mommy? What’s wrong?” She managed to whack him on the behind with her free hand and told him to shut up because his little brother or sister was about to make an entry into the world. She looked out at the street, and saw people sitting in the tea shop across the way, all lost in their conversations. The rain was light even while the sky darkened with clouds. “I thought maybe there’d be time if I just held you in,” Angie told him more than once, “Because I know you were happy when you were inside me. You didn’t kick the way your brother did. And oh, I was worried that we’d have those complications like I had with Van—he was blue when he came out, and all kinds of things had to be done. So I thought: I better get to the hospital and fast!”

His father was still out on the trawler working the lobster cages by the Isles of Avalon, his grandfather knocked out from the previous night’s medication, so his mother was pretty much on her own. After taking another sip from a Budweiser can, she left her little one, Van, with Martha Wight at the Package Store. The only man available to drive her to the hospital down in New London was Johnny Miracle. “He had been an idiot in search of a village, and he found it in Stonehaven, of course,” she’d laughed when she recalled the day. Johnny was a less a half-wit than a three-quarters-wit who could do two things and two things alone: drive, and quote scripture. He also had a proclivity for setting trashcans on fire around town, so he was as much a nuisance as he was a fixture. Since no one ever trusted him with their car, nobody was really sure about the first thing, but the scripture rang in their ears when Johnny went on his shouting sprees. And at least once in everyone’s lives, they had to put out one of his little fires. Other than that, he occasionally swept the streets, but was not much of a sweeper. Johnny Miracle was not true to his name, either. Usually whenever he touched things, they had a habit of never working again. “He is the Anti-Miracle,” Stony’s mother would laugh. Angie Crawford should’ve known better than to entrust the birth of her second son to Johnny’s aid.

As soon as Johnny got behind the wheel of her station wagon, the car refused to start. Angie’s water broke right there in the backseat. “It hurt, but I just forced my knees together. You wanted to come out, and I wanted to keep you in, at least for another half hour.” Between that and the storm that began, seemingly out of nowhere (at least that’s how his mother always told him the story) raining down in buckets, Johnny didn’t know what to do. So he got out of the car and began shouting for help. Not a hell of a lot of help around Stonehaven Borough, midday in spring when half the shops had not yet opened for the summer trade, and most folk worked in neighboring towns. The idle were there, as the idle always are, but they did what the idle are best at and just watched as the woman in the backseat of the green station wagon began screaming.

Still, one person came to help. From across the town square, Father Jim Laughlin had heard Johnny’s bleating call and Angie Crawford’s cries. Some said it was the only time they’d ever seen a Catholic priest sprint across the Common with his white collar coming undone and only one shoe on. “He was a handsome figure,” Martha Wight once told Stony, “he was only about twenty-three, a full thick head of dark hair, a strong body from all that jogging he did and you know he used to coach basketball at the Parish back in the summertime. I once watched him take his shirt off at the beach, and my oh my, Stony, if I weren’t a good Baptist and he weren’t a good Catholic priest, I might have had a notion or two.”

Father Jim was able to calm Angie Crawford in the last few moments as her newborn emerged, already bloodied and somewhat battered from the birth passage. Angie downed a couple of beers while the pain subsided, and later told her son that it had been one of the easiest of her births. “Of course, both you and me was stone drunk by the time it was over,” she laughed. The young priest wept when he held the baby in his arms. Johnny Miracle, it is said, looked up to the heavens and the downpour of rain and cried out, “It’s the bloodiest baby I ever saw in my life! It’s the goddamnedest bloodiest baby I ever saw! I never seen so much goddamn blood!”

As Stony grew up in the village, he was often told details of this story by various townsfolk who claimed to have been glancing out their windows, or sitting in the Blue Dog Tea Shop across the way. “Johnny Miracle is good luck ‘cause God watches over drunks, babies, and idiots—and all three of them were there.” Stony also grew up knowing that his mother was the one known as the drunk. He found out much later what no one, including his mother, would tell him—

That the nurse’s uniform his mother wore was soaked red before the morning was over. That she stayed in the hospital for four months after his birth.

That when he was just beginning to breathe the air of the brave new world he had entered, his mother’s body was ragged and torn and his own father would not touch him for the first year of his life from blaming him for it. His father would never touch his mother again, either.

But the crying newborn could not know this, nor would anyone tell him.

Someone else was there, too, that day, at his birth.

A woman, who was not watching him, at least not watching him in the traditional sense. She sensed his birth more than anything. She sensed something about the baby that had just come into the world as she sat on the little bench under the granite eaves of the Stonehaven Free Library, the rain pouring hard. But her senses were sharp, and above the storm, she heard the baby’s first cries as it entered the world. She turned to her older sister, and whispered, “It hurts to hear the way that baby cries, doesn’t it? It just brings out the pain of living to hear it go on. It’s like he knows he’s come from a better place and now he’s stuck here for the time being and can’t do a damn thing about it.”

Her sister, sitting next to her, took her hand. “Nora,” her sister said. “Let’s go on home now.”

“No,” the other woman said, reaching up to her face to pull the dark glasses from her eyes. “I want to hear him. I like the way he’s crying. It’s like a song, isn’t it? He’s telling us about the journey he’s been on. He’s saying that he knows where he’s been and now he’s moved on to us with the news.”

Later, when they met, she would tell Stony about hearing him cry at his birth.

Later, she would make him feel as if just by being born he had done something remarkable for the world.

Only when he was fifteen, and fell in love for the first time, did he feel that the world had done something remarkable for him.

5

But until fifteen, Stony’s life was like a shadow room. His first actual memory at home was when he was three. His brother Van grabbed his hand in the hall and drew him into the bathroom. “Shh,” Van put his hand over Stony’s mouth.

Then Stony felt the vibration in the door, as if some great force were shaking the house.

The stomp of a giant’s footsteps.

Then, the shouting, his father’s voice, in the hall, “Damn it, Angie! I’m sick of all this. I know the bastard’s not mine!”

“Stop that, he’s here,” his mother’s voice was smoother. “Just stop it!”

“I am so sick of workin’ damn hard all the time and coming home to this mess—and Van with his bike in the driveway, and you gettin’ fat and sloppy and that bastard eatin’ the food I work hard for! Wearing clothes I pay for! It ain’t what I dreamed for us, Angie. Not when we started out. Not when we met, you damn...”

Then, his mother’s voice raised to a pitch. “Walter Crawford, you just shut your yap, you drunk old fool! I work hard too, and he is your son as much as he’s mine, and just because he doesn’t look like your trash family doesn’t mean he isn’t from you, you ignorant son of a bitch!”

Stony, at three, could not possibly know these words, but he knew that his parents were angry, and he knew that the bathroom door vibrated whenever his father shouted.

He looked up at Van.

Van whispered, “I wish you’d never been born.”

6

His next earliest memory was crawling under his parents’ bed during yet another fight of theirs, this time over paying the mortgage. As he shivered, trying to crawl as far under the bed as he could, listening to their screams—

He came across a small metal box. It opened easily, and in it, he saw all kinds of money. He was nearly four, and knew well what money could buy (candy and toys). As he sat there looking at paper money, piles of it, rubber bands wrapped around it, he wondered why his parents were fighting about paying for the house when it looked like a lot of money was right there in the room.

He was thinking of bringing it out from under the bed. The box was his mother’s—it had her name scrawled on the top. She had probably forgotten where she put it. He could stop their fighting right there.

But his father’s voice, booming across the room, and then the sounds of the slaps, and then his mother got so quiet it scared Stony.

He stayed beneath the bed until long after his father had stormed out of the house.

This was not all of his life. There were happy times, and times when his father was wonderful to all of them. His grandfather, on his good days, would walk with Stony out to the lighthouse and tell him old stories of the sea and of the village. All the stories were sweet, and tinged with a sadness that the world changed with time. “It’s not the same place I grew up in,” his grandfather would say. “It was once—not innocent, Stony, not that—but it was once undisturbed.” Then, he’d raise his fist as the summer homes, “Those summer people coming down here with their money and city ways. I don’t care who owns this village. I don’t care. It’s ruining itself. But you—you my boy—you will get out of here someday. Do the one thing that my daughter—your mother—was never smart enough to do. When you get older, get out, go see the world, don’t let this village stunt your growth.”

“Daddy says,” Stony began.

“Don’t ever listen to him,” his grandfather interrupted him. “Don’t even pay attention. He’s a bitter, unhappy man, and he loves you, but he is not capable of showing it. He and your mother crawled into a bottle a long time ago, and they don’t seem to want to get out. Just let them be. You keep your joy within you, Stony, keep your candle burning even while all around you, they snuff theirs out.”

Then, his grandfather’s tone turned grave. “You’re too young to know about a lot of things, Stony. But when you get a little older, when you become a man, you’ll find out things about your mother and father, and you won’t like those things. You’ll find out about what this village is all about. If I was in better health, I’d get out of here, and take you with me, something I should’ve done long ago before your mother got rooted here. We tie ourselves down, Stony, but we don’t have to. Someday, you’ll know why your father is so awful and why your mother is the way she is. But for now, trust that it will all come out all right, will you do that?”

Stony nodded, never understanding him. As the old man’s mind seemed to be erasing itself, within months his grandfather didn’t even recognize him anymore.

After his grandfather died, there were still good things. Christmas was always beautiful and magical. Summer was usually peaceful. Sometimes he thought it was perfectly normal that his dad sometimes hit his mother. Only sometimes; other times he thought he lived in a crazy house. But his mother didn’t seem to mind all that much. Usually, he didn’t like it, but did nothing about it. He knew his parents loved each other, though, because of the way they looked at each other over the dinner table, or because of the flowers his father would bring home after a night of shouting. Once, he’d come home early from school in third grade, and his father was just getting in from the trawlers. Dressed in the heavy fisherman’s mackintosh coat, his rusty beard spattered with bits of his lunch, his father gestured for Stony to come over to him. His father placed his arm over his son’s shoulder, his breath thick with beer, and said, “You’re a good kid, you know that, Stony? You’re a damned sight better’n I was at your age.” These were the only kind words his father had ever said to him, but they were enough to keep him warm during the more difficult times in the Crawford household. Other times, he’d sit up with his mother to watch her favorite TV show, The Holy Brigade. The man with the glasses reminded him of his grandfather, and he’d shout out about scripture and gospel and raise his hand up and call to Stony and his mother—it seemed like he reached right out of the television—to make them send in a donation. When the man on The Holy Brigade looked right at Stony and said, “We are raising a generation of vipers! It’s true! Look all around! We have false messiahs, and you! What will you do about it?”—Stony was sure the man could see him as he picked his nose.

Once, walking down High Street, near the bank, Johnny Miracle was sitting there on the revolutionary war cannons that had been rolled out on the cobblestones as a relic of old Stonehaven. He shouted the very same scripture at Stony, and it gave him the creeps. “No!” Johnny had shouted, “Don’t run, boy! I wanna talk with you! God wants to talk with you, too!”

Such incidents made up his childhood memories.

And there was his favorite comic book, called The Storm King. The Storm King had once been an ordinary farm boy in Kansas, but by accident had discovered his true abilities. He was a Rainmaker sent down by the inhabitants who lived beneath the frozen seas of Yog Arren, a moon of a distant planet. They were water element people, and the boy had been sent to earth since he was the last living son of the greatest of the Aquamers. All of his other sons had been slaughtered in the wars with the people of the Quillian Desert. But the boy who became Storm King found his powers, and took storms and lightning with him wherever there was injustice, wherever a wrong had been committed, “Wherever Evil Takes a Foothold, the Storm King and His Powers of the Cosmos Shall Find and Destroy It!” So said the advertisement in the back of each magazine. The Storm King had even gone to Hell and made the Devil beg for mercy as the rain came down and put out Hellfire...the Storm King had gone to the ancient garden of Eden, which was now a desert, and he’d brought rain to make it grow...the Storm King had gone to Mississippi and had called the great flooding river up, up, up into the sky so that it would cause no more damage. Storm King had taken the tail of a cyclone and wrapped the water up into it like it was a handkerchief. No one on earth was more powerful than the Storm King, but he had one weakness, what he called his Achilles’ Heel.

He was alien, and a loner. There was no place upon the world he’d been sent which would accept him, for although he was a savior, he also brought fear, and his very touch might mean death...

And one thing alone could destroy him:

Moonfire, the Fire That Burns In Water, In Air, In Earth.

IT IS AN ELEMENTAL FIRE, NEITHER SPIRIT NOR FLAME, IT SEARS AND TRANSFORMS THOSE IT TOUCHES.

ONCE THE STORM KING IS TOUCHED WITH IT, HIS POWERS LESSEN, AND HE BECOMES LIKE ALL MORTAL MEN.

He was an outcast from his own kind, and a creature that had to disguise his inner alien nature with a hooded cloak. The Evil Men and Women of Earth, when they discovered his Achilles’ Heel, would steal Moonfire from a Sacred Vault and use it against him. He would weaken, and they would then capture him. But he usually got away eventually and righted more wrongs. The Moonfire Effect, as it was called, was only temporary.

Someday, the little boy knew, the Storm King would come to Stonehaven, too, and right all the wrongs and vanquish those who caused Evil to exist. The Storm King could use the winds to suck out evil like bad blood from someone, or he could bring rain on a dying land, or he could chase evildoers with lightning bolts.

Stony Crawford had all nine of The Storm King comic books, and knew each practically by heart. He took comfort in all this whenever the bad seasons came on and his father began drinking. Stony had favorite TV shows, and movies that made him roll in the aisle of the theater in Mystic, laughing his head off; he had the world of his books which he read over and over again, especially The Count of Monte Cristo, his favorite. He had his childhood friends, at Copper Ferry high school on the other side of Wequetucket. He had his Special Places, like the rotted-out old tree in the woods that doubled as a fortress, and the dock down by the Cove where he could sit back and watch the swans while he plotted his future escape from Stonehaven. He had his dreams of the future, and of rockets and jet-packs and intergalactic missions—all the things that boys growing up in the last gasp of the twentieth century cherished.

So even in the worst of his young life, there were both hope and comic books.

The boy grew, and when he fell in love, his life seemed to open up with a radiance he had never before known.

Chapter Four

LOVE HURTS

1

Remember how it tastes? The first time you really fall in love, and you don’t know then, no matter what happens, that it’s that first taste of love that is always best. You don’t know that truth until you’re older and you accept what life offers, then you forget. You forget that once, when you were young, you burned with love.

Burned.

It’s almost like that first cigarette you tried, a Camel unfiltered, and it burned inside your throat just like love burned inside your heart.

2

“You know what’s cool about being fifteen?” his buddy Jack Ridley from Copper Ferry High asked. Jack’s breath an eternal cheeseburger-with-onions, his face peppered with zits, his good looks still shining through undefeated by adolescent ravage. Jack had grown up down the block from Stony, and only recently, when his folks divorced, had he moved out of the village halfway down the road to Mystic. Still, Jack was a villager, and sometimes Stony felt as if they were more brothers than Stony’s brother Van would ever be to him. But they were hardly alike. Jack was cool, unlike Stony. Jack had always been cool; it was s a halo around him, ever since third grade. He even smoked Kool cigarettes, and flashed the pack at Stony.

“What?” Stony said, but didn’t give a damn because he was wondering when he was going to see that pretty girl again, the one who passed him the note in third period that read, You’re cute. You want to call me? That pretty girl who just a few years ago had braces and no make-up and hair pulled back and worn in a braid so she looked dorky, only now she looked like the Babe of the Universe as far as he was concerned with her slightly crooked smile, those red lips, the Spanish eyes. How could a guy resist?

“Here’s what’s so great about being fifteen: Abso-fuckin’-lutely nothin’,” Jack said, laughing. “Jesus, I just want to be away from all this...this bullshit!” He withdrew a cigarette from the pack, as if he didn’t care if any of the teachers caught him on the last day of classes. He offered one to Stony, but Stony patted the pack of Camels in his breast pocket. They’d both begun smoking just because it was something they knew they weren’t supposed to be doing. “Hey, what you doin’ this summer? I gotta work for my mom in her office. New London here I come. Pisses me off.”

“Just gonna do the boring stuff.”

“You gonna get some?”

“Please,” Stony laughed, punching him in the shoulder. “I will die a virgin. My dick’s gonna fall off before I’m sixteen from lack of use.”

“Sure it will the way you beat it five times a day, ya wanker.” Jack grabbed the last of his books from his locker. He held each one up as if weighing their sins. Biology was the heaviest. Jack had drawn a picture of Mickey Mouse on the back of it. “Man, I just want to burn these. Burn fuckin’ bio, fuckin’ geometry, fuckin’ Spanish. Wanna do a bonfire in my backyard? Bring your own lighter fluid.”

“Look at her,” Stony said, nodding as the Girl of His Every Thought passed by. “Huh?” he added, as if waking from a dream.

Jack nudged him. “I saw the way that Spanish babe winked at you. Lourdes Maria. She’s sweet. She’s fine. Fine as fine can be. But watch out—I hear she’s got a ton of brothers all of whom want to make sure she doesn’t date till she’s forty. And you know those Catholic girls, it’s the wedding ring or it’s—” Jack kept talking but his voice became indistinct, and then Jack stepped off the edge of the world—at least as far as Stony was concerned, because there she was again. Looking at him. Moving in front of him so he could get another glimpse. As if from some great distance, he heard Jack’s words, “She looks mighty fertile, Stony, she looks like she wants you too, kiddo, those breasts, those hips, those beautiful lips, her eyes—”

She was a goddess—

Like a dream passing by.

Lourdes.

Her soul was in her eyes; her depths were there, her mystery. Her body was small and perfect, her breasts cupped gently within her thin sweater, her hair sparkling with black diamonds, her grin infectious, her warmth like the sun.

She glanced back at him for a second, her dark hair falling across half her face. He just wanted to touch her hair and maybe talk to her. He wanted to be near her so badly he could taste his own frustration.

Time stopped. He felt it. His heartbeat was the only sound, and all the other kids, they froze, even the air froze with motes of dust hanging...

All that moved were her eyes, looking into him, opening him up, freeing him.

Then, time returned, noise returned, all the students scrambled to clear out their lockers, and Lourdes was halfway down the corridor.

Stony raced after her, practically knocking down Ariel Seidman and Ellen Tripp (“Sorry, Ariel, sorry Ellen, I didn’t—”), then he tripped over his Nikes and his big floppy blue shirt came half-untucked as he caught up to Lourdes and asked her out, and then summer began, summer and the end of all things of childhood for him.

The beginning of manhood.

When love hits a guy whose hormones are already haywire, it hits hard and fast, and love can be the most enthralling of demons.

3

A flash from early June—

Sitting on the big rock by the pond in the woods, his hand up her blouse, his lips on hers, the pounding of sweet love in his head as he whispers too soon, “God, I love you baby I love you more than—”

“Hush—” she stops up his mouth with her kisses. Then, laughing, she pulled away. Buttoning up her blouse, shrugging his hands away. “Give up those damn cigarettes, Stony, it’s like licking an ashtray!”

He nods, and picks up the rest of the pack and its cellophane wrapper and flings them out across the pond.

“That’s littering,” she says, sternly.

“I can’t win,” he grins, and for her (anything for her!) he jogs along the narrow path to the far side of the pond to pick up his trash. When he turns to look at her again she shouted, “You are nuts!”

A flash from late June—

Laughing, both of them, him wearing his big goofy swimming trunks, and her in her bikini that shows too much and all the other guys on the slim strip of beach out at Land’s End are staring at her. Running through the water, the spray bursting around their calves. He splashes water at her, and she shrieks, and then chases him deeper into the icy water while some little girl floats by on a rubber raft shouting that there might be sharks in the sea.

A flash from late July—

Drinking ice-cold beer stolen from his fridge, just enough to get a buzz, not enough to do damage, and they’re out on the Cove in a little boat also stolen from a neighbor’s dock. He says to her, “I never thought I’d feel like this about someone.” She repeats it back to him. He kisses her big toe and tells her that she has got to have the most beautiful feet he has ever seen, with such perfect toes. She calls him a pervert, and he laughs, “Yeah, I’m so perverted I think I love you.”

And then it all begins.

4

Dear Stony,

I have heard that everyone has one GREAT LOVE in their life. ONE GREAT SECRET LOVE. I didn’t know till I met you that I would have one. I thought I’d always feel alone and maybe get married and have kids someday but never really know REAL LOVE. I look at my mother and I think, THAT’S GOING TO BE ME IN TWENTY YEARS. Married with kids, cleaning, keeping my mouth shut, wishing something better for my kids. But when I saw you the first time, last spring, I knew just by looking in your eyes. I mean, I’d seen you before, you know that. But I had never really SEEN you. Did you know it too? It was like there was a chalk outline, or maybe a halo around you. When I looked in your eyes it was like looking into an ocean that was there just for the two of us. I knew that you were the one. I knew that there would be no others. You are my ONE GREAT SECRET LOVE. I don’t know if we will always be like this, but I know that I will never ever forget you. NEVER. I want it always to be like it is between us right now. ALWAYS. No matter what happens. And things do happen. I know that. I know that sometimes love is not enough of a miracle to cure everything. I just wanted you to know. What we did together is what I wanted. It was PERFECT AND RIGHT.

LOVE

LOURDES
p.s.

I don’t love your smoking those nasty things. Kick that habit. I mean it.

5

“Your hair,” she says.

“Your smile,” he says

“Your muscles,” she laughs.

“Your legs,” he grins. “Whoa, baby, those legs!”

“Your sweetness,” she whispers.

“You,” he murmurs. “I love you best about you.”

Fifteen! And it’s your first time. You know what that means, you know how forbidden and natural and mind-blowing it is, you remember the half-can of beer that gave you courage, and the way your first love looked at you.

Beneath a tree thick with summer green, so thick it has milk, not leaves, milk in the tree, mother’s milk sap running down its humid bark. The heat of August on your back, the crawling humidity of night, the heat of August inside your own body as it moves like liquid. Fifteen! You lie beneath the spreading tree with your girl, not just your best girl, your only girl, and it’s after midnight, and this is the experience that will blow your mind, the moment that takes both of you and binds you to each other and throws away convention and bursts your boy and girl consciousness until your branches grow heavy with the green of man and woman. You want it, not just the sensation, but to get out of your skins, to change, to be more than what you were a few moments before. You notice how hairy you are, and how smooth and fresh her skin feels, and you let that part of you, that delicious animal part, take over and you let nature command. You close your eyes because you want to be somewhere other than in the sensation you feel, you want to be inside and outside at the same time, you want to be cosmic and you want to be small, and afterwards, as the two of you lie wrapped in each other’s arms, you shrink and the tree seems larger above you, its hungry leaves flowing all around you. Through its branches, you see the world now, filtered through the veins and stems and twigs. Your hands feel scored like the leaves, like the hands of an old man. It has taken something from you, this summer night, this act of passion.

Then, you begin to look at her differently. She is already not who you thought she was. Maybe it’s love.

Maybe it’s fear that there’s a dream you’ve entered into now, a dream from which you will one day awaken.

But now, you’re fifteen.

After awhile, you say, brushing off the dirt, buttoning your shirt while she discreetly dresses, “It’s almost morning. We better go home.”

“Yeah,” she says.

You say, “Tomorrow, we’ll meet at Nora’s. Okay?”

“Sure,” she says, and you watch as she picks bits of a leaf, crumbled up like ash, in her trammeled hair. You reach up and touch the edge of her face. You both have gone over into the land of secrets.

Fifteen, Stony, fifteen, and already you wish you’d waited because there’s a closeness and a distance that comes with the secrets. There’s someone else living inside you now, and what is left of you is only the cocoon that won’t yet shed itself.

6

Dear Lourdes,

I love you like no guy has ever loved a girl before. You are the light of my world. You got my heart in your hands and I want you to have everything really good there is. I wish I had lots and lots of money to shower you with lots of gifts—like a Corvette or something! Or a trip somewhere just the two of us! It’s going to be u + me till the end of time. I never felt this way before either. Want to go see a movie this weekend down in Mystic? And also I want you to meet my friend Nora. She’s an old lady but she’s really cool.

STONY, YOUR STORM KING!

Within this note, a crushed purple iris blossom

7

You can’t know Stony Crawford at fifteen without knowing the old blind woman who lived in the tarpaper shack in the woods. He met her when he was a little boy, not long after his grandfather had died. Certain times of the year his father and mother fought more than usual, and those times Stony found it best just to make himself invisible by being wherever other people were not. She’d been outside doing her wash, deep in the old woods. He thought she might be an evil ogre, but she convinced him with the smell of a blackberry pie cooling on her windowsill that she was actually just a human being. When they got acquainted, she told him how she’d been there at his birth. He had not believed her, but found that he wanted to believe her despite the fact that people lied all the time. He knew they did, even in grade school. His father lied, too. He’d seen his father down at the Boatwright Pub drinking when he was supposed to be out on his trawler. He’d seen his mother lie, too, when she put him to bed at night and told him his father hadn’t caused the bruise on her face.

But this woman, in the woods, she told him what sounded like the truth.

She was named Nora Chance. People said she had been blinded when she was making soap with her mother, back when soap was made of lye and suet and the lye had splashed up. She had rocked it, and it had sprayed across her forehead. Before she could even scream from the pain, it had gotten in her eyes. But she never told this story herself. When asked, she would avoid the question and instead go into one of her spins. It was what she called them—her spins, her stories, she’d sit down at her loom, blind and yattering away as she tossed the boat through the threads, making one of the blankets or rugs that could be sold down at Mystic. She did nothing the modern way. She would not have electricity, she would not have a telephone, and she would not have anything but the fresh running water and modern toilet, which according to her, were the only true conveniences of the past one hundred years. She had a clothesline of candles, made the old way with rolls of beeswax, hanging beneath the eaves of her low roof. (“Who the hell buys all these candles?” he’d asked once when he was fourteen and feeling bold, and she had scolded him for his language but had not answered his question. Then, once she told him that she didn’t care if the candles were bought or not, she made them out of devotion. “Candles bring light to darkness,” she said.) She was three-quarters Indian and one quarter African-American, a smart and nimble woman who had survived four husbands over sixty years. She had spent forty of those years weaving and taking in laundry, which she washed behind her home in a great black pot—thus she had been called the Witch, for she had spent many an afternoon stirring the boiling-over pot with a great long stick, singing her songs. Spied by malicious children in the crackling woods, she was a wraith seen through the bog mist, calling to her demons beside the crumbling cemetery of the town’s outcasts of yore. But Stony had known her since the days she’d saved his pet cat from drowning in the bog, and had brought the two of them in—boy and cat—to dry and warm themselves by her stove while she took out her knitting and wove the first story he’d ever heard another human being weave. It was like magic.

“There was a woman from upcountry,” Nora Chance began, and upcountry was what the old-timers called anyone not from the sea. Stony was shocked, then, when he noticed that her backwoods dialect dropped away when she told her stories. “She and her man didn’t get along. She had a little boy, about your age, maybe a little younger. Maybe half your age plus two. And her man, he was beating on the boy, too, so she had to run and get away from him. It was winter, and fierce. She took the train and wanted to go all the way to Boston, maybe, or Springfield. But going through the hills to the west, the storm became a blizzard, and the train had to stop a little further on. It was in a small town, smaller than Stonehaven. The train was surrounded by ice and snow. She thought to sleep overnight in the depot with her boy, but the train company had fixed it up so passengers could go sleep in town in farmer’s homes. This was back in the days when that could be done, when you could sleep in a stranger’s house during an emergency.” As she spoke, Stony lay down with his black cat, stroking her still-damp fur, watching the embers between the slats of the great potbelly stove. “The people she stayed with were good country people. He, a retired farmer, and she, a woman who had mourned all her life for children she never had. They showed the lady, whose name I think was Ellen, and her son, to a small bedroom. Strange thing was,” and this was the point that Stony would learn was the departure from reality, the part that Nora Chance strung across her stories the way she strung a bright red thread through the grayness of a some bit of sewing. “Strange thing was, Ellen noticed the green and black flies all along the lights on the walls and ceiling of the little farmhouse. In the room, seven or eight of them flew along the ceiling. She fell asleep holding her son in her arms—her little boy that still had bruises on his face and neck from what his awful daddy had done to him just the night before.”

“Is this gonna be a scary story?” young Stony had asked.

“Don’t interrupt me,” Nora Chance chided him, “I don’t tell scary stories. All my stories are the truth, and they’re about human love. Human love comes in all forms. Like this mother, Ellen, who loved her little boy so much she ran from his daddy just to keep him safe. Now, there’s human love for you. So they slept all night, and she began to dream of flies. Flies all covering her and her little boy, flitting around his nose and mouth. Frightened, she woke up. It was early. It was almost dawn, but not yet. She glanced outside the window and saw the snow shining like broken glass on the farm. She got up, leaving her little boy wrapped up in the old quilt, and went to the hall.”

“Why’d she do that?” Stony piped up.

“I told you, don’t interrupt when I’m weaving a story,” Nora Chance said. “All will be revealed in the telling. As I was saying, she went into the hall because she was thirsty. And as she went to get a drink of water in the bathroom, she saw three small children standing half-naked in the darkness of the hallway. One was a girl of about eight or nine, and one a boy of five, and the littlest one, barely more than a baby, a little two-year-old. But they all wore cloth diapers.

“And something even more shocking.

“She noticed that at the edges of their mouths, thread had been sewn, and their eyes were closed, too, threads also, little black threads, and their ears and nostrils, all sewn shut. Ellen’s heart beat fast, and she clutched the bathroom door for support. She was unable to scream, and she wondered for a second if she were dreaming.

“Then, the little girl reached up and drew the thread out from her mouth, humming sounds coming from her.

“And as she drew the thread, and as her lips parted slightly...

“A small green fly crawled to the edge of her lips. Spread its shiny wings and flew, and then another emerged from out her lips. And another. And another.”

Here, Nora Chance fell silent.

“Is that the whole story?” Stony asked, after a minute.

Nora chuckled to herself. “No, but it’s enough for you now. Your cat’s dry now, and it’s getting dark soon. You two get off on home for your supper. I’ll tell you the rest another day.”

And so it had gone for six years, since Stony had been nine-years-old, wandering with his cat out in the woods. That cat, Liberty, had gotten hit by a car by the time Stony was fifteen, but even she had become part of Nora Chance’s stories, woven into the tapestry of whatever tale had been begun the time before his last visit to her. He had begun getting her groceries for her when he was twelve and had the New London Day paper route for Stonehaven. He could ride his Schwinn around town, delivering papers, and make his first stop his last: the Watchman Goods and Package Store, where he’d pick up her orders of flour, sugar, ham, milk, and beans. Her diet rarely varied from this, other than the whiskey she drank—but she seemingly had a never-ending supply of this in her cellar.

All this he’d told Lourdes by their third date, and had taken her to meet Nora. “But how did the story end?” was the first thing Lourdes asked when she sat on the threadbare rug by the potbelly stove.

Chapter Five

LEGENDS OF STONEHAVEN

1

“Which one you talkin’ about?” Nora asked, her nimble fingers still working around a needle and thread. “I got a million spins, some about Stonehaven, some about distant lands and fascinating folk.”

“About the children with the mouths sewn shut,” she said, for Stony had never finished the story for her.

“Oh, those children!” Nora said, and then quickly resumed a story that she’d actually left off telling years before. “Well, this woman named Ellen went back to her room to get her child. She was going to leave. She knew what kind of monstrous farmer and wife they were. The kind to torture little babies like that. Why, she was going to the police, she was going to find someone to take those poor children away from them. But the farmer told her the truth about it. See, he didn’t torture those children. ‘They been at their threads again,’ the farmer said. ‘Damn it, they ain’t supposed to tear at the threads.’ And Ellen, she is fit to be tied. She’s a ball of fury. The farmer tells her, ‘They got the minds of flies now,’ he says. ‘They need to let them out, lord, but that means I got to put them back.’ And Ellen slaps him one and says, ‘How dare you stand here self-righteous when you’re such a monster.’ And the farmer, he looks at her. He’s crying. ‘We love them babies,’ he tells her. ‘Only they ain’t ours. Mama, she cried for years for not having children of our own. I thought she’d like to die. What was I to do? What is a man to do? So I thought, other people have children. They die. They get put in the ground. They just get left there.’ So this farmer, see, he goes and digs up these three dead children. And he thinks: how does anyone know if someone’s alive or no? What makes us alive? And he figures, if you move, you’re alive. That’s the bottom line. And for most folk, it’s true. So he sews up these dead kids with maggots and such, and when the flies are born, they move. ‘But,’ he tells her, ‘they got the minds of flies, and sometimes they got to let them out. But Mama, she loves them kids. It’s love beyond choosing, lady, don’t you know that?’”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” Lourdes said, shivering slightly.

“Not done yet, so hold your horses,” Nora Chance said, no longer tolerant of interrupters. “So this woman and her little boy go to get on the train. The boy’s daddy is there, and he’s mad and he drags them back home. Months later, she returns to the farmhouse. She got her little boy in her arms. His daddy might have hurt him real bad. His mother, she loves her little boy too much to let Death take him. She tells the farmer, ‘Love beyond choosing, remember?’ and then the bundled-up little boy, he’s so still he might be dead, a spool of thread falls out of his little curled-up hand, unraveling as it rolls.” And here, Nora dropped the spool of black thread she held in her hands, and it rolled towards Stony.

“Oh, my god,” Lourdes gasped.

Stony clapped his hands. “See? She’s the best storyteller in the world.”

“That’s a cool story,” Lourdes agreed, leaning back on her elbows, looking up at Nora with awe. “Creepy but cool.”

“I got a thousand and one,” Nora Chance grinned, her eyes never lowering. “Just like Scheherazade.” Then she grinned, and nodded. “Get on home now. It’s almost twilight; I can smell it in the air. Twilight’s no good ‘round the bogs.”

And so it was that year, when Stony Crawford turned fifteen, that love came to him and swept him away, and Nora Chance, in telling the rest of her story from so long ago, had blessed the union of the teenagers.

That had been the summer before.

Autumn came in with the lobster trawlers, dumping its catch on the streets, the smell of brine and barnacle and seaweed across the crystal day. Stonehaven was lovely in the summer, but like all New England coastal towns, did not bloom until the leaves had begun turning.

2

Are there places like this anymore? Where summer seems to last nearly as long as the school year, where the houses all have neat lawns, are made of brick or clapboard, all neat neat neat; where all the neighbors’ children play together, play tackle football on summer afternoons down on the small beach by the cove, where there doesn’t seem to ever be an end to the days until the fireflies themselves appear in the nighttime veil of purple as it descends after nine at night? Then the days shorten, until dark comes by five, and the chill of fall sets in, with the scent of rotting blackberries and crisp leaf mold.

Stonehaven, a small gem of a town, but a gem washed over by sea and years until it was smooth at its edges but sharp and prickly within, sat along a promontory of land that poked into the Avalon Islands Sound. Hurricanes in ‘38 and ‘60 swept the rooftops off the houses, and the town clock off the old Meeting Hall, but by the time Stony was fifteen, all had been replaced, all looked as it had when much of it was first built in the 1700s. Officer Dennehy joked that the roads had not been improved since then, either. He’d sit out at his patrol car sipping coffee from the donut shop out in Pawcatuck, and watch the slow pace of the village and then go back to the station in Mystic and tell his envious colleagues, “Well, again, the Village was quiet. I saw three pretty girls, one black Mercedes, and I got a free lunch at the Tea Shop just for checking the burglar alarm to make sure it was working.”

His reports rarely deviated, except in the odd suicide or petty theft, and at fifty, Ben Dennehy was happy to lead such a peaceful existence as an officer of the law. The best he could say about Stonehaven folk was they were good God-fearing people; this was also the worst he could say about them. Down at the Water Street Barbershop, where most of the older men of town gathered of an afternoon, the stories of never-forgotten storms and wars passed around like the flu, and the tales coughed up got larger and grander images until they’d have had you believe that all Stonehaven was crushed by Hurricane Donna way back when, and that all the young men of Stonehaven single-handedly won World War II.

The village had always continued, through history, through gossip, through neglect. Stonehaven was all white clapboard, dark shutters, weathered boards of the old abandoned houses out by the railroad tracks. It was filled with newly remodeled houses of the summer people, now ghost houses, too; its skyline consisted of the steeples of three churches, the rotunda of the two-room library, the flagpoles above the U.S. Post Office and the trees along the Common—the square emerald lawn of grass that occupied the imperfect center of the borough. It was a community just half an hour out of New Haven, but none of the children living in the town knew much about the great city an hour to the south, nor of Providence, an hour to the north, nor even New London, and much less of Mystic or Stonington, its nearest neighbors. Stonehaven was hardly even suburban, for the houses, houses with names, all had been built before the oldest man in town had been born. The Josiah Bishop House, the Nathanial Greaves House, the Sarah McLendon house, the Randall house with its ancient slave quarters, the Portuguese Holy Ghost Society, the Custom House, even the tiny Citizen’s Bank building (one teller, no ATM, and open one day a week, summers only) on Ocean and Water Streets had been built just after 1814, after the town had been under attack by the British troops. Many houses were nameless, and some had not been built until 1900, but they all were weathered and lovely and the clapboard flaked with bad paint jobs by the end of summer. The scraggling woods on its eastern edge, full of bogs and ancient cemeteries, before the road led to the highway which led to the interstate, it was like the wilderness had not quite been burned back far enough by the early settlers of the region. It seemed so far away sometimes, as if Stonehaven itself had not progressed since the late 1600s, when it was founded. The town, as summer turned to fall, stank of the overflowing lobster boats that consumed the harbor as they spilled their clawing catches onto the long docks to the south side of town. The lobster smell was so thick you could cut it, you could inhale and choke on it, and it would open up your pores and clog them with the red sea scum stink. Stonehaven, surrounded on three sides by water, a finger thrusting defiantly at the Isles of Avalon, all three, spotting the glass of sea where it beveled at the horizon. How many bare feet were pricked by thorns, how many hands and elbows stung by yellow jackets, how many faces eaten red by the powerful sun before Labor Day came and destroyed all devices of escape? And then, with fall, all the summer people left, and with them, the mansions out by the point became shells, dark at night, the luxury boats sat on stilts in the boatyard, the lunch and tea shops closed, and one boy felt buried alive, if it had not been for the intense love he had. The burning love that only the very young can understand.

It was all Stony Crawford wanted at fifteen, his pure white T-shirt blotted with yesterday’s sweat, his swimming trunks waffling as he ran in his old torn-up sneakers, down the placid streets of Water to Seascape Terrace to Swan Drive then across the bridge at the cove, to the other side, to the other neighborhood beyond the cove. Wequetucket it was called, an old word that meant nothing other than freedom from the village to Stony. Wequetucket was beyond all the white people he had once believed were the only people in existence in his real world. It was the other side, where the apartments rose up, where the people who worked the lobster trawlers lived, where his heart seemed to beat faster and faster as he ran. Spanish and Portuguese and Indian and Black—the colors and tongues and legends were endless, just outside the borough. It was a world where things happened. Where love happened. Where Lourdes lived with her mother—the rows of garden apartments, the highway, a causeway between bays that connected Stonehaven to the outer world. To freedom. First down the streets of numbers, down alleys without names, across Barley Road and Myrtle Drive, to the Ninth Street Apartments. See him run like he’s a match trying desperately to catch fire.

See him run.

3

“You,” her mother said at the door, but Lourdes Maria Castillo stood behind her, glancing over her shoulder. Her mother glanced back, glaring. “Lourdes, it’s that boy.” Her mother shut the door and turned to her daughter. She waggled a finger at her, keeping her voice down. “You must make them call you first. A boy should never drop in like this. It shows disrespect.”

“Oh, Mom,” Lourdes said, exasperated, moving swiftly past her mother to open the door. The door creaked, as she pulled it back and she felt a slight embarrassment at the smell of the hallway—the fish, always the fish from the boatmen.

Stony Crawford stood there, sweating, out of breath. His brown hair too long over his forehead, the shine of perspiration like glaze on his face. “I ran all the way,” he gasped. His grin was wide and goofy. He waved hello to her mother who had already padded into the kitchen. “Hello, Mrs. Castillo,” he said, and then he returned his look to Lourdes, who blushed at its intensity. “Want to go for walk? We can go to the confectionary. I got some money.”

“You should call first.” Lourdes didn’t smile. She looked slightly cross. She did her best not to look him directly in the eye—otherwise, she’d have begun laughing at the charade.

“Next time. I promise,” he said.

“Okay,” she nodded, continually glancing back towards the kitchen as her mother banged one pot against the other. “I have to do some chores later.”

“I can help,” Stony said, his voice deepening as he caught up with his breathing. “Tell your mom I’ll wash her car.”

“I heard that!” her mother called out from the kitchen. “Tell him I want it waxed, too!”

Lourdes grabbed his hand, giving it a conspiratorial squeeze. “Let’s get out now while we can.”

“I want you two back here by three. Understand?” Her mother’s voice became shrill as it blended to Spanish, “Lourdes Maria, entiendes?”

“Si, Mommy,” Lourdes said.

Then, she went out the apartment door, and when it was shut behind them, he grabbed her and they kissed and she felt something wonderful blossom inside her.

4

It was always: to the lighthouse, to the lighthouse. Stony might drag her this way and that in the cool October night, she might linger down by the harbor where the trawlers creaked along, abandoned till the following morning, but it was always to the lighthouse, finally. The woods, too, or the cemetery, or out on the docks late at night when the sea was a flat gray glass and the few twinkling lights of the Isles of Avalon beckoned. But the lighthouse was better, for you could go inside and huddle in the low-ceilinged room, or climb up the tower and look out over the Sound. Or you could go out to the sloping hill that led to the rock wall before the sea, and lie camouflaged by shadows and land. The lighthouse no longer functioned, so it was the best possible place to make out and speak softly, for it was dark at Land’s End, across the cracked pavement of Lighthouse Alley, to the dead end marker. Leaping over this, to find one of the grassy bunkers that rose on the hillock over the wispy sea.

After Stony had told her of his love, and she told him of her love, and they did all the things young people are warned not to do,

And in his mind, he felt Moonfire bursting yellow red almost a sunset

Almost the pale light of a moon—

She told him.

That night, he wept for joy.

Then, by dawn, he wept for fear. Alone in his bed, knowing that the sun would be up in minutes and he had not slept a wink. He could hear one of the wild dogs of the docks barking as the trawlers pushed away, out to check their lines and cages.

Words could kill, sometimes, he thought then. Words could change everything.

Lourdes had whispered it sweetly, knowing that a boy might not like hearing the words. Knowing that this might destroy the wonderful thing they had together.

Knowing that this might destroy everything and take from both of them all they had ever dreamed possible.

He felt his heartbeat accelerate, and something that might have been adrenaline—or liquid fire—burst under the surface of his skin when she said the two most horrifying words any fifteen-year-old boy could ever have heard.

CHAPTER SIX

CONSEQUENCES

1

“I’m pregnant.”

“You can’t be,” Stony said, more startled than shocked, knowing that of course she could be pregnant. It was nature. It was their bodies reaching fertility; it was hormones and the terrible price that came with them.

She didn’t say anything for the longest time, but he heard her breaths, slow and careful.

“I love you,” he said.

In the morning, the full understanding of this hit him, of what it would mean to him and to his future.

2

Mid-afternoon, a couple of high school punks skip school, and one of them has the bright idea. “Let’s pillage my folks’ room. I know they always got a couple of twenties lying around,” one says, and his name is Van Crawford and he’s lanky and has ears that nearly stick out, but he has that aura of coolness with his knit cap on and pockmarked face and terminally hip sullen sneer. H

Chapter Six

CONSEQUENCES

1

“I’m pregnant.”

“You can’t be,” Stony said, more startled than shocked, knowing that of course she could be pregnant. It was nature. It was their bodies reaching fertility; it was hormones and the terrible price that came with them.

She didn’t say anything for the longest time, but he heard her breaths, slow and careful.

“I love you,” he said.

In the morning, the full understanding of this hit him, of what it would mean to him and to his future.

2

Mid-afternoon, a couple of high school punks skip school, and one of them has the bright idea. “Let’s pillage my folks’ room. I know they always got a couple of twenties lying around,” one says, and his name is Van Crawford and he’s lanky and has ears that nearly stick out, but he has that aura of coolness with his knit cap on and pockmarked face and terminally hip sullen sneer. He knows these things about himself:

He hates life.

Hates his little brother Stony. Tolerates him but hates him.

Hates his mother.

Hates his father.

Hates the fact that he has to live at all among these fish-people in this fish-village.

Hate is tattooed on his ass, only he’s never shown it to anyone in his family, but half the guys in gym have seen it in the showers after soccer practice. Not that Van is good at soccer, but hate can even fuel him through a rough game. He got drunk one night down in New London, and his buddies dared him to get a tattoo, but he decided that HATE was the word he wanted emblazed on his left buttock for all eternity, although if he’d had his druthers he would’ve had a flaming skull tattooed there too only he was too drunk and he couldn’t afford it.

He sits on hate, he breathes hate, and he lives hate.

If he could get drunk on hate, he would.

Van says, “Always beer in the fridge and maybe once we get some cash we can go on to Mystic and meet some girls or somethin’.” He has this way of speaking that’s half snarl and half cough, his voice is too deep, his eyes are set too close together. “I fucked Brenda last night.”

“No way,” his buddy says, his buddy named Del who lives in a rundown old farmhouse with his lobsterman father, but way out on the highway, way out in the middle of nowhere. Del lives far out enough from the borough and the docks that he doesn’t have the fish stink on him. “You didn’t fuck Brenda.” His voice, drunken, giggling.

“Yeah I did. I rammed it in and got her to moan real bad. She smells though. She smells like barnacles down there. Fuckin’ townie. I didn’t care. Just needed to get a nut off,” Van says.

“Holy shit. Think I can do her?”

“Fuck yeah. She ain’t the kind of girl who’s gonna mind a few more,” he laughs, and then they’re rummaging the fridge for beer, calling friends, lighting up the last tiny bit of a joint and wondering when the hell their other friends are gonna come over.

3

Van grinned stupidly, a can of beer in one hand, his other clutched around his hunting knife. “Your knife is your dick,” he said, laughing. He lay back on his parents’ lumpy messy bed, and looked up at the ceiling. “See? And life is a great big pussy that you just jab at and slam it home—” He sliced the air above him. The knife flashed silver in the overhead light. It reminded him of fish beneath water.

His friend Del Winter opened and slammed a dresser drawer shut. “I can’t find ten bucks in your mom’s dresser,” he said, ignoring what Van said.

“You hear me?” Van said. “I said your knife is your dick!”

“Yeah yeah,” Del said, pulling out a strand of pearls. “Shit, your mom has nice pearls. We could maybe take these to a pawnshop. You people in this village, you got nice things.”

Van downed some beer. “Naw, they’re fake. She don’t have nothin’ of value, trust me.”

“Last week you found a twenty,” Del said, dropping the pearls back in the drawer.

“Yeah and last week she got pissed off ‘cause she figured out I’d been taking it.” He took another gulp from the beer. He hated Bud, but it was the only thing his father ever bought. So it was all he could steal from the fridge. He sat up, looking at himself in the mirror above his mother’s dressing table.

“Your knife is your dick and your dick is your knife,” he said to his reflection. “Who the hell asked you?”

Giggling, sipping, swinging the knife around.

Del came over and picked up a new can of Bud from the floor. He popped it open. “You’re gettin’ shit-faced, my man.”

“Yeah I guess I am fuckin’ very gettin’ shit-faced.”

He set the beer down at his side, heaving a bit. It overturned, spilling the last of its golden contents on the white comforter. The room spun slightly. His reflection in the mirror wavered. “Your balls are God and your dick is your knife, that is wisdom,” he said.

“Yeah yeah,” Del said, chugging his beer down.

“I would like to kill that Spic bitch who my brother’s fucking,” Van said almost solemnly.

“Yeah sure. Hell, I’d do more than just kill her,” Del laughed, raising his beer in a toast. “I’d make her cream.”

Van held his knife up. “Your knife is your dick,” he said.

4

Van Crawford lived by a single code:

Survival of the fittest.

It was fuckin’ Darwinian.

5

“Throw out your line,” Van said, nudging Stony’s arm. They were in the dinghy, which rocked gently back and forth on a fairly placid current in the cove. The sunlight was almost blue across the pockmarked sky, and swans rested like feathered bowls not far from their boat. “You’ll get something.”

“No thanks,” Stony said. He leaned back against the prow, and stared up at the sky. He watched the sun, wondering if he would go blind from staring.

“Something’s up,” Van said. He reeled in his line, and set his pole down in the bottom of the boat. “Tell me.”

“No way,” Stony said. Even when Van seemed warm and kind, Stony had not grown up for fifteen years in that house for nothing. He knew Van too well. Trusting his older brother seemed impossible at times.

“It’s your girl,” Van grinned. “You get some pussy?”

“Shut up,” Stony said. “Shut the hell up.”

“Use rubbers, that’s my advice.” Van slapped a mosquito on the back of his neck. “Damn skeeters ain’t dead yet. It’s fuckin’ October and they ain’t dead.” Then, an after-thought, “Don’t trust a girl to take the pill. They lie. They all lie about that. Dad told me even Mom lied to him. All women do.”

Stony couldn’t help himself. “Too late for that.” Had he said it aloud, or muttered it? He glanced at his brother. To see what his face betrayed.

But Van was always on the lookout for the nasty sides of things and the deep dark secrets. “Shit,” he said. “You’re shittin’ me.”

“Shut up,” Stony said. He reached down into the cooler and brought out a Coke. Popped the top, sipped it. Two swans circled around the dinghy. Stony tossed the birds bits of his sandwich, which they gobbled greedily.

Van shut his eyes, shaking his head. “All that you’ve known about sex, and you got her knocked up?”

“Shut up,” Stony said. “We came out here to fish.”

“I came out here to fish. You came out here to confess,” Van laughed, and then, “Holy shit. Holy shit. Stony, your life is over.”

And then Van said, “That bitch. She let herself get knocked up on purpose.” Something tugged at his line. Bringing it up, it was a small bass. He unhooked it quickly, holding it in his hands. “That fucking bitch. Wequetucket Spanish Portuguese bitch trying to get a white boy from the borough to take her and her bastard in. Just like Mom got knocked up and made Dad marry her. Just like it’s always been in this shithole. Jesus, these fucking bitches. And you are such a dumb shit for knockin’ her up.”

“SHUT UP!” Stony shouted, his voice echoing across the water. Geese flew up from the surface of the cove, rippling the sky as they went.

6

In the shower, Stony Crawford steps beneath the hot water, and turns it up hotter. He isn’t sure if tears are falling or if it’s just the spray of clean hot water that almost feels hot enough to clean off the dirty way he feels. Don’t fuckin’ cry, he warns himself. You cry and you might as well be back in third grade. He grabs the bar of Dial soap and scrubs it hard beneath his armpits, and along his shoulders. The water and soap runs across the light hair on his chest, and the smell is fresh and new.

All he wants is to be clean.

If he could, he would scrub the soap across his mind to erase his memory. To erase the part of him that told him he needed to somehow take care of this. To eradicate the fear he had about the future.

The steam and heat are almost magical, taking him out of himself for a few minutes.

The Storm King is alone. If he touches someone they might burn to a crisp or drown...

And the MOONFIRE got him.

Then, the water begins to turn cold.

He stands beneath the cold water, shivering, wondering what the hell he’s going to do about the baby that he made with Lourdes Maria Castillo.

7

In the pocket of Stony’s jeans, a note:

Things I love about you:

I love your smile.

I love when you get angry and stomp around like a big baby.

I love all that hair on your chest and tummy. It’s like you’re a puppy.

I love when you kiss me.

I love when you tell me you love me and all the reasons you do.

I love the way you mow a lawn! Hubba hubba!

Your soul.

Your purity.

Your heart.

I love how sweet and kind and considerate and wonderful you are Stony Crawford. Don’t ever forget it. And we’re never going to be like your folks or my folks. I think you’re pretty special.

Love ya,

Lourdes

8

He walks into the living room where his mother, in darkness, watches The Holy Brigade. The man with the glasses is shouting that the false messiahs abound, that “we live in an age of miracles and nightmares, and God will send his Fury down upon sinner and saint alike, and there will be war and rumors of war, and rumors of unnatural beasts from the seas, and of fire from heaven!”

His mother glances up at him for less than a second. “You might want to pay heed to this,” she says in a monotone. “Your father won’t and your brother won’t. But you ought to.”

Then, she takes another drink from her small flask.

9

FROM THE DIARY OF ALAN FAIRCLOUGH

...All my life I had been searching for this, but did not think in my wildest dreams that I would find some evidence of it. We are raised with such beliefs in devils as children, but as we grow older, our imaginations die. Our beliefs transform like the consecrated wafer, but in reverse. From flesh to bread, we believe that symbols take over from imagination, rather than the opposite, that imagination creates symbols from the genuine creation. Ritual comes from our instinct, the way that salmon return to the rivers of their birth. Ritual is not empty. Ritual is full.

If this damn business with the banks had not taken over, I would have remained there at my retreat, but it’s always the prosaic that draws one back from the abyss, time and again. I would not wish the hell of finances upon anyone. Let the poor remain happy rather than deal with the headache responsibility of money when one wishes to be a hermit in the wilderness, a scholar in the library, or a pilgrim at a place of worship...damn necessity...damn properties...damn worldly goods.

But without them, I could not have my home on the island.  I would not have met these terrible yet wonderful people. I would never have seen the creature, or watched it open itself, change its geometry, go from beast to demon to beauty as if it could no longer keep to one shape. There is no god but the god of the flesh, and all sanctity runs from profane images. All flesh is profane. All flesh is sacred. All men are gods. Ritual is the key between the worlds of the Old and the New.

The town is a crucible, a place to observe the effects of our grand experiment, our foray into playing God, our need to move humankind forward, to stop the endless spiral of death that is mortal necessity. When I first saw it, in its cage, its arms strong, its eyes golden and fierce, I knew terror as no man has ever felt. What must the ancients have known who laid eyes upon these beings! What must the holy sisters have felt when they heard its cries beneath their sanctuary?

And yet my terror turned to love and longing, for even in the darkest of daemons, the fire of heaven kindles and threatens to rage.

When I touched its face, it gave in; it put aside fury, softened.

Can I describe what I felt when I parted its warm flesh and watched the transformation beneath my hands?

When this business is done here, I will return to America, to that crucible. The note I received from George Crown this morning was full of urgency. There is more, he told me, there is the beginning of the future now.

His note read simply, “It has taken hold.”

Chapter Seven

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALAN FAIRCLOUGH

1

Alan Fairclough raised his hand over the young man’s face. The face was handsome. Alan would not hire anyone without a handsome face for this. He liked seeing the bruises beneath the eyes, the gashes that opened up above the lips. He liked turning the very beautiful into the very scarred.

When his arousal heightened, he went deep into himself, losing the sense of the physical world, and entered the domain of the gods.

2

FROM ALAN FAIRCLOUGH’S DIARY

The story of my life is not a tragedy, but an adventure from what we believe is true to the extremity beyond truth and minor distinctions of Good and Evil. There is no Good and Evil; there is only evil right now and good right now. How life, as it got its hooks into you, moved effortlessly from the sacred to the profane. All we can truly know of it is the Light, the ever-brilliant Light of Divine Essence. In the deepest cruelty, in the most saintly kindness, in the brutality of human conflict, the Light sparks again and again and again.

The purpose of my life, its mission, is to find the stone from which the spark can be struck and set afire.

3

From his earliest years, Alan Fairclough had been destined for greatness. His father was Lord Early, whose ancestral fortune included three great castles in Scotland and Northumbria. His mother was Lady Elaine Romney, a diamond heiress whose grandfather had been South African Dutch and whose father had made a success of the Romney Ironworks as well as the mining operations in Africa. Alan attended Harrow, made the cricket team eventually, and then his world changed so swiftly the shock of it had never quite worn off. His parents died in a sailing disaster off Majorca. Alan was pulled from school and sent to live with his only living relative who would take him. His aunt owned land in a particularly inhospitable part of northern Scotland. While Alan had been protected from the worst of life by his parents, his aunt was cheap and mean-spirited. To build character, she forced him to take freezing baths, and when he disobeyed her, she had him soundly whipped by a tall grim German named Ranulf. His work was to keep on top of fifteen tenant farmers and their rents. By the time he was seventeen, he had been won over by what he then believed was the nobility of poverty. He took to the streets, eventually joining a monastery and foregoing any material comfort.

But just before his twenty-first birthday, lying on his hard bench of a bed, he began to experience erotic dreams for the first time in his life.

In them, he held the poor young street girls in his arms, thrusting into them like a jackal. He tasted the first blood of virgins, and whipped them until their screams turned to moans of delicious surrender. In these stimulating torture dreams, he was Ranulf the German not peach-faced Alan Fairclough The Good. Even in the dreams he was not a willing participant to the pleasure he felt. He felt as if he were being raped even as he slowly pressed a rusty spike into the nipple of an altar boy; he tried to resist, but was overcome by a greater force which shoved him deep into the body of a beggar girl from Calcutta...

When he woke from these dreams, he also resisted them. At first, disgusted with their vileness, then merely curious at his own nocturnal imagination, until finally, he grew to look forward to sleep and its night of dreaming.

As he was in the middle of an orgy of beating up a young hoodlum before raping the boy’s mother, Alan realized with dread that the dream had the texture of reality. As if his memory had become a black hole, sucking in the material world around it until he could not tell what was substance and what was not. He felt his fist connect solidly with the boy’s shoulder as a sexual electricity surged through his groin...

“It’s not a dream!” he cried out as the boy howled, blood bursting from beneath his left eye a split second after being hit. “It’s not a dream!” He screamed at the boy as if it were his fault. Beyond the boy, the mother, her flowing dress torn down the middle, her hands tied to a metal pipe above her head.

Alan let the boy go. The boy ran to sit beside his mother, shivering. The boy was no more than sixteen. The boy held his mother, and both of them wept.

Alan, awake, stared at his bloodied hands. For the first time that he could remember, he began to weep, as well. His tears washed the gray walls of the room, wiped clean the image of the woman and her son, until all he could see was night. All he could say was, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Dawn arrived, eventually, without response. He untied the woman, and dropped five hundred pounds onto her son’s lap.

A small mirror, above a scummy sink, stood at one end of the room. Alan Fairclough went and looked at himself and saw a monster. Neither Alan nor his former tormentor, Ranulf, stared back.

The face was so inhuman he could not place it as anything other than shadow.

Several weeks later, he embraced this image, and began his voyage to seek God in dark places. At twenty-one, he inherited his parents’ vast fortune, and began discovering the extent of flesh, suffering, and pleasure.

But even these had their limits.

When he’d awakened one morning, naked, with two young women and one young man sleeping beside him, curled beneath his arms on a stained and ragged mattress...their bodies so beautiful and fresh the previous evening with the tastes of laudanum and marijuana soaking him. Then, in the noon sun slicing like a steel glint razor through the slats of cheap wooden shutters—now, these bodies were great puddings of rot and disease, and smelled to him of excrement. He noticed sores along the man’s buttocks from the whip, and one of the women had small knife slashes on her left side along her ribcage. The all-consuming flesh lay there, one great tangled body. He had hacked his way out of that den of melting skin. Rushed to his shower, wiping himself clean of the night’s residue.

And the darkness enfolded him. Not the darkness of depression or regret or longing, but the darkness of a man who knows what is true about himself and his appetites.

With that knowledge, all youth abandoned him. All happiness faded, all satisfaction dissipated. He was thirty, then, and had already heard about the creature held captive in the caverns at Maupassane. There were stories of its cries echoing through the small village beyond the cliffs.

4

FROM ALAN FAIRCLOUGH’S DIARY

After all this time, to be so close to the legend, to its origin. I will find the creature if it’s the last thing I do. I will experience the miracle of its existence. I will touch its essence and be transformed. The key has always been ritual. This is what men have forgotten, what has been lost. It is the ritual that turns the lock and opens the door.

My God is the Savage God!

I glory in His Presence!

I will find His Radiance!

Azriel, come! Come with your Light!

5

Since these particular holy sisters had died or moved on two hundred years previous, it had been difficult to track down the precise cavern, but Alan Fairclough had a great deal of wealth and he spent much of it excavating the area.

Then, at last, one of the local workmen found the first clue.

The remains in rock, crushed by some collapse in the caves several hundred years previous.

“Beautiful,” Alan had said, as the flares were lit around the remains, casting yellow and orange shadow. “Look at its shoulders. Look at its...magnificence.”

It appeared to be a fossil to some extent, with the arms and spinal column of a human, but its skull, crushed and its jaw separated, had the incisors of a lion, and what appeared to be perforations along the forehead. The wings that had been crushed behind it seemed like a pterodactyl’s, but this was Alan’s fancy playing with him. He could not tell for sure.

He knew that it was a daemon that the holy sisters had kept within this darkness. Its secrets would never be known.

Within eleven months of painstaking excavation, he’d raised the stones and carefully brought it forth from its resting place.

When he beheld it in the light of day, his hair went from jet black to pure white. His eyes, from sparkling jewels to the dullness of cold stone. The Light of the world, he felt, had flickered and worn down—both by the majesty of this discovery and by the knowledge that it was no longer part of life in the flesh.

It was on a trip back to his townhouse in Manhattan. He’d heard a man say something quite remarkable. It had been at a regular afternoon at the private club, the chap mentioned something about a certain family. “The Crowns,” the man repeated when Fairclough asked. “They’re in all kinds of industry. Arms, mostly. Very charitable clan, as well. Six million last year to the Save the Children Fund.”

“I couldn’t help but overhear—you said something about...” Alan Fairclough didn’t even want to repeat it. Perhaps he’d heard wrong.

“The beast? My brother saw it himself. Visited them one summer,” the man said. “They have a pied-à-terre up the coast a bit. My brother’s place is on a little island, right across the water from their place. He’s selling his. While he was doing some renovating, they had him and his wife out to stay with them, briefly. He said for such rich people they have fairly common tastes.”

“The beast,” Fairclough reminded him.

“Yes, so my brother tells me that they own some creature that looks like the devil himself.”

Alan laughed. “Your brother—does he drink?”

The man went silent. After a sip of whiskey himself, he said, “Not these days. He died six weeks ago.”

Alan Fairclough was about to inquire further as to this information, but suddenly it was as if the noise of the club—the laughter at terrible jokes poorly told, the chatter from the men at the bar, the tinkling sound of the piano keys being molested by a less-than-adequate musician—all had been overwhelmed by his thoughts.

The beast.

The Devil.

Holiness.

6

Fairclough had tracked down the Crowns’ penthouse in the Lonsdale, off Central Park. He had no problem bluffing and bribing his way up to it, but was sorely disappointed when a lone butler met him at the elevator. The butler was extraordinarily handsome, with dark hair and round blue eyes, a bit of a trace of a scar running down beneath the left eye.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the butler said. “The Crowns are in Bangkok this time of year.”

“Liverpool,” Alan grinned, recognizing the butler’s accent. “I thought you’d be Irish, but that tone.”

The butler half-smiled. “Yes, completely. And you’re—”

“A man of the world, home nowhere.”

“I would’ve said Sloane Square with a bit of Scotland thrown in,” the butler nearly laughed.

“Well, you are close to the mark, you are. Alan Fairclough,” Alan extended his hand.

“Pete Atkins,” the butler said. Then, as if remembering his job, added, “They won’t be back for another month. Not till this nasty winter is over.”

“Business?”

“And pleasure, one would assume. Would you like to leave a message, Mr. Fairclough?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Alan Fairclough said, “Yes. Yes I would.”

He scribbled down a note, folding it once, and passed it to the butler. “How long have you been Stateside?”

“Two years,” Atkins said. “The Crowns are wonderful employers. Not like people say at all.”

“They say?”

“The usual malarkey. Nasty rich people and all that. They been like second parents to me almost.” Atkins then held the note up. “You don’t know them at all, do you?”

Alan tried not to reveal the lie. “We’re old friends. Tell me, they still summer in New England?”

Atkins nodded. “Yes sir. Stonehaven. A lovely village I’m told, right on the water. From the pictures it looks like castle to me. The property’s been with them for hundreds of years. Come on, then,” he said. Then he led Alan Fairclough into a modest parlor with three overstuffed chairs, a long table, and a half-dozen pictures on the wall. “It’s called The Shields,” Atkins tapped a photo. The picture was an old one. It showed a Bearcat in the driveway, and a white mansion behind it. A rich dowager and her driver stood in the foreground. “That’s Miranda Crown. They called her the Queen. She died a ways back. I heard from cook she was fierce.”

“The Crowns must have quite a history.” Fairclough glanced at the other photos beside this one. One caught his eye. He stepped over to it for closer inspection. “This one,” he said.

“1914,” Atkins said. “I know because Master Crown told me it was taken the morning his father was born.”

In the picture, four men, one in military garb, stood outside the mouth of a small cave. “That’s Master Crown’s grandfather.” Atkins tapped the glass.

“Where was this?”

“France. Outside Paris I think.”

“The war,” Fairclough said. “Doesn’t look much like they’re concerned with war, does it?”

Atkins was silent for a moment. “You say you’re an old friend?” There was suspicion in his voice.

“Well, truth is, I lied,” Fairclough admitted. “I know old friends of theirs from the club. I wanted to contact them.”

“Good show,” Atkins chuckled. “You had me fooled, just about. But I knew if you were an old friend, you’d know about them and war.”

Fairclough didn’t look away from the picture. “Yes?”

“Their girl, Diana, told me that they began all wars. I believe her.”

Fairclough barely caught this comment. “I’ve been there,” he said.

“France?”

“Yes,” Alan whispered, almost to himself. “That cave.”

7

Rupert Lewis had been the name of the man at the Club who had first mentioned what Crown possessed. Fairclough got hold of him through some easy connections—the Rafael Finches whom he dined with occasionally, and with whom he often entered New York’s seedier S&M clubs for a weekend of inspiration. On the phone, Fairclough asked, “Did your brother ever sell that summer place of his?”

“You have some memory,” Lewis said on the phone, obviously barely recalling their conversation. “No, and now his widow can’t seem to unload it either. It has some structural faults from a tropical storm three years back. It’s quite grand, really, but his property is probably more valuable than the house itself. It takes up most of a small island. Less than a hundred acres. Interested?”

“Very,” Fairclough said. “Make that extremely.”

The next afternoon, Alan Fairclough drove up from the city, taking 95 the whole way, past the usual and better-known turnoffs where he had known others’ summer places in Old Lyme or Old Saybrook, Stonington, Mystic—until he found Route 3. Then another ten miles down a two-lane road full of potholes and bumps, shrouded from sunlight by thick brambly trees shorn of leaves by winter. He thought he’d made a wrong turn—then, the sun, a small cove, woods everywhere, he drove past boatyards into what he could only describe as the most quaint New England town, still fairly untouched by New York and Boston on either side of it, both gradually growing out like parasitic routes. But here, an abandoned Customs House that looked as if no one had yet thought to use it, a public library the size of a one-room apartment, three churches with perfect steeples, and the empty streets of a fishing village at midwinter. It almost made him nostalgic for something he’d never had nor wanted.

At Land’s End point, he saw the small islands off the coast, the three Avalons, and the smallest was no doubt where Rupert Lewis’ brother’s summer home ate up half its geography.

Then, losing himself again in the narrow streets, the clapboard and brick piles of houses along frosty lanes, he turned toward Juniper Point, and the row of enormous white houses that formed a horseshoe just the other side of the village. They were close enough to join with the Borough of Stonehaven as a unified architecture, but far enough away for luxurious privacy.

A small brass plate attached to a low wrought iron gate proclaimed, The Shields, All Are Welcome, None Shall Be Turned Away. Stables to the north of the house, a caretaker’s cottage beside the six-car garage, a boat slip off the south end, and a lawn that was smaller than he had expected, with no garden to speak of. But the house, a Georgian fake, its columns too short, its windows too large, its flourishes barely regarded. Yet it was magnificent. The Crown place was, itself, more than a feast for the eyes and soul.

It was a face of white carved from the very landscape that surrounded it, holding in contempt all that it held within its gaze: the Avalon Sound, the woods, and even Alan Fairclough in his small black Mercedes as he parked it in the circular drive.

8

His first impression of Diana Crown, who was then only barely five or six, was that she was rather homely and unkempt. He mistook her for the caretaker’s daughter, until her hackles got up at this suggestion. Then she became a little tyrant.

“I am Diana Crown, daughter of Darius and Honor Crown, and right now, sir, you are trespassing.” She still had that little girl lisp, but her vocabulary, and the authority with which she used it, seemed beyond her years. Her hair was blond, but matted impossibly with some kind of gummy substance as if she’d been rolling in clay.

“Well, I am Alan Fairclough, and I am buying the Lewis place out on the island. I wanted to meet your father if I may.”

“Mr. Spencer Lewis?” she asked, eyeing him almost suspiciously.

“Yes, the very same.”

“He was a very tedious man,” the girl said. He chuckled at her words. “And just what is so funny?” she asked imperiously.

“Not a thing,” Fairclough said. “You’re charming.”

She gave him a slight pout, and then turned to call out to her father. “Daddy, there’s a Mr. Faircough here—”

“Clough, Fair-Clough,” Alan said, emphasizing the sound.

Diana grinned impishly. “Yes, I know. I was playing with it. I prefer Faircough.” As Alan Fairclough stood there, listening for the sounds of Darius Crown’s footsteps, the little girl turned back to him, staring up at him soulfully with her nearly transparent blue eyes. “Last night I dreamed you’d come here, Mr. Faircough. I dreamed that I was standing up in my bedroom and I saw you driving up here in your black car. Only it was a nightmare. Someone else got out of the car.”

“Oh?” he asked, wondering if she had ever felt much pain in her life yet, or if the pleasure of it was to come as she reached adolescence. “And who was it who was driving my car?”

“The Devil,” she said. “But he looked like you. His eyes were like yours.”

“I’ll tell you,” Fairclough chuckled. “He’s a distant relative, from my mother’s side. No wonder you saw a resemblance.”

9

That had been years ago, and Alan still felt the chill of that first meeting with Crown and his family. The slow beginnings of trust that grew between them. Alan bought the Lewis place and fixed it up and found himself living more and more on the island, spending time visiting the Crowns in the summer and at their midwinter holiday.

He showed them the image that had been burned into the stone from the French cave, and they in turn showed him their secret, a treasure more valuable than all the riches in Christendom.

And he taught them the words of bondage, and what language their treasure understood.

Only Fairclough’s appetite as well as his many financial dealings drew him back to cities, to London, Rome, New York, to the places of teeming masses where a half dozen or more bruised youths or violated maidens would not cause more than a raised eyebrow...where he could practice his form of spiritual growth in relative anonymity...

But the Shields, and the Crowns, always called for him in this little borough of darkness.

What he helped them do.

The atrocity, the glorious atrocity, the use and misuse of power beyond the sphere of human endeavor—he was part of something greater than anything any man had ever been part of.

If it took and held, as it seemed to be doing, the world would transform and slough off its old tired skin.

Alan Fairclough would shepherd the new age into being.

10

FROM ALAN FAIRCLOUGH’S DIARY, SEVENTEEN YEARS PREVIOUS

I felt only impatience as Crown led me into his study. I wanted to see. I wanted to experience. But he told me that he had matters to discuss with me first. The usual talk, the suspicious glances. My assumption is that Crown believes the bullshit he’s spouting, his falling back on Judeo-Christian mythos, his reliance on words like Satan and Fiend, as if this could possibly describe what his treasure held. He is perhaps a madman, and his immense wealth has separated him from his fellow men. He believes his own hogwash. He has even created a chapel for it. He says that it remains trapped by the symbols of religion, but he must be mistaken.

If it is trapped, it is for some other purpose. For nothing in the world could hold this creature if it needed to escape this house.

Finally, after showing me the ancient drawings of Hell and Heaven and the conjuring of demons and all the arcane foolishness that Crown in his megalomania believes, he took me into the chapel.

I can only describe the emotion that held me in its thrall as I entered that sanctuary. Fear? No.

Pure terror. I felt as if I were a child again, a little boy walking into some great and mysterious cathedral.

Crown has the accoutrements of his belief strung around what once must have been a quaint family chapel.

But I barely noticed the perverse nature of the place.

Instead, there it was. Caged and held like some sideshow freak.

It spoke the ancient language known only to those most Holy Sisters, and who knows before them.

The celestial language of demons and gods and all those who are the fire at the heart of the cave and are not the shadows dancing about it.

Its golden eyes opened and watched me as I stepped nearer. My bowels released involuntarily, and I felt a shudder of electric energy shoot up my spine. My nose began bleeding, but I didn’t bother to wipe at it with a handkerchief.

I felt suspended.

For a moment, I felt disembodied and could not be sure that my feet touched the ground or that I was even breathing.

All sound ceased.

Should I write here of the great sorrow in those eyes? Of the weariness, and yes, even fear, but most of all, the sorrow?

And in that sorrow something more terrifying than this vision of a creature from either nightmare or fantasy:

It began speaking with my dead father’s voice.

What was it, what did it show me, what did it say?

All this it destroyed within my memory, and all I’m left with is the image burned indelibly in my mind after this first encounter.

11

The picture that he could not remove from his brain, no matter through how many sleepless nights, nor during those nameless hours before the first sunlight when all the world seemed in the same state of sublime panic that he felt within, that picture conjured itself in the blackness whenever he shut his eyes.

A man screaming from a great oak tree, red sparrows pecking at his palms, feet and eyes. Upon his head, a crown of fire.

It was not until much later, replaying this image in his head like a dreaded movie, that Alan Fairclough recognized that the man on the tree was himself.

Chapter Eight

IN THE SUMMER HOUSE

“Can’t you stop it?” the young woman gasped, as the servants held her down on the bed. She was trembling, her body spasming, and sweat pouring off of her. Her back arched, and her blouse was shredded where she’d clawed at herself before they got to her. “Can’t you stop it?” she began shouting, her voice soon going hoarse. “Somebody stop it!”

Her father stood over her, wiping a sheen of perspiration from his brow with a handkerchief. “Please, Diana, it will pass. You must let it pass.”

“It’s burning me,” she cried, her arms breaking free of those who held her down. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her skin flashed with an ashen glow. “Daddy, it’s burning me! Get it out of me! Why can’t you get it out of me?”

Her father stepped forward with his handkerchief and pressed it against her lips. Her eyes went wide with terror as she looked up at his calm face.

“You must fight it. Keep it in. You have to.”

“It wants out!” she screamed.

Then, he stuffed the handkerchief into her mouth, gagging her.

Chapter Nine

NIGHTMARE

Stony awoke in a sheet-soaked fever, the sweat so filmy and thick it was like pond scum. Someone was whispering a phrase over and over, and he realized with a start that it came from his own lips. He felt a tickling around his nose, and when he felt it, he also felt the blood that dripped from his nostril to his lips. Grabbing a Kleenex from the box on the windowsill, he wiped at it. Shit. He sat up in bed, the end of the dream, just a hypnogogic trace, left hanging over him like a spider web:

A memory of being four-years-old, and having cut himself accidentally with his brother’s hunting knife while he was playing with it. But the blood didn’t terrify him, what terrified him was he thought he saw a small fire burst from his skin, from his blood, a momentary flash. Then it was gone.

He sat up the rest of the night, unable to sleep. He looked out over the shingled rooftops of the neighboring houses, out beyond them to the sea, to its vast darkness. The light of the moon cut across it, like yellow lightning, and the word that he uttered seemed at first alien to him. It was the word he’d heard when he was half in the dream, the word that he’d said on waking. He said it three times like an incantation, as if it would bring comfort to his thoughts. “Moonfire,” he whispered, “moonfire, moonfire.” Something in the word itself terrified him, as if it were something more than a phrase from a favorite comic book. As if it insinuated something to him, something about the world around him that lay just beneath its surface. Moonfire fuels the world. The thing that destroys the Storm King is the very thing that flows in the veins of all creation.

At fifteen, he felt again like a very small boy, not like the man he knew he was becoming. What was a man anyway? A walking erection? A fur-covered cave man? His father? Sometimes Stony wondered what the hell it meant to grow up and be a man when he still felt like a little kid on the inside half the time.

He got out of bed, pulled on his briefs and went to use the bathroom. In the bathroom mirror, he looked at the teenager staring back and wondered why the hell the little kid from long ago hadn’t vanished from his features. One final wipe at the last of the blood beneath his nose.

Moonfire, he thought. Christ, all this stress is getting to you. Lourdes is pregnant, your school grades are dropping, your parents are assholes, and you’re having nightmares like there’s no tomorrow.

The words of his English teacher came back to him, “These are the best years of your life.”

If these are the best years, Stony thought shaking his too long hair in the mirror, looking at the last bits of Kleenex still stuck underneath his nose, what the hell is the rest of it gonna be like?

As if a threat were contained within the words, but he could not decode what that threat might be.

In the back of his closet, he found the old half-empty pack of Camels that he hadn’t touched for over twelve weeks. He had promised Lourdes he would never touch them again, but this was different. He wasn’t going to get through this night without some nasty little crutch.

He lit one, and inhaled deep. It was good. It burned in his throat. The nicotine kicked in, and he coughed. Then, he put the damned thing out. Even a cigarette wouldn’t do it for him. His head pounded, and he felt ancient.

He watched the moon until the first light of day came up.

PART TWO

MOONFIRE

“As the Outcast held up the metal sphere, a curious light came from within. ‘Weep, O Storm King! I hold the mastery of the cosmos! Behold, THE RADIANCE!’”

From THE STORM KING: CHAMPIONS OF DARKNESS, Vol. 6

Chapter Ten

INITIATIONS INTO THE MYSTERIES

1

All human tragedies are tragedies of innocence waking. Stony spent most of September brooding, when he wasn’t delivering papers and groceries and going to school. He felt as if he were living underwater at the public school over in Copper Ferry, a good five miles out of town. He’d sit in class, nod his head during Geometry, doodle during American History, watch his lab partner do all the chemistry assignments and then just copy from his notes, and pretty much sleepwalk from one end of the long corridor to the other. Half the time in gym class, while he was running cross-country, his mind was elsewhere, off in a private zone of worries and musings about raising a kid, or aborting a kid, or just ignoring the whole damn thing. When the bells rang between classes, he no longer saw the individual students, he saw the sea, the melting tide of faces, intoxicated with secrets or half asleep and moving zombie-like from English to Geometry to Spanish—through the dingy, dirty halls, their giddy excitement at some scandal of adolescence, their surliness, their many faces making one face. Even his old best friend Jack Ridley was lost in the crowd, and he shunned talking too much to anyone. And there, among all of them, Lourdes Maria. Her face, the first time he’d seen her, the tan of her Spanish and Portuguese forebears, the hair dark as night, and her lips sweet. He was still wanting her. Her yellow sweater, and the small gold cross on the slender chain around her neck...But now, in the sea of others, between classes, he turned away from her, from the one he thought he had loved but now knew he had destroyed. Stony felt caught between a dream and a reality too complicated to handle.

Lourdes finally grabbed his arm one day, and he felt like he might wake up.

“We need to talk,” she said. He could barely look at her. He resisted, and instead looked at her hand as she grasped him. Her fingers, with their red nails, the two rings on her finger—the one her grandmother had given her, the one that she had bought for twenty dollars at a flea market in Mystic...the olive cast to her hand...

Stony looked at her for only a second, but as soon as he saw her eyes, those dark stones brilliant with an inner sun, and the curve of her lips, bright red lipstick glossing them, he could not look away again.

“We do?” he said, feigning good humor. He still loved her. He felt that in his heart. He knew he loved her. But he also knew that her having a baby meant that what he wanted his life to be, the Dream of what he wanted his life to be, was not going to happen. What was going to happen: he would work at the cannery or on the lobster boats like his dad, and he’d stink of fish and come home to some cramped apartment or worse, a trailer out by Route 63—the trailer park nicknamed The Lightning Rod of God because of the way it always got destroyed during the frequent summer hurricanes—Lourdes would be prematurely old by twenty, there’d be another baby, he’d be in a prison of his own making.

Still, he loved her, and he wanted to try to find a better Dream for the two of them. He followed her outside, and they sat along the concrete steps overlooking the blacktop where the ninth graders were doing calisthenics.

Lourdes pressed her hand in his. “You’re afraid of all this, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “I know I love you. I know that.”

She leaned against him, kissing him on the cheek. “Good. I love you, too.”

Silence. She let go of his hand.

“You haven’t come over much in the past few days,” she said.

Another shrug. “I had a lot to get done.”

He could practically feel her trembling, even though they were not touching.

“I found out something today,” she said.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I was wrong.”

“Huh?”

“I was just late. That’s all.”

“You mean...”

“Yeah. It’s not what we thought.” Then, she amended this. “What I thought.”

For the first time in a week, he looked in her eyes again. He felt like he’d been a jerk. He was happy, but something inside tugged him downward. He’d shown his true colors. Yellow. Cowardly. Chickenshit. She shaded her eyes with her hand—from the sun, not from his stare. He wished she’d smile. He wanted her to smile and throw her arms around him.

“I guess you’re thrilled, huh?” she said.

“No,” he shook his head, throwing his arm around her. “I guess I was just scared. I mean...I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

“Me neither,” Lourdes said. “My father would’ve killed me. Thank God, huh?” He thought her eyes were getting watery, and knew it had been a terrible experience for both of them. Dumbass! Stupid! Two idiotic kids getting in trouble. Thank God she wasn’t pregnant!

“Yeah,” Stony said, and tossing his head back he stared up at the cloudless blue sky. “Thank you, God!” Then he kissed her. “Do you think I was acting like a jerk?”

Lourdes shrugged. “A little. I guess I would’ve too. But it’s different when you think it’s inside you. It must be hard to understand if it’s not inside you.”

At that moment, Stony felt alive again. Engaged in life, where he had disengaged two weeks previous, when she’d first told him. “I really do love you. I was just trying to figure out how we were going to handle...all this shit...”

“Let’s not talk about it again,” she whispered. “I need to get back to English. See you on Friday?”

Stony nodded. As she got up, he grabbed her hand again. Squeezing it. Something seemed cold when he touched her.

He looked up at her face. “Are you telling the truth?”

She turned away and walked back into the building.

2

Van Crawford, hanging out on the steps of the Package Store on Water Street in Stonehaven, tossed back a Pabst Blue Ribbon, neatly wrapped in a small brown bag. His buddies Del and Rich the Roach took turns watching for Officer Dennehy, and then swiped the can of beer and passed it back and forth.

“I need some pussy, bad,” Del said, wiping the sweat off his neck, watching one of the local girls go by in her daddy’s Volkswagen. “It’s been two weeks.”

“Bullshit,” Van laughed, making another grab for the can of beer. It was empty, so he tossed it in the trash and reached into the green backpack resting on the pavement. “Like you ever get any.” Then, as he popped up the tab on the can, he saw her, walking out of the Stonehaven Country Store, a basket in her arms, her dress all of summer and sheer audacity—for he could see through it to her creamy thighs, and her breasts, too, like twin scoops of ice cream.

“Who the fuck is that?” he heard Rich ask, but Van was already transported—his heart beat fast, his tongue shriveled, and his dick seemed to ache with a longing he didn’t know a body part could have.

She had nearly blond hair, to her shoulders, and eyes like blue stones, and a set of thick lips, juicy lips, and confidence—a sexual confidence, he could tell just by the way she walked, the way her head stayed high, the way her posture was relaxed but perfect. Her lips made him want to fuck her. There was no other reason for lips like that.

She had legs that were near perfection, and where her waist was narrow, her hips were wide. She looked like a sexual thoroughbred. To him, she looked like the whore bitch of the universe, the one who could take in all of him, drink him in, and he would never be tired of it.

“Jesus, look at her,” Del gasped.

Van actually dropped to his knees, holding the beer can in both hands like a holy relic. “Oh sweet Mother of God,” he said. “Bless the fruit of your womb. Jesus. Jesus.” He grabbed his balls with one hand, looking up. “Man, I want some of that.”

She was a stranger to town, probably a tourist. A day tourist. Someone from New York. A model, maybe. No, better than a model: a wet dream with legs. “Who the fuck is she?” Van asked.

“She’s a Crown I think,” Del said. “I never saw her much, but when I was a kid, remember? Didn’t you ever see her and her weirdo family out on their boat?”

Van shrugged. “A rich bitch too. Cool.”

His buddy Rich whispered, “Man, she’s trouble. Leave her alone. She’s a Crown. They’re bad.”

“Yeah, fuck you,” Van muttered.

And then she stopped, watching the boys.

Van closed his eyes, almost embarrassed.

When he opened them, she smiled at him. It was a blessing, all right.

She smiled and nodded, as if she knew what he was thinking.

As if she knew what he was thinking, and it was all right with her.

He got up, dusting off his jeans, passed the beer to his buddies, and trotted off across the street.

3

Picture this:

You’re a horny seventeen-year-old boy and you are used to the dregs of teen girldom, of girls that lie deathlike on soiled mattresses while you slobber and push into them, of girls who smell like the docks, of girls whose make-up smears and beneath it you see the chapped lips, the small eyes, the skin not quite mottled not quite smooth...

Girls like Brenda Whitley with her uneven boobs, and her barnacle taste, and her way of whining when you get to third base...

And then you see a girl who looks as if she just stepped out of a Hollywood movie, with a perfect body nearly, with sexual confidence, with an aura about her that’s like fire from the moon. Hormone is her perfume and what lies at that goal there, that place you want to get into, is nothing less than the garden of paradise.

You think: maybe she will get me out of this miserable existence.

4

“What’s your name?”

“Diana.”

“Diana what?”

“Crown.”

“Yeah, I guessed that.”

“You know my people?”

Van almost laughed. The way she said, “You know my people?” It was as if she was talking about a tribe rather than a family. Rich people were so different. All the summer people were. They weren’t from the same world as Van and his family and other families who lived in town year-round. They occupied the same world, but they weren’t from it. Summer people were always like that. They were from New York or Washington or even England sometimes. They didn’t have boats; they had sloops. They didn’t have maids; they had servants. They didn’t have money; they had wealth. And they didn’t have a home, but homes. Homes everywhere. One for work, one for summer, one for winter. The Crowns were like that—the Crowns were rich. A Crown had once stolen money from a railroad in the north in the late 1800s, and then another Crown had bootlegged liquor from Canada, and another Crown had even funded part of the Nazi party in the ‘30s. There had once been a picture of Frederic Crown in Life magazine, standing with Adolph and Eva, and the caption read: “The Crown Prince spends Easter with the Fuehrer.” This had been meant to discredit the Crowns, but in fact, it barely touched their lives. They profited from the war, they profited from the peace. The Crowns even set up a Jewish Refugee Fund in 1945, and then in 1960, Michael Crown reopened the textile factories on the Monangetowga River in Pennsylvania, and produced the popular Crown Cotton Shirt in no time. They were different than the rest—everyone in Stonehaven knew it. They were a family with a power beyond the ordinary doings of mankind. They owned property all over. Van heard that they owned half the shops on Water Street, maybe all of them.

And here, Diana Crown, in all her moneyed glory, her hair swept by pearl and her breasts raised in cups of gold. He could barely see anything that resembled a real girl to him, since the girls he was used to didn’t have the shine to their faces, or the hips that begged to be squeezed in his filthy hands. She looked like she knew why God had given her this body, those tits, the lips, and the fire he saw in her eyes.

Van had had poor girls and middle-class girls before, many of them—he was used to seducing all the local girls. He’d been unsuccessful more times than not, but there were always a few, the Brendas and Mary Lynns of the world he knew. He had never gotten into the panties of girls like Diana Crown. As far as he knew, there were no other girls in his limited knowledge of the world that were anything like this Diana. This earthy vision, with the purity of good genes and some inner intelligence, all bound up in a package of hormonal vampirism. That’s what she was: a vampire. He sensed it. She wanted what boys like him could give a girl, not money, not prestige, but the flesh heat that Van dreamed of giving her.

And here she was, presenting herself to him. So easy. So available. So fuckable.

“I worked for your father one summer.” His voice deepened, and he showed his appreciation for her beauty by looking down to her feet and then back up to her face. There were only two places he cared about, and they both looked delicious.

“You did,” she said.

“I thought your family left after Labor Day.”

“Some of us did. Some of us stayed. What’s your name?”

“Van Crawford.”

“Van Crawfish?”

“Funny. You’re funny, Miz Crown.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said, stopping. “Diana. Call me Diana.”

“Sure, Diana. Sure. How’s the house?”

“Fine.”

“You going to stay through the winter?”

“No,” she said. “Just till November First.”

“Sure,” he said, “Just till it gets cold. You summer people.”

“Yes,” she said with a formality that irked him. He wanted to throw her down right then and there and tear her summer dress off, covering her face, and expose her thighs, just holding them apart with his hands. He would squeeze silver coins from her loins.

“You’re thinking something, aren’t you?” she asked. “I like a boy who thinks. How old are you, Van Crawfish?”

“Seventeen. Almost eighteen. Eighteen in two months. December Third.”

“That’s a magic age,” Diana Crown said. “How old do you think I am?”

“Maybe twenty?”

“I could be,” she said. “Here, let’s go to my car. I’ll need help with the groceries. Mind if I hire you for an hour or two?”

Van shrugged.

“I’ll pay you twenty-five dollars,” she said, later, much later, after the trip to the grocery store, after a glass or two of wine, when she had brought him on to the screen porch of her family’s summer house, and as he looked out over the water, “No, make it thirty dollars, if you’ll take your shirt off for me.”

He felt cold when she said it.

He felt October in his heart.

He began unbuttoning his shirt.

5

Later, when he began bucking into her, uncontrollably as if she were milking him, as if he were a cow that she was drawing some strength from—but he didn’t want to think this, not while his senses were frayed and spitting electric juice from his pores—later, when his sweat stung along his chest as they bonded together, he felt as if there was something that she was taking away from him. Some indefinable piece of him, the virginity of a part of Van Crawford that he had never been able to name. A hidden corner of his consciousness, a sprig of life, pressed into her ice-glazed fingers that aroused him still even while he lay against her, spent.

“I want you,” she whispered.

“You got me,” he said, drawing back to look at her sweaty beauty, the curl of her hips, and the gentle curves of her small belly, the breasts that all but cried out for his lips. “You got me.”

Chapter Eleven

VILLAGE LIFE, AUTUMN

1

The threat of winter so soon, not in great frozen breaths of air, but in the fists of wind. It was October coming in, the chill increased, the townsfolk moved a little more slowly, but not so much as to be perceptible to an outsider. If it wasn’t rain, it would be wind; if not wind, then snow; and if not snow, then an overhanging misery. Once winter announced its coming, there was no retreat. Other autumns might be mild clear through Thanksgiving, but this was not to be one of those seasons. Guff Hanlon, with his furniture business, shut the shop down for the winter; his sons would take the rest of the inventory down to shops in Greenwich and Rye for the winter, selling them off at half-price to the dealers. Guff then went to his winter job, as assistant librarian at the Stonehaven Free Library, which was all of two small rooms beneath a dome at the edge of the town Common. Guff was probably the tallest man in Stonehaven, at least for the months after Labor Day and before Memorial Day. He was six foot four, and strapping, even at forty-six, a barrel chest and a constitution like an ox, that’s what Doc Railsback always said. “You’ll live till you’re a hundred and three, just like your grandfather,” Doc would say, and Guff would wonder how that might be, since his grandfather had been down at Yale-New Haven hospital on machines for the last twenty years off his life. Guff’s father had been lucky—cut down in his prime, hit by a bus in front of Grand Central Station in New York in 1961, a healthy man, gone at fifty. That was the way to go.

But Guff knew in his heart he’d end up like his grandfather, for his life was without event. He worked in his woodshed building furniture, he worked at the library because he loved books so much, he worked at home with his wife on keeping her calm through all the things she worried about, and he worked keeping his sons, both in their twenties, employed and active so they didn’t go run off and be lazy good-for-nothings the way Guff had for a good ten years before he straightened himself out.

“Well, good afternoon, Guff,” Fiona McAllister nodded to him, from behind the front desk at the library, as he slammed the screen door behind him, then shut the thick oak door against the slight wind.

Guff nodded. “Fi, good to see you.”

“How’s Marcy?”

“Just good. And Alec?”

“Just good, too,” Fiona said.

“I guess I need to go down and clean up the stacks,” Guff said, matter-of-factly, his folksy New England way of speaking sneaking out as if this were a hook for a fish.

“Yes,” Fiona nodded. Then, she removed her wedding ring, setting it inside a small card catalog file.

She always did this when she followed him down to that dark musty room below, where they made love as passionately as they could before he had to clean up, and she had to return to help someone check out a book.

2

James and Alice Everest sat in front of the Everest Bakery, on the small green bench. She had a small rhinestone-studded calculator on her lap, and was totaling the week’s grosses, while James, his white hair covering half his face, smoked his pipe and noticed that the shingles on the barbershop across the street were falling loose, and he noticed that kids just didn’t play football in the streets the way they had last year. Their afternoons were ones of boredom, and James often felt as white and unnatural as the flour that powdered his apron and shirt. The barber, David Smith, known as Cutter, busily sawed at the thick tresses of a Mike “The Mule” Mueller, getting him down to a military buzz because Mike wanted to go to the Coast Guard Academy down in New London in another year, and he wanted to start looking the part.

The Railsback Butcher Shop, on the corner was probably the liveliest place, because before five, the business was as fast and furious as at the Package Store down the other end of the street. Housewives and the unemployed lined up on the sidewalk—it was Friday, and Butch Railsback, cousin to Doc Railsback, who was also second cousin once removed to Stony Crawford’s mother, Angie, was all decked out in his bright white t-shirt, and old ship’s cook’s white pants, but his huge apron that covered him thigh-to-neck, was already bloodied in the battle of meat.

His great arms were muscled like a stevedore in overdrive, and he wielded the cleaver freely across the chopping board, turning a once crimson steak into the thinnest of slices for Mrs. Partridge’s Steak Diane that she was making for Father Rammer for Friday night dinner at her house with the Prayer Meeting Group. Butch was thirty-six and gorgeous to the town’s women, as only a muscled and cocky hunk can be, and perhaps it was the spraying blood of the meat, or the gentle way he took their orders—for his voice never rose higher than a masculine whisper when he asked, “And what would ya like wit’ dat, Mrs. Partridge?” He had the good looks from his Polish mother, who had been a blond and ravishing beauty, trucked over from Albany by his father sometime in the 1950s, and Butch was a poster boy for meat and dairy consumption—even his one lazy eye, the left eye, with its milky blueness, could melt the heart of most of the women and some of the men who stood in the line. Chop! Chop! The cleaver to the block, the meat laid out, or pounded down with his mallet, making the chicken soft, the meat tender, and the pork edible.

When Angie Crawford made it to the front of the line, she said, “Is there any good lamb this week?” She held her purse in front of her, demurely, and tried not to glance at the pretty-boy face. When she did, she remembered her own husband, dead for nearly a decade now, but eternally young to her. And Butch here, too, was eternally young, for the image of who he was at this moment, this crossroads, was burned deeply and painfully into all who beheld him.

Butch leaned forward, tipping his white cap, scratching just beneath the shock of strawberry blond hair that fell across his forehead. “You want good lamb, huh? I maybe might have a little, yeah, sure,” he said, his accent thick and sharp, he sounded like a thug from Boston. “How much you want? I got a good side in da back.”

“Oh,” Angie said, “Nothing that big, maybe...maybe a shoulder and a good leg.”

“Sure,” he said, but it was always “Sho-ah,” and it never seemed a word with him, but an expression of an ox pawing the ground. “Hold dat t’ought,” he held his finger up, and then went over and grabbed a clean blade from his rack. Turning his back to his audience, Butch opened up the walk-in refrigerator, and then walked down a hallway. He opened another door, but this was as far as Angie, or any of the others waiting in line, could see. Butch Railsback did not exist beyond the front counter.

When he returned to the front of his shop, he had a shoulder all wrapped up. “Don’t got no leg right now. Might try back on Tuesday.”

“A shoulder’s fine,” Angie said, opening her purse to root around for her cash. “Just fine.”

“How’re dem boys a yours?” Butch made small talk as he rung up the order on the register.

“Van is thinking of UConn next year” she said, fully believing the lie. “Stony’s okay. He gets in some trouble sometimes.”

“You can’t be a boy wit’ out gettin’ in trouble, Miz Crawford, ‘specially when dey’re young like dat. Dey’re like spring lambs, all hoppin’ around,” Butch nodded, passing the package across the curved counter to her. “You send him ‘round ‘ere if he needs some toughenin’ up. Next!”

The Doane sisters, Alice and Mary, were out in their garden digging up bulbs and gathering up the broken clamshells that the seagulls dropped onto the paved walkway. Their backyard ended abruptly at the seawall, and the inlet, still calm and glassy, was packed with cormorants and seagulls floating lazily on its surface. Alice Doane had a little used-bookshop at the front of their shared dwelling, but it was always closed after Labor Day—still, the occasional book fancier bothered them into opening it up for a few minutes.

Down the other end of the shops, was the Ye Olde Shoppe, which was mainly for the summer tourists, but stayed open through December, because it sold Christmas decorations and spices and old-fashioned candles. Lorraine Puglia ran it with her son, Guiliano, but most days she ran it by herself while Guiliano sat in a corner of the shop, brooding. One display case, over next to the potpourri bags, all neatly tied up with ribbons, held thirty-six beautiful one-of-a-kind candles. The Kind, the small card beneath them announced, That the Early Colonists of the Area Made and Which Cannot Be Found Anywhere North of Williamsburg, Virginia or South of Stonehaven.

This was an out-and-out lie on more than one count, but Lorraine was in it to sell to the last of the tourists, stragglers who go lost off old Route One and came across the village accidentally, charmed by its old houses and shops.

The candles were long like thin fingers, and the dappled wax over-dripped layer upon layer across itself as it formed around the wick.

Nora Chance made these candles, out at her little house in the woods. She’d been taught by her mother, who’d been taught by her grandmother, and so forth, back into unrecorded history.

It was Lorraine who, that day, wanted some more of these, since her supply was running low, and she was worried that Nora might start to get better offers on the candles from one of the shops in nearby Mystic, and since Lorraine could sell them for ten dollars each when they costs her twenty-five cents a candle, this was not a profit she wished to lose.

As soon as she knew the school buses had gotten back into town, she picked up her phone and called up the Crawford house, hoping to find Stony at home.

3

Which he was, having just run inside, thrown his books down, and heard the phone ringing. Stony raced to get it, and said, “Yallo.”

“Stony? It’s me,” and Lorraine’s voice was so distinct, like a sharp clatter of silverware, that Stony didn’t need to ask. “I need you to ride over to Nora’s and see if she can get me twenty more candles by Monday. Also, tell her the Christmas shawls are not in yet, and they need to come in by November. Tell her I’ll raise the rate. Okay?”

“Sure,” Stony said.

“Good,” Lorraine said, “and when you’re back I’ll give you a tip. All right?”

“Yeah,” Stony said, dropping the phone back in its cradle. He always needed the money, from lawn mowing, raking leaves, running errands for the shopkeepers, and sometimes even cleaning the sailboats for the rich summer folk when he could get the work.

He glanced at his watch. Nearly four thirty. Nora would be having her afternoon tea.

4

These were the typical pursuits of a typical October day, but as with all life, and all towns, it was not all surfaces.

Calvin Stowe, who ran a tourist boat in the summer, spent most of his afternoon down at the Fisherman’s Catch, down on Juniper Point, drinking himself under the table before getting into his Toyota and checking out to see if any schoolchildren were available to come over to his house to watch his special movies. Sophia Randall, a descendant of Jeptha Randall, who was one of four early Stonehaven families, waited desperately on the front porch of her Captain’s Walk home, a home built first in the early 1700s, then rebuilt after the town was burned in the War of 1812, and further rebuilt in 1901 after the Great Hurricane came through—a house and a two-acre lot with history...here she waited, wringing her small perfectly formed hands, her face glowing with fever, her normal beauty reduced to a labored moment of intense anguish. Then, a Harley-Davidson roared around the Common, and its rider parked it by the house. Rather than run out to greet him, Sophia retired within her home. The young man with the golden goatee jogged up the walk, leaping onto the porch, and only stopped once when he dropped what appeared to be a syringe and a small packet of white powder.

Down at the loading dock, where the lobsters were dumped unceremoniously from the overflowing cornucopias of the trawlers, four men, all under thirty, decided the fate of the summer girl who had stayed past the season—the girl at the Crown place, out by Land’s End, the girl they’d watched from their trawlers, the girl who’d stood naked at her back window at five in the morning, watching the sea, as if she were just there for them to take.

Lyndi Potter, who lived on Cold Spring Road, almost out of the borough, in the small clapboard house at the north edge of the cove, had already begun kicking at her five-year-old son, Rupert, when he didn’t clean up the dog piss in the front hallway. She raised her foot and aimed for his gut, and her son, who was wise in ways that most five-year-olds are not, remained silent and felt no pain.

Out on the lobster trawler marked Angela’s Bounty, Gerald Crawford, Stony’s dad, nursed the last of his whiskey, and wished to hell he had never gotten trapped in the life he had, with kids and a wife and all the weight of the world on his bulky shoulders. All the weight of this damned gone-to-hell world.

5

Stony Crawford rode his black Schwinn bike past all this, ignorant of what lay beneath the anthill of town, and then veered off Cold Spring Road, onto the dirt path that led into the scraggly woods.

The smell of a dead animal was nearby, a physical heat, as if the death of the creature created a larger life in odor. The woods stank also of the damp of the bog and marsh. He rode beside the ancient and crumbling stonewall that marked off the cemetery, and finally took the left fork of the path. As the withering grass grew higher here, and the leaves piled as if building new earth, he dropped his bike, walking the rest of the way.

Going to Nora’s always made him feel like a kid again, no longer saddled with adolescence, but a more innocent and wonder-laden time. He felt the tug of adulthood at him most days, but he still enjoyed heading out into the musky woods to find her at her loom, or out washing her mountain of laundry.

The tarpaper was falling in several places from Nora’s roof, and two-dozen candles dangled from the roof’s edge, setting. Her great black pot boiled over with soap and laundry, and there she stood, stirring the pot with a great thick staff. The smell of the soap could burn, but the breeze was going the other way, towards the bog.

“Nora!” he called, waving his hand.

Nora Chance turned slightly at the sound, nodding. When he reached her side, she said, “I knew you’d be coming along sometime soon. Your voice—I can’t get over it. Last year you were still my little boy, and now you sound like a man of the world.”

6

They sat in the front room, Stony on the floor with his legs crossed, his back to the warm potbelly stove, Nora in her rocking chair. In her lap, the freshly made candles. She rolled each candle into several squares of tissue paper while she spoke. “I got a October story for you, Stony. You know the story ‘bout the resurrection?”

“You mean Jesus?” Stony asked almost sullenly.

“No, not that one. I mean the resurrection right here in Stonehaven cemetery. Happened in 1746. My great-grandmother told me this story on her deathbed. She had heard it from her grandmother, who worked the Randall and Crowninshield places back then, and she was just a little girl when it happened.” Nora nodded to herself as if she were just being told the story for the first time. “Yes, that’s right. Something happened back then. Nobody liked to talk about it since, although you can bet some people in town like the Doanes and the Mainwarings and the Randalls and even the Slatterys know the story ‘cause no one forgets this story once it’s in their blood. It’s always in October, like now. You ever hear of the Reaper?”

“Sure. The Grim Reaper.”

“No, boy, I mean the Reaper who used to live out at Juniper Point. He owned most of the land out there, and he was called the Reaper because he looked like Mr. Death most of the time. Pasty white face, gaunt like a skeleton dug a hundred years after he was buried. He married a gal from up in Marblehead, brought her here back before the Revolution. She was a sickly thing, and they thought when she was gonna have her baby that she was gonna die. They spent three nights tending her while she gave birth, but that little baby near ripped that frail gal up and down like a bayonet, and they had to use knives—it was something awful. I heard that the folk in attendance fainted at the sight of what they did to that little gal just to get the baby out. Story was that a farm hand couldn’t take her screams no more, and came up to the bedroom like he was possessed and raised his scythe over her belly, just ripping her open and pulling that baby out. The baby was all twisted up and upside down, his head turned, his legs misshapen. His gal survived that night, stayed in bed from then after. And the baby—it was a little imp of a thing, and from its first day would only drink one thing from its mother’s breast, and it wasn’t milk, oh no. The stories are terrible, Stony. Terrible. You want to hear more?”

Stony nodded. “Yeah.”

“Good. Go make us both cups of Cat’s Claw tea, and I’ll tell you the rest when it’s steeping.”

Stony rose, and went to put on the tea. “How can someone live who’s been scythed open?”

“It happens, boy,” Nora said, stretching her fingers in the air above her head. “I get so tired sometimes, working all day. Know how old I am?”

“Sixty?” he ventured.

Nora let out a big belly laugh. “No, not even close. Older than these woods sometimes. That’s what I feel like. You getting the jar of tea?”

Stony glanced up at the crude wooden shelf, packed with jars full of jams and herbs and roots. He grabbed the Cat’s Claw jar, and dumped some of it in the clay pot that Nora used for tea.

“How’s that gal of yours, anyway?” Nora asked.

“She’s okay.”

“That’s it? Okay?”

“Yep.”

“You still like her?”

“Sure.”

“You know about nature—and how to avoid it?” Nora asked.

“You mean like birth control?”

“I never said that,” Nora said, shaking her head. “I mean nature. It always gets you into trouble.”

“Sure,” he said. When the tea was steeping, he brought her cup over to her. “Tell me about the baby.”

“Oh, the Reaper’s baby? It was something fierce,” she said, her voice sinking into her familiar storytelling cadence. “That baby wasn’t satisfied with his mother’s milk, it had to suck her teat till blood ran out of it. It was an abomination more than it was a baby. The Reaperman accused her of sleeping with the Devil or some such nonsense, and took her to the tribunal over in Copper Ferry, which back then was called Copperfield. There she was, this gal who was always fainting and sick and practically no blood in her, and there was that Reaper, holding up his baby Reaper with its snarls and sharp little paws and the way it was suckled with blood. They dragged that gal off and hanged her up on Gallows Hill near Hartford, and the old Reaper went back to his house here in town and shot himself through the head with a little flintlock pistol. He didn’t die, but lived for a few more years. They said that he had wanted to kill the baby too, but something human in him hadn’t. They raised the baby out in these here backwoods, and nobody ever saw that baby again as far as townsfolk knew. And then, one October...Years later, when the Old Reaper was living up at the house on High Street, with his brother, a man came into Stonehaven. Well, it wasn’t really a man. It was a thing—not much taller than a six-year-old boy, and all hunched over, and it stank like the bog, and it half crawled and half walked. It came up to that old mansion, and there was Old Reaper, Old Mr. Crowninshield, sitting in a chair, half his own body frozen, his mind barely there. And he knew. He knew it was his son, come back for him. Come back to punish him for what he did to the boy’s mother. Come back for revenge. Reaper tried to cry out to his nurse, who was in the kitchen preparing a sandwich for him. This was in broad daylight, in the afternoon. People saw him, the young man. They say he had little horns on his head, but you can’t believe everything you hear. No, he may have been deformed, but he was a man. And he went up to his father. His father, shivering like he was seeing a ghost. And that young man, all hunched over,” Nora said, her eyes widening despite their milky whiteness, “that son of his threw his arms over his father’s shoulders and began weeping.

“And his father, that awful Reaperman, grabbed the scythe, the very one he always kept by his side, the very one a farmhand had used to open up this boy’s mother—and that awful man brought it against his boy’s neck and slit his throat while the young man wept for finding his father.” Nora paused. She sighed, shaking her head. “Tea’s good, Stony.”

“Jesus, did that really happen?”

“As God is my witness,” Nora said. “The boy gave one cry to heaven and then died in his father’s arms. That evil, evil man. They buried that poor boy just outside the cemetery, which is always a mistake.”

“Why’s that?”

“You don’t know?” Nora clicked her tongue. “This is all Pequot land, boy. You white folks jump off your ships a few hundred years ago, and you think you understand the land? This ain’t ordinary land. This is sacred.”

“You mean like an Indian burial mound?”

Nora cackled. “No, nothing as stupid as that. Our burial mounds are sacred, and maybe a curse or two’ll come out of them. Why do you think we let you people settle this land? Because of your guns? Because we were nice? No, boy, this land around Stonehaven wasn’t just sacred to us, Stony, it was magic. It was absolute magic. You can plant anything, and it will grow. Ever notice that? You plant corn here and it shoots up high. Now, we gave you white folks the cemetery for your dead and the land to the water for your borough, but we told you not to plant in this one area. We all know about it, we know where to plant and where not to. But you, you and your families all forgot that. That Mr. Crowninshield, he should’ve known. Hell, the entire borough back then should’ve known, but even then it was thirty years after Stonehaven got settled. But you don’t bury your dead where things grow. We never have.”

“You mean like the deformed guy was buried in this magic place and he rose up alive again?” Stony asked, half in wonder and half in wondering if she really expected him to fall for this bullshit.

“Nothing as asinine as that,” Nora said. She rose up from the rocking chair, the tissue-packed candles in her hands. Her full height was nearly six feet, and she towered almost to the low roof. “Don’t you know about what people brought to these shores?”

Stony shook his head, half smiling, hoping she’d laugh or grin or do something to show she wasn’t getting angry. “No, ma’am. What’d we bring?”

“The Devil,” she said. “And he took root here. He grew here just like the crops did.  Never been the same since.”

Chapter Twelve

NORA’S STORY

1

This didn’t end with the Imp’s burial—for that’s what they called the young man that the slaves and hands had raised up. Imp. There was a woman in town named Mrs. Randall—she was a coarse-minded woman, who liked to create difficulties and intrigues. She made sure that Imp was buried in the bog, just thrown in, without ceremony. I heard she stood there, her cape across her shoulders, her old biddy white cap covering her hair. They said she didn’t even let them weigh his body down with stones, but just let it sink and then rise, and float again. Eventually, it caught under the low-hanging branches of a birch, covered with leeches sucking the last of his blood out of poor little Imp.

And then, it sank again into the muddy water and lay in the silt.

People in town didn’t much want to talk about Imp, or of what had happened. You know how people are—once a judgment is made, and a sentence carried out, we tend to find ways of agreeing with it, and we build up superstitious ideas around it. The summer went by, a swift and bountiful season. By the time the harvest moon came up, from sharp crescent to full, the maize and barley crops were doing good, and the sea’s harvest was plentiful, as well. Back in those days, Stonehaven still had the Harvest Festival on the Common, with music and even a little dancing—’course nothing like the party the hands and the slaves and the servants had. Our people were back in the woods here, dancing in the moonlight.

And something else came out that night to dance.

Something rose up from the bog, clothed in the slime and covered head to toe with leeches. In his hand, the rusty scythe that his father had used to kill him with. His face was no longer his own—it was a mask, bloated and pulled by water and leeches and insect larvae—it was a face without eyes in its sockets, and when he opened his mouth, water and leaves poured forth. Yellow jackets burst from the festering sore beneath his chin. He was no longer just Imp, the son of that Old Reaper bastard.

He was the force of nature we knew about—we who knew about the magic land. But not just that force, but another, for he was borne from the seed that the white man had brought to our land: the Devil was in him, the Devil as only my people could understand the Devil: an ancient god that you white people hold close to your bosom, not the opposite of your Heavenly Father, but a long-ago banished god, a god of the Harvest of Humans.

There is a name for this god, but it is long forgotten.

He is called by many names, Stony, but he is known by his actions.

On All Hallow’s Eve, four hundred years ago, he first came from this bog.

He was the god resurrected by the magic of the land. God always has got to die and get reborn before he has his true powers. Everybody knows that.

He was the god of vengeance and the devourer of light.

And he is still here in the land, in the water, outside the churchyards and beyond the reason of man.

Waiting for his chance.

After midnight, he came, crawling across the land with the scythe in his mouth.

He is the father of scarecrows, come to reap the harvest of flesh!

2

Stony laughed when she screamed this last part.

“What, you don’t believe me?” Her voice was slightly teasing. Her eyes were, as always, milky white. Sometimes he dreamed that they were the warm cinnamon she had always said they’d once been. She grinned. “It’s absolutely true. My great-great-great heard it from her great-great-great and so on and so forth.”

“The father of scarecrows? That sounds goofy.”

“You know what scarecrows are don’t you?”

“Sure. Dummies on sticks to scare off birds.”

Nora threw her head back, laughing. “You ever see a crow scared off by a dummy on a stick?”

Stony thought a moment. “Not really.”

“That’s right. Scarecrows go way back. An old word, some folks say, goes way back: sacré croix or maybe croix sacrée, something like that. I get it confused sometimes. Means sacred cross, from what I can tell. They were statues of Jesus up in the middle of the fields. They protected the crops, at least once upon a time. But the scarecrow’s no Jesus. The scarecrow’s older. He’s thousands of years old. He’s the King that’s been killed and his blood makes things grow. He’s the Magic One. He’s the Harvest Lord. The Halloween Man. You got to understand that everything we know now is as under a layer of dust, centuries of hiding from us. But one day, each one of us sees clearly. I once saw…”

“You saw?” Stony said, and then regretted it.

“Ha! Yep, I used to see. I once saw a scarecrow out at the bog, let loose from its cross, looking for its mate.”

Playing along, Stony asked, “So who’s his mate?”

“The Corn Maiden,” Nora said, nodding her head as if this were perfectly logical. “You can’t have a King of anything without a bride for him. That’s why I have that.”

She took up one of the candles, pointing it towards the doorway.

Stony glanced over at the little cornhusk doll on the threshold.

“It keeps him away from my place when he comes searching. He won’t cross over a house where the corn doll is.”

“You’re making this up,” Stony said.

“Maybe I am,” Nora chuckled, but something in her tone did not feel humorous to him. “And maybe there’s just a bite of truth in it. But when the scarecrow sees the corn doll, he respects her. He must die to be reborn, but she lives and is reborn through her children. She is the giver and taker of life. This is why male and female are separate: strength and recklessness together is a world-beater. But they’re like magnets—they both attract and repel each other. So he won’t ever cross my threshold.”

“Wait. You said that this Halloween Man was the harvester of flesh. So, did he kill the Reaperman?”

“Oh,” Nora’s voice dropped to a reverential whisper. “Something much worse than that.”

3

the rest of the story

So after midnight, he comes crawling across the land, the scythe in his mouth. Remember, this was both Imp and the Halloween Man in one body—the Halloween Man used his body to rise from the earth and water. Imp shoulda never been buried in that old bog, outside the cemetery, with no blessing of any kind on his head. So in the night, that most dreadful night of the year, he comes and into the twenty families he crawls up the stairs on all fours, leaving a trail of damp and leaves and leeches. What he did in the night was laid out for all to be seen on the Common in the morning. As the sun rose, people came from their houses, victims of terrible nightmares. And since back then, all the houses of the borough were around the Common, even those who did not leave their houses could see the terrible handiwork of the Halloween Man:

Strung like pigs, by their legs, twelve of the men and women from town, the most devout, those who in church cried out in tongues to God, those who kissed the foot of the cross daily, those who were most godly and worshipful, their throats slit, their blood dripping down, strung from the two great oak trees, the ground soaked with their blood. And between the trees, a great cross had been erected, and on it, nailed with spikes, Old Reaperman Crowninshield—his eyes and mouth sewn horrible shut, and his nightshirt torn open.

On his chest, carved the words:

I came to save you.

In his one hand, his left hand, tied as if a hook, the scythe that had butchered the villagers. This hand was not nailed to the crossbeam.

Of course, the white people thought it was Reaperman who had done the killing. They always thought he was crazy, even though he was rich and mighty in the village.

But we knew. We who had been here since Man had first been on this land. We who had avoided planting on the Magic land, and instead planted near it, but away from it. We who buried our dead not in bogs but in sacred, protected earth—we knew it was the Old One, risen again for his night in the flesh of Imp.

It was a wicked time.

It was a great stain of death on Stonehaven, that night and morning.

And it took one of my own people to go find the body of Imp the next morning and do the work that would seal the Old One into that flesh until it returned to the damp earth and slept again.

Not in the history books, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen just like I said it did. Or maybe, Stony, it hasn’t happened yet, but will one day. That’s how legends go.

4

“Even if you made it up, it’s a great story,’ Stony said, wiping his dusty hands off on his jeans.

“I don’t have to make these things up,” Nora said, her voice tinged with a serious tone that made Stony look at her strangely.

“But I don’t believe in a Halloween Man or in the devil,” Stony stated, slightly embarrassed.

“You believe in God?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I guess so.”

“God’s no guess. Either He is or He ain’t.”

“Well, I don’t know yet,” Stony said.

Nora grinned. “Good enough.”

“Do you believe in the Devil?” he asked, trying to tease her. “The horny-tailed red Devil with the pitchfork in his hand?”

Nora stood slowly and went over to her front door, opening it. The last of the sunlight was merely a whisper through the tree branches along the bog beyond her property. “The Devil won’t be just one thing, Stony. He’s an army. ‘I am Legion,’ he says. He can be a woman, too. He can even be a summer’s day. But the one thing you can be sure of about the Devil. He’s the reflection of what we want.”

“I’m not sure I get that,” Stony said. He walked out to stand beside her on the porch. A flock of dark birds flew across the sky, blocking all light for a few seconds.

“You ever want something so bad you forgot everything else?”

Stony nodded. “Do you?”

“Ah,” she sighed, and her sigh was like an ache on the breeze. “To have my sight back. To see you, the young man you are, the boy you were, the man you’ll become. That I would want badly enough to kiss the Devil himself.” Then, she shivered slightly. “Next time you want something that badly, look in the mirror and see who’s gonna be waiting there for you. Could be the Devil, could maybe be the Halloween Man. Halloween’s comin’ up, maybe someone here’s gonna take off his mask and show himself again, who knows?”

Nora grinned, her eyes seeming to sparkle even with their emptiness. She held her hand out for him.

Her hand was warm and strong. Her voice softened. “Tell me about your girl. Why didn’t you bring her? You never bring her to see me anymore.”

“We’ve had some problems,” Stony said.

“Stony,” Nora said, pulling her hand from him. “You’re hurting me a little with all that squeezing.”

“Sorry. I didn’t know I was doing it.” He wanted to not talk about Lourdes. He wanted to not think about what he’d narrowly escaped. About what he had wanted more than anything else. “People think I’m nuts to like you so much, you know that?”

“Oh yeah,” Nora said, her husky voice breaking like a wave on a rock as she laughed. “The weird old blind lady in the woods who won’t get a phone or electricity. I bet they think you’re nuts. I bet they’re gonna start calling you by your Indian name, Crazy-Moon.”

“Maybe I am,” Stony said. “Yeah, I am Crazy Moon.”

He stood there with her for several minutes until she told him it was time for her to go to bed.

5

“Do you like to hunt?” Diana asked, riding beside Van on her steed, while he rode the mare. Van was having a hard enough time staying on the horse. He wasn’t much of a rider, but he was not about to show her any weakness. Not her. She wore a tan riding outfit, her dark boots as shiny as a storm trooper’s. Over her shoulder, a quiver full of arrows, and a small bow.

Are we gonna play Cowboys and Injuns? He wondered. I’ll be the big bad cowboy coming upon the helpless squaw. She will beg for mercy, and I will give it to her. Give it to her. Over and over. Give give give...

“Yeah!” he shouted. “I love to hunt. Bagged lots of deer over at Blue Point last year.”

“What else?” she shouted.

“What do you mean?”

“What other kinds of prey?” Diana slowed her horse to a trot, and then finally a walk. She kept perfect form upon the saddle.

Rich bitch probably’s been riding since she was three. Van watched how her hips undulated as her thighs pressed into the saddle. Mmmmm.

“Well, shit, I’ve fished. I’ve shot some rabbits,” Van said, but kept watching those thighs. Pressing down and in. Clinging to the horse’s side.

“Little bunnies, how adorable,” she said, her words dripping with sarcasm. “Brave of you. I come from a long line of hunters.”

“Girls don’t hunt,” he said.

“Of course not,” she laughed, riding ahead of him. “Come on, Crawfish!”

She was a bitch, but he had to follow. They had been fucking so much, he felt drained of any will to resist her. He wanted to be with her, inside her, around her. He hated most of the local girls, but Diana Crown was different. He wanted her to want him. Badly.

He pressed his heels into his horse’s flanks, and the animal took off after its companion.

When they came to the edge of the cove, she held her hand out to indicate that he should stop. “Stay in the shadows,” she whispered, as his horse approached hers.

The cove was full of swans. It looked to Van like a mirror with a bunch of zit pops on it, or the little flecks that hit the bathroom mirror when he flossed once a month. It looked like his mother’s round mirror in fact, the one she kept in the bathroom, the one that made your face large and when Van looked in it, he could see all the pores and zits and invisible whiskers and ugliness on his face.

“They’re like angels,” Diana said. “Angels on the water.”

She reached back and drew the bow from her back. It was crudely made, and fairly small. She took an arrow and set it, tightening the bow, her shoulders drawing back.

“Watch this,” she said, letting an arrow fly.

Van thought she was magnificent.

Birds flew up, their white wings spreading as if one great white bird were bursting upwards to heaven.

As Van watched the arrow go, he saw the girl out on the dock.

It was that bitch that was going to ruin Stony’s life. That fuckin cunt girl from out of the borough who had got herself knocked up. Probably not even by his brother, but by some immigrant boyfriend of hers.

He wished he could shoot an arrow at her.

He closed his eyes. He wished Diana would miss the bird.

Hell, he prayed she would miss the goddamned bird and hit that bitch in the heart.

“Let’s get out of here,” Diana said when she was done. Her breathing accelerated, and her face displayed the ruddy glow that Van had seen after he’d done her good and hard. “I got one. Let’s ride back, I want you now.” Quickly, she turned her horse around, and they raced back through the woods, Van clinging to his saddle horn, having lost the reins. He kept his head low and felt that at any second he’d be thrown to the ground.

Somehow, he made it back to the Crown place.

Somehow, he ripped her riding pants open and pressed his face into that salt-sea moist garden that grew wild at the center of her womb.

Chapter Thirteen

THE SWAN

1

Lourdes stood at the edge of the dock, watching the cove as if half expecting some secret of life to be revealed to her.

Stony crossed the bridge, and waved, trying to get her attention. They often met here, for his family didn’t like her calling, and hers often left the phone off. He couldn’t wait to hold her. It had been too long.

He knew that despite the fact that they’d had a scare about the baby, they were lucky.

Damn lucky.

Look at her, he thought, shielding his eyes from the last of the sun. The sky sprayed pink and yellow light across the distant clouds. The trees along the opposite side of the cover seemed deep blue. Seven swans glided across the slightly choppy water, colored a blue-green like marble rippling. Lourdes wore her blue jeans and an orange sweatshirt, but might as well have been wearing the most beautiful gown—or nothing at all as far as Stony was concerned. He stepped off the bridge, onto the flattened yellow grass. Moving through the drying thickets that had, in the summer, been blackberry tangles, now just dry twigs. In his hand, a small flower he’d plucked from a garden on his way to see her. The closer he got to the small dock, the more he sensed something not quite right. Something about the way she stood, like a statue at the edge of the water, made him think he shouldn’t give it to her. He pressed it into his pocket, crushing it.

When he called to her, she turned and he saw, even at some distance the tears on her face. Later, he couldn’t remember how he’d moved from one end of the dock to the other, but suddenly—it seemed—he was there, his arm around her shoulder, as if time had skipped.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked. He felt a shuddering from her. “What’s wrong?”

She turned her face into his neck. Her hair smelled always of spice and lavender—he would know her from her smell. Sometimes she smelled of cigarettes, too. He didn’t like this odor, except from her, on her lips. “What is it?”

She whispered something so faintly he barely heard. Had she said, “I’m dead?” What flashed through his mind was the baby they’d thought had been within her. “It’s dead?” That was what she’d said. He kissed the top of her head.

She pointed to the water that lapped at the pylons. Something small and white floated there—like an old towel, thrown to the sea by some bather.

Then he saw it more clearly. It was a swan. Not as large as the others that glided along the water near them, it was dead. An arrow through its back.

“It’s dead,” she repeated. Her tears became a current from her eyes to his throat as she pressed against him. “I was feeding it.” She unclenched her fists and balled-up Wonder Bread dropped onto the docks. “Someone shot it.” She pointed across the water to the thick woods. “Over there.”

Her voice trembled, but what trembled within Stony was not the dead swan but his love for Lourdes. “It’s all right,” he said. “Probably some asshole over at the Parkinson place. Someone should shoot an arrow at one of those jerks.” It was all he could think to say. When he looked at the swan, its blood black in the water, its feathers so brilliant white and somehow untouched by blood...All he could see was that something that had seemed so pure—something so innocent and wild—that had been cupped in his hands—in his and Lourdes’ hands—now lay dead with an arrow through its heart.

The sun began to diminish against the sweeping clouds. Like dust whisked across a room—the light scattered. It was as if the world had turned over, a restless sleeper, and woke momentarily as Stony woke at that moments—a millisecond of time—a photograph of her face. Lourdes. He knew. She didn’t have to say it. It was like a sudden flash of telepathy between them, or perhaps merely intuition.

You knew all along. You knew even when she lied to you.

Lourdes was still pregnant. He was sure.

“Why did you lie?” he asked, holding her closer. Now her tears blotted at his cotton shirt, mingling with his sweat. The river was between them—she cried, he sweated—and the reservoir held the truth. “Why?”

She didn’t speak. She wasn’t like him in that way. She couldn’t go on and on with words and phrases and well-articulated thoughts. All she had was a telepathy in her silence. All that needed to be said was in the warmth and tears.

Finally, “Because I was thinking of getting rid of it.”

Silence.

The wind was icy and bitter, as it came down suddenly, and then the air calmed.

“But I can’t do that. I just can’t.”

Silence.

“Christ,” he said. “What are we gonna do?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.” The crying stopped. He felt their two hearts pounding together—and then he remembered the third one—the baby. Would the heart be pounding there, somewhere between them? It had been four months. The baby was four months old now.

“Other people do this. All the time,” he said. He reached up to stroke her thick dark hair.

“Yeah. I guess they do.”

Then she said, “I don’t want us to get married or anything.”

“Why not?”

“That would be dumb. We’d be divorced in less than a year.”

“Maybe,” he shrugged. “Maybe not. People get married all the time. If it lasts, it lasts. You can’t predict anything with much accuracy.” He felt something overcome him; a feeling of how good life was despite the terrible parts. Despite the fact that at fifteen, he knew his life would change whether he wanted it to or not.

A curious calm came over him. He wanted her. He wanted their child.

He wanted what life was throwing at him.

He loved her smell, her warmth, and as he held her close, he thought: I could wake up to her next to me, her face, her smell, her warmth, every single day of my life. I could do this. I really could.

“Shit, you can’t even predict the weather,” Stony laughed, feeling the rain come down fast and furious. “See? God is pissing on us!” The heavens opened up with rain, suddenly, a crackle of thunder, and a flash of light...pure rain began pouring down on them as they stood on the docks. He lifted his face up to the rain, laughing at its chill, opening his mouth to take in the drops.

“Why are you laughing?” she shouted, but began laughing, too.

Feeling completely insane, he began dancing around her, nothing brilliant, no steps, no special moves, just dancing the way he felt children must dance when they’re happy. He was laughing, and she began dancing, too. The joy was absurd. He had got her pregnant, she was going to have a baby, they were far too young—it would never work. He’d probably work the lobster boats now, no college in his future, maybe no high school graduation. They’d live in some tiny one-room apartment and she’d get fat from boredom and he’d get sullen from resentment, and they’d raise a goofy child. We can get around that. I know we can, something within him whispered. Nora had always said, everything can work out fine if you just plant your feet on the ground and look straight ahead. Nothing is a tragedy unless you buy it a suit of clothes and give it a free meal. Something within him told him it would be okay, and better than okay, it would somehow make itself work. It would fall into line. There was a dead swan in the water, but other swans, together two by two, far off in the cove, ignored the dead and moved in tandem across the disturbed surface.

“Why are we so happy?” Lourdes shouted, clapping her hands together. Her dark hair was flying side to side, her hips moved in circles to an invisible hula-hoop, her grin was enormous, infectious. The world could go to hell! Stony thought. It can go to hell and we can be here dancing on this dock.

“Because I love you!” Stony cried out, throwing his arms up in the air, the rain pelting them.

“You look stupid!” Lourdes yelled. Her voice echoed round. She was laughing too, drawing her hands up to her mouth as if to stop the laughter. “You look like a fool!”

“I love looking stupid! Let me be as dumb as they come! I dare the universe to strike me with lightning! Come on, lightning! Hit me now!” He almost jumped into the water, but when he got to the edge of the dock he thought better of it. He raised his hands up, looking at the sky as the pale blue clouds darkened above him. He wanted to reach up and feel lightning in his hands. He felt it all surge through him—the power of the world, the power of his youth, the power of love. It was insane what he was feeling, but he looked at the sky as if it held all the mysteries of the cosmos. “I know the secret of the universe now! I know it! Life can do its worst and it won’t touch us!” He began to jump up and down, rocking the dock. The dinghies tied to it bobbed up and down. Small fish came to the surface of the water, attacking the raindrops.

The raindrops felt fresh on his face. He closed his eyes, face up to the sky, and opened his mouth slightly to taste the freshness of the world. He imagined touching the clouds, his hands clutching at their vanishing...and beyond them, the moisture of heaven. I am a rainmaker! He cried out within himself. I am the Storm King! Come on, rain, hit me with all you got! Throw the bolts down on me and the buckets of tears and the drums of thunder! I am the Storm King, and I’m gonna bring the heavens down on us, down on Lourdes and me and we’re gonna have heaven on earth right here and right now! I am in love and we are gonna have a child and it will be the most wondrous child this stinkin’ piece of hellhole earth has ever known!

2

Sweat all over Van’s face, from riding the horse, from excitement, from a fever that grew within him at the thought of her touch.

“What is it you want from me?”

Diana wiped her hands across her skirt. She looked Van Crawford directly in the eye. “What everyone wants.”

“People want different things,” Van said.

Diana glanced out the window, into the darkness. “All I can get. It’s all I ever wanted.”

Then, she smiled. “Want to see something?”

“Depends,” Van said. “What is it?”

“Our own private chapel.”

“Shit, I don’t want to see a church. ‘Specially after what we just did.”

“It isn’t a chapel like you think.”

“No crosses?”

“No Jesus, don’t worry,” she said. “Come on.”

He followed her as she took him through the pool room, with its wide Olympic-sized swimming pool, the billowing cover stretched across it. Past her father’s orchid greenhouse, and the small gymnasium full of weights and bicycles. One wall of the house was made almost entirely of glass. The glass was warped in some way so that when Van looked out across the dark water, it seemed to have flecks of yellow and green light dancing on its surface.

“Come on,” Diana said. “My, you’re slow.”

“I’m coming,” he said, slightly testily. He didn’t like some girl telling him things, nagging him. His father got that, too. He did not intend to end up in that kind of life. Diana was a rich girl with a hot body, but that was it. He was sure that as soon as he could, he would move on to some other local girl.

Finally, they came to a small door. It was curved in an arch, and looked positively medieval to Van. “What the hell kind of chapel is it?”

Diana turned, her mood solemn. “No teasing. What are you, Catholic? Baptist?”

“None of the above. A goddamned atheist,” Van chuckled. He stepped forward, slipping his arm around her waist. He tugged her against him.

She pulled away. “You’re something. Everyone is something. You a good Christian boy, Van?”

“I don’t believe in nothing,” he said. “How many times do I have to tell you? All right,” he finally relented. “I believe in this.” He pressed his hand down to the cleft between her legs, feeling that part of her that he most desired. She let out a small gasp. “And this,” he said, reaching up to press his fingers around her left breast. Then he covered her hand in his, and brought it down to the bulge in his jeans. “But mostly I believe in this.”

He felt colder than he’d ever felt in his life, yet there was some spark he wanted to ignite. Something had been missing in his life up to this point. This shit-heel town, this dead existence, the way he knew where he’d be if he just went along with things. He would be in a goddamned lobster boat looking at his old friends getting older, smelling the fucking lobster and crab on his skin till it got into his blood...

Warmth emanated from her hand beneath his, and he felt all of a fever there.

“I am your religion,” Diana said, her voice turning throaty the way it had when they’d fucked before. “I am your church.”

Her mouth pressed against his lips, swallowing his mouth up in shimmering moisture, her greedy tongue thrusting across his teeth as if trying to find the heat and excitement within his body. Just as quickly, she drew back from him. She reached her hand up and wiped her wet lips. “Inside,” she whispered.

She turned her back on him again, but his body would not let her go. He wrapped himself around her back as they stood there, his lips finding her delicate smooth neck. She shrugged him off. “Inside,” she repeated. She turned the key in the door, and opened it. The door swung outward. A musty scent assaulted him. A rush of warm air from inside the dark chapel. “Follow me,” Diana said. She stepped into the darkness. It was too dark to see. Too dark, but still he followed her.

He stepped over the threshold.

Diana was already lighting a third candle by the time he walked down the center aisle between the pews. “Holy shit,” Van said. “Oh my god.”

Diana kept her eyes on the altar.

“It was a gift to my great-grandfather at the end of the First World War. A token of appreciation.”

“Jesus,” Van said, feeling the piss run down the inside leg of his pants. “Goddamn.”

He closed his eyes. His mind was blank; he could not escape the darkness that surrounded him. He began shivering all over as if he’d been sprayed with ice water. But within that growing pain, something else pushed at the back of his head as if there were something in him, some darkness, waiting to find its moment of freedom.

“Once a person looks upon it, he will never be the same,” Diana’s voice faded even as she spoke, and then it grew and he wondered how the hell she managed to be talking inside his head.

Then he remembered how much he wanted this, wanted this kind of experience. To break free from this village and its small minds and the horrible existence that doomed him to a prison of family and dead ends. The darkness within him seeped across his mind.

Opening his eyes again, he felt fear like a thousand lasers graze his skin.

Chapter Fourteen

OUR LADY, STAR OF THE SEA

1

It was as if something busted inside Stony Crawford. He squeezed Lourdes’ hand, and pulled her along.

They ran laughing across the bridge, towards the Borough. Rain pelted them like endless tears, and they were soaked to the skin by the time they made the Common. “The library!” she shouted, but when they got there, it was closed (BACK IN TEN, the sign read). “No, there!” he cried, pointing to the church next to the post office. It was Our Lady Star of the Sea.

“Oh my god!” she said, as he grabbed her hand and pulled her. They almost slipped on the muddy grass. “I can’t! It’s sacred ground!” She laughed nearly as hard as he was doing, and her hand was warm within his grasp.

He drew her into the church, its inner whiteness like the bone of some desert animal. As soon as they got inside, they slowed, quieted by the statue of the Virgin Mary. It stood sentinel next to the font of holy water. They both stood there shivering before it, the chilly dampness soaking them through.

“Oh Mary,” Lourdes whispered, nodding her head slightly, crossing herself. “You who are the blessed mother of God, bless this child.” She pressed her hand to her stomach. Stony noticed for the first time that her stomach was getting a little bit of a paunch. The baby was forming. The baby was growing.

He went to her, pressing his hand over hers to feel it. “It’s a lump,” he said.

Lourdes put a hand over his. “Look at Maria,” she said.

Stony glanced up at the statue. It was pure white like ivory. The statue’s face was almost expressionless. Round white eyes, Romanesque nose, rose-petal lips. It bothered him, all these statues that Catholics had. It seemed idolatrous.

“I don’t worship statues,” he said.

“I don’t either, you Protestant-atheist,” Lourdes whispered. “It’s not a statue I’m looking at. It’s the idea of purity and holiness. It’s a human face for that idea. Do you believe in that?”

Stony shrugged.

“I need to know if you do,” Lourdes said, applying more pressure on his hand against her belly. “It’s important to me.”

Stony closed his eyes. The idea of God or Jesus or anything like that had always been abstract, like a cosmic tangle of nerve endings shooting out the birth of the universe and then pretty much staying in the background. He rarely attended church with his mother, and his father never went. But for Lourdes’ sake, for her sense of religion, he concentrated. In his mind, he saw a woman who might have been the Virgin Mary, but then all the color drained from her face until she was white as bone. “Do you really think she was a virgin?”

“I think she was pure,” Lourdes said. “To give birth to God, she had to be pure. Do you believe in purity?”

Finally, opening his eyes, he nodded. “Yeah, I do. You’re pure.” He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the lips. Drawing back from her, pulling his hand away, he glanced at the statue. It almost felt pagan, not that he considered that so awful. He pulled the crushed flower from his pocket. It was purple and red. He pressed it into the statue’s open hand. “Sanctify our love,” he said.

“Silly, she doesn’t need it.” Lourdes grabbed the flower and set it up behind her ear.

2

Van felt the power of the universe thrust through his skin, burning his blood, sending him wild-eyed into the rainy night.

“The horses!” Diana shouted. “We hunt!” Her hair twisted in the wind, practically a mane itself. Her clothes clung to her slender form, outlining the breasts he had so recently sucked at, the belly he’d nuzzled, the legs, so smooth and refined, he’d spread like she was the cheapest whore from New London...

“That’s fuckin’ crazy!” he laughed, but he raced her to the stables. “Fuckin’ nuts, it’s damn insane!” He shouted against the rain, feeling the spirit of her life overtake his, raise him up, make him feel as if there was a purpose to this damned existence.

He no longer felt like stupid Van Crawfish, the lout who could never understand why his mother disliked him so much, why his father disciplined him too harshly, why the whole damn town wasn’t on its knees to him—

He felt bigger than life itself, and here he was, with a goddess from the summer houses, a fucking beauty, and they were mounting horses in a rich man’s stable, they were riding out across the gravel road, through the mud of rain, beneath the sheltering trees, great canopies of orange and gold and yellow leaves above them, holding back all but a trickle of rain. The lightning brought instant daylight to the trail ahead.

Van felt like a goddamn god himself, he felt beautiful and strong and unstoppable. Within minutes, Diana had spotted their prey, a deer that bolted at the sound of the horses. But Diana had her bow out, and aimed an arrow—

She let it fly, and it was the most perfect arc—

Her fingers, the bow, the arrow as it moved, and the deer as it leapt up to dive into the brush, with the arrow that caught its left flank. And then another arrow, then another, and the horses seemed to know the trail of the woods, and followed the wounded doe.

Finally, feeling as if wings were on his ankles and a tidal wave of pure energy carried him, Van leapt down and grabbed the doe’s throat, exposing it in the lightning flash. His hair was wild and floated in static wind, his eyes redder than he could’ve known, his grip on the deer’s throat as the animal breathed its last—

“The knife!” Diana clapped, pure joy coming from within. She was so fucking beautiful, and it was all for her. He was going to finish off this deer for her. She had brought the animal down, and he would glory in the kill.

He reached around to his belt, bringing out his hunting knife. Unsheathing it, he raised the blade up. Lightning whitened the woods around them—

The trees, for a moment, seemed to be men and women, shrouded in cloaks, the branches and leaves their hair, their eyes on him as if in some solemn event—

The knife flashed as the early dark of evening returned. He brought the blade deep into the deer’s heart, once, twice, raising it and hacking at the creature—

Blood flowed across his arm—

Diana, throwing her head back laughing—

“More!” she cried. “More!”

Lightning flashed—

She held her hands near him to catch the spray of red. It felt like he had struck oil deep in the creature’s wound. The torrent did not cease for several moments as the woods went from white to black and white to black again.

His energy grew, as he dropped the dead animal—his dick got hard, he wanted her all over again. It burned inside him, this unquenchable fire she had kindled. Both of them, covered with the animal’s blood, like wine, her skin, her breasts...she crawled to him on her knees and their tongues entwined, their lips, their hands, he felt her buttocks moving rhythmically as they coupled against the carcass in the leaf-shattered woods as night and rain descended.

Just as he was about to climax within her, she drew away. “No, no,” she whispered, “Later. One more creature to hunt tonight.”

But his arousal began to hurt, he wanted to be inside her, not just his dick, but all of his body, his soul...he wanted to stay within her wet heat and not be outside anymore. Rage filled him, then exhaustion. He lay back on the blood-dampened animal. “I’m too tired to hunt. Too tired, baby.”

He closed his eyes for what seemed like the first time in days, and the darkness behind his eyes exploded—shattering his mind—he saw demons leaping from the fires of Hell, smelled the tortures of men, the cries of women as they were thrown into lava pits—

Opening his eyes to a flash of lightning, she was so close to him that her face was out of focus. “One more hunt tonight, and then, you have me forever,” she said, licking blood from his cheek. “And I have you.”

3

Stony Crawford followed Lourdes as she passed the statue of Mary, and went into the main part of the church. The stained glass windows depicting the Stations of the Cross were dark with the pelting rain. It felt so clean, the way the rain hit the glass, the way the colors in the glass mutated from light to dark. It was as if they were being washed, yet kept dry by the church. A coldness settled into the church, dispelled only by a lingering scent of incense. Above the altar, a great wooden cross, with a nearly naked Jesus nailed into it, agony across his gaunt features. It made Stony think of Nora’s story about sacred crosses and scarecrows and the Halloween Man of her story. Was the carving of the man any different from Nora’s tales? Could one man, being tortured to death, actually be a god, and not just any god, but THE God? It was as hard to swallow as the Halloween Man story. It was a nice legend, but how could it be? How could a man be God? Men could be monsters, men could be devils, but there was no way in heaven or hell they could be better than other men. Religion was a nice fairy story. He would have to play along with it if he wanted Lourdes to love him, but he did not really believe in any of it. It seemed ridiculous. Virgins giving birth. Gods being crucified and then rising from the dead to point out their wounds. Drinking wine and eating bread and pretending it was blood and flesh. It made no sense at all.

Stony and Lourdes sat down on a pew, and she kneeled, praying. Then, she sat back.

“Someday maybe we can get married in a church,” she said. “If we decide that’s what we want.”

“I want it,” Stony said. He glanced at the saints and the windows, and no longer felt tied to the town or his family. The church was a world where they could not touch him. “Come on,” he said. He stood up, offering his hand. She looked at him, questioning, but took it, and rose. They went to the railing before the altar. Kneeling down, he said, “I take you until the end of time to be my lawfully wed wife.”

She cracked a grin. Out of the corner of her mouth, she whispered, “You’re crazy.”

“To love, honor and cherish till the end of my days,” he continued. “To protect and care for in sickness and in health...”

“That’s not the exact wording.”

“Till death do us part. No, till God parts us, till you don’t love me anymore, till the universes collide,” he said, and looked up at the cross.

“You don’t believe in God, heathen,” Lourdes said, shoving him slightly.

“If you do, I do,” he said.

“I do,” she said.

“I do,” he grinned, leaning over and kissing her, feeling his mouth open to her, and hers opening in return, not devouring as when they’d made love, but sweetly, as if inhaling each other’s breath.

4

Lightning lit the church, the blues and reds and yellows of the stained glass flashing for an instant.

“I better go,” she said after a while. The rain let up, and they’d been kneeling at the altar for several minutes. He didn’t want to let go of her hand.

“I’ll walk you,” he said.

“No, I think maybe I need to be alone. Just to think. We both have a lot to think about, Stony. If we get married...”

“If? Now it’s official. Before God,” he said. “You, me and the baby. A family.”

“Ah, I see,” Lourdes shook her head. “You tricked me.”

“There’s no divorce in heaven,” he said. He helped her get up.

Tears played at the edge of her eyes. “It’s not a joke.”

“No.” He kissed her eyelids. “I meant every word.”

“My father will kill me.”

“Mine won’t be too happy either.”

“I mean it. He will.”

“Then let’s run away.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I mean it,” he said. “I can borrow my mom’s car. We can get away and I can get work somewhere. I’ve saved some money.”

“From what?”

“All those rich people’s lawns I’ve mowed,” he grinned. The lie hurt. But he wanted to make her confident now. Right now.

“We’ll talk about this later on.”

“When later? You’re beginning to show,” he said. “They’ll guess soon. You’ll need to see a doctor and stuff too.”

“Please,” she said, wiping her tears back. “If we run away, we’ll end up back here. And it’ll be worse.”

“Tell you what,” Stony said, and almost could not believe the words spilling from his mouth, but he felt an urgency. “Meet me at Nora’s tomorrow morning before school. Maybe at seven. We can decide then, okay?”

She nodded. She looked at him curiously. “Okay. But I’m not promising anything, Stony.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let me walk you home though. We can talk.”

“No, I really want to be alone now, just to think about all this,” Lourdes said, and touched the edge of his face sweetly before she left.

5

He remained behind, sitting at the railing, after she’d gone. What was he doing? What the hell was he doing? Fifteen, married, kid, wife, responsibilities...

He imagined his father’s face, his mother’s tears, his brother’s disgust...

“Can I help you with anything?” a man asked.

Stony turned around. He hadn’t heard the man come in. Not just a man. A priest.

“Hi,” Stony said, fumbling in his mind. Was it illegal to go into a church without permission? “I was just...admiring your church.”

“It’s a nice one. We’ve lost a lot of congregation over the years to the churches down the road, but this is one of the most beautiful ones, in my opinion.” The priest was in his forties, and a light frost of gray had settled along his light brown hair. He walked up to the altar, extending his hand. “I’m Father Jim.”

“Stony Crawford.” Stony shook the man’s hand. A very cold hand.

“I know,” the priest said. “I was there when you were born.”

Stony felt a slight chill. He had lived his life in the Borough and never had run into this priest before. He stood up. “Yeah? I’ve heard every story in the book about that day. How Mom was in the station wagon, and Johnny Miracle was yelling.”

“Rain coming down,” Father Jim nodded. “I heard Johnny from across the Common, and came over to help out. But you’d already come into the world.”

Stony grinned. “Well...”

“You feeling all right, Stony?”

“Sure.”

“You look a little pale is all.”

“Maybe a little bit cold.”

“Good,” Father Jim said, touching him on the shoulder. “Well, if you ever need any counsel, be sure and come see me. All right? Catholic, Protestant, even if you don’t feel very Christian, we’re all one fellowship in the divine light. Do you understand?”

“Sure,” Stony said. He could not wait to get out of that church. He had never liked churches all that much, and priests bothered him. Father Jim in particular, now that they’d met. Father Jim had something in his eyes that seemed less than priestly, and Stony was not sure what that was. He just didn’t want to see it again.

“Stony,” Father Jim said when Stony was halfway out of the church.

Stony turned. “Yeah, father?”

“You look so much like your mother in some ways. It amazes me.”

On his way back home, Stony thought that was the strangest comment of all, since he and his mother looked nothing alike as far as he could tell.

6

“What are we hunting?” Van whispered, his tongue lapping at the back of her neck.

Diana remained silent, crouching down beside her horse. The rain was letting up, and the moon, nearly full, shone across their domain of tangled vines and branches.

I have my knife, he thought, clutching it, unsheathing it the way she unsheathed his manhood just minutes earlier and wiped it across her womb—it wasn’t a pussy or a vagina with her—it was a womb, it was a sanctuary there between her legs. And my knife is ready. We will hunt! I am hunter of all I see! He wanted to cry out, but remained silent.

A lone figure walked along a slight ridge near the opening of the woods.

“Our prey,” Diana whispered, rising up on her haunches, bow and arrow in her hand.

Then she did something that confused him. Her voice was somehow inside his head. Like a mosquito wriggling into his ear, and moving to his brain, it tickled and buzzed at first, and then he heard her clearly—

Who do you want to kill more than anyone in the world?

no one

Oh yes you do, Van Crawfish, you want someone to vanish from the face of the earth.

no

Yes, don’t hide from me Van, tell me who it is, tell me—
the bitch

Who?

the bitch trying to stop Stony from having his freedom

Her name?

Lourdes Maria. She’s a Spanish bitch from Wequetucket, she wants to get her claws into him and bring him down.

You want to kill her don’t you?

YES! YES I WANT TO KILL THAT DAMN BITCH BEFORE SHE DOES TO HIM WHAT MY MOTHER DID TO MY FATHER!

You want to take your knife and open her up.

YES! I WANT TO OPEN UP THAT BITCH WITH MY KNIFE AND MAKE HER BLOOD SPURT OUT LIKE JUICE! I WANT TO TEAR THAT BABY OUT OF HER! I WANT TO MAKE HER TASTE HER OWN SKIN! I WANT HER TO SUFFER AS MUCH AS A BITCH LIKE HER CAN!

7

Stony sat out on the back steps to his house before going in to supper. He was wishing he’d just grabbed Lourdes and brought her with him, that they would run off tonight, just get it over with before either had a chance to change his or her mind.

He glanced up at the emerging stars.

Closed his eyes.

Life was beautiful. It was. He loved her, she loved him. In spirit, they were already married.

It’s starting now, he thought. My life. My real life. The future of all I will be begins tonight.

I’ve been bad before, I’ve done terrible things, but from here on, if you’re up there listening God, from here on, because you have given me such a beautiful wife and such a happy beginning to a family, I will never do bad things again. I won’t lie, I won’t sneak beers, I won’t even look at another girl as long as I live, I won’t be all the things that my dad and brother and mom are. I’ll be the best damn Stony Crawford there ever was.

If...

And there’s always an If, but you’d know that if you’re really God and you’re really listening.

If only you’ll promise me that I’ll never have to come back here again, not to these people, not to this place. Promise me we’ll get far from here, just me and my baby and my baby’s baby.

Then, Stony felt it. As if God had answered. As if whatever ran the universe was in accord with his wish. He felt something inside him give, and an overriding calm came over him.

He felt a strength inside him, and all anxiety vanished for a few moments as a cool salty breeze blew in off the water.

“Thanks,” he said, knowing that it was all his imagination, but he didn’t care. He felt confirmed in his conviction and he knew that marrying Lourdes was going to be the right thing, and that he would be a good father and everything would turn out better than just okay.

Sometimes, shit happens.

But from here on, miracles are gonna happen.

Chapter Fifteen

Lourdes stepped cautiously over a low tangle of dried vines, her feet smushing down in the mud.

She felt stupid for not having thought to bring a flashlight. She usually did. But then, you could walk through these woods blindfolded and you wouldn’t trip over much. She had been walking these trails her entire life. She had fallen in love with loneliness at an early age. Her family was smothering. Her four brothers hovering around, either teasing their only sister, or trying to protect her. Her father, with his old ways, believing that she should never leave the house unchaperoned until the day she married.

Maybe even not then.

Her mother distrusted Stonehaven Borough as well as the apartments and gas station areas out where they lived. By the time Lourdes was seven, she had managed to sneak away on summer afternoons and just roam. She would spend hours gathering berries, or hiding from yellow jackets, or watching the shadows for fireflies. She created make-believe creatures among the trees, and every bog and pond contained a mermaid or two. She spoke with the invisible spirits of Indians, too, whom she still believed, at fifteen, wandered between the thick bundles of birch and oak.

Nothing scared her here. Nothing ever could.

These were her woods.

Within them, she felt protected, and knew every tree, every moss-covered rock, every pond and bog, every blackberry bush. She even knew the ancient stonewall that was full now of hibernating snakes, and she knew where the mosquitoes attacked the most aggressively in the summer and how to avoid them.

Now, following the thinnest of trails, the fallen wet leaves slippery like eel skin, the mud sucking at her sneakers, the only thought that frightened her was the idea that she and Stony would be running away from all this.

Every childhood has to end. It was something her grandmother used to tell her when Lourdes was eight or nine and asking about when she would grow up. Every girl becomes a woman, and there is often sorrow on that day. Do not rush ahead to meet the woman you will become.

And now, this will be it, she thought. Tomorrow morning. He wants me to meet him at Nora’s and run away with him. Like prisoners escaping. I just can’t. But I love him. We’re going to have a baby. We’re going to bring life into the world.

After their moment together in Our Lady Star of the Sea, something felt even more sacred to her than it had previously. The baby growing inside her had a family around him, a father and a mother. That Virgin Mary had blessed the baby, and she and Stony were bound together at the altar, before the eyes of God.

It was stupid, she knew. As she crossed a thin trickle of stream, Lourdes felt what seemed to be a spark leap within her. We are one. Stony and I are one. No one will separate us. Not my parents, not his, not anyone.

She pressed her hands upon her slight paunch.

(the baby!)

What would he be like? Or she? Would he have Stony’s eyes, or hers? Her hair, she hoped. His smile. Then, a terrible thought occurred to her as she slowed to a stop.

What if the baby looks like my father?

Or his mother?

(It’s okay, you’ll be the most beautiful baby ever brought into the world. Don’t worry!)

Carefully avoiding low-hanging branches that shivered as she touched them, Lourdes giggled aloud. She imagined a child with all the worst physical and mental attributes of both their families. Moles on the neck. Large ears. Crooked nose. Lazy eye. Non-existent lips. Big blubbery lips. Short and fat. Boxy...

She had to remember to make a joke about it with Stony in the morning.

(Don’t worry, hijito, you’re gonna be as gorgeous as your mother!)

All her life, she’d known she would one day marry and have children. Her mother had only been seventeen when she’d married, pregnant with Lourdes’ older brother, Miguel. Mom was two years older than me. Not that much different.

Please, Blessed Virgin Mary, bless us three, and protect us with your love and purity. Don’t allow temptation or the shadows to fall on us.

Praying like this, in her woods, seemed as natural to her as breathing.

Lourdes’ father had warned her not to ever think of marrying a huero. This was the word for the blue-eyed, blond-haired Anglos, but it encompassed all non-Latinos. Lourdes had an Aunt Elena who married a huero and they divorced within four years. “They never work out, ever,” her father had warned. Her father considered Stony a huero, too, and had told her so. This had led to the first actual fight she’d ever had with him. He called her every name imaginable and she had thrown those words right back at him. In the end, she’d cried and her father had gone off angry. Only her mother had comforted her, telling her that her father would eventually come around to liking the “Anglo boy.”

And now...

Marriage.

A baby.

God, what will Dad do now?

The moonlight turned a small oval pond into liquid gold. Lourdes looked up for the source of its light.

The moon was huge and round, filling all the sky that could be seen beyond the greedy treetops. It was turning an orange hue, almost like a sunset. She closed her eyes. Harvest moon. God, please make sure this is the right thing. Please help me and Stony.

Without realizing it at first, Lourdes found she was saying the prayer aloud, now in the cathedral of wood. “Please make sure our baby is healthy and help us learn to handle my family and all the problems we’re gonna have. Mother of God who looks out for babies and mothers, keep your hand upon me, let us have a good life together as you will.”

Opening her eyes again to the expansive moon, she shivered. The temperature was dropping. She could feel a difference between the few seconds before and now. The smells of the bogs and wet leaves were almost humid despite the cold. She glanced down at her own dark reflection in the moonlit water. “Two in one,” she whispered, touching her stomach. “Be safe, hijo.”

She turned about, thinking,

(Hijito, you had better not make me sick tomorrow morning like you did yesterday)

When a flashlight beam blinded her.

She put her hand up to shield her face from the light. “Who is it? Stony?”

All she could see was a silhouette and the round white beam.

“Victor? Miguel?” But her brothers would not do this. Not at this hour, maybe later at night. It wasn’t even suppertime yet.

Then, the flashlight moved up beneath the chin of the boy who held it.

A ghostly light distorted the features, but Lourdes recognized him. “Oh, Van, it’s just you,” she sighed. “You scared me for a sec.”

Van grinned. His smile, wide and gap-toothed, reminded her of a jack-o’-lantern.

“So,” he said, his voice low and almost a growl, “here’s the bitch who’s trying to fucking ruin my baby brother’s life. I’ve been looking for you all day. I got a game we can play. You and me.”

Then, the flashlight shut off.

“Let’s play ‘Skin the Bitch’,” he said.

INTERLUDE

DAWN, SEVERAL YEARS LATER

Chapter Sixteen

A MAN, A BOY, AND THE ROAD HOME

1

It seemed like yesterday. Tears streamed from his eyes, and he felt like an old man. He felt that awful thing inside, too, that thing that he’d managed to keep down within him, that terrible feeling that meant only bad things were going to happen.

He could not stop the tears, and when they were all poured from his soul, he wiped at his face.

The boy had told him all and more than he could himself remember. Nora’s voice from the boy’s mouth...Every detail of his past life was laid bare for him. How could this child know? Had he been there? It was as if he had raked his small fingers through the hair of Stony’s memory. Stony, now, twenty-seven, driving a car up 95, nearly there, nearly to the town of his birth. Time had held and stopped as the tale had spun out, and he glanced in the rearview mirror at the boy. He was sound asleep. He had not been telling Stony the tale of Stony’s past, of things Stony could not have seen, but somehow did see, and did know. He had known it all as if from a distance, watching—part of him that did not even know he was then watching the world unfold.

The sign up ahead indicated that the turnoff to what had once been Stonehaven was coming up. It didn’t read: Stonehaven Borough, which it once upon a time did.

The sign merely read: Land’s End Lighthouse.

Stony took the exit. Dawn clung to the trees along the potholed road, the ghostly light of five A.M. filtered through trees and thin fog. When he hit one of the many bumps in the road, the boy called Prophet groaned in the backseat.

“You okay?” Stony asked.

“Yeah,” the boy said groggily. “We there yet?”

“Almost. About seven miles.”

“Good,” the boy said. “I’m hungry.”

“Still have some doughnuts back there. Water’s in the thermos.” Stony reached over and grasped the thermos, handing it back to the kid.

“I have to pee,” Prophet said. He took the thermos and a moment later, Stony heard him gulping down water.

“Okay, I’ll pull over.” Stony slowed the car to a stop.

“You trust me?”

“To pee? Sure.”

“No, I mean to not run away.”

“You haven’t run yet.”

The boy got out and stepped into the woods. Stony opened the glove compartment, and checked to make sure the timing device was still there. He hadn’t checked it since Texas, mainly out of an abnormal fear that he would take the small sphere and throw it out and forget his plans. Forget why he was bringing this boy back to this place. Why he intended to protect the world from what had begun when he was fifteen-years-old.

It was not much of a bomb, actually, something he’d learned about by accident when the Feds from Phoenix had come into a small Arizona burg that to handle some old fart building a bomb in his outhouse. Stony had been called in to help, on a local level. The old fart was named Jaspar Swink, and had spent half his middle age building small bombs and then sending them in gift-wrapped packages to little old ladies in Tucson and Phoenix from the HEAVENLY FUDGE FACTORY. The little old ladies, delicately pulling off the ribbon, and then unwrapping the gold paper, could not have been more surprised when the first thing they saw was a tiny clock and some C-6 all bound together. Swink had timed his devices perfectly. He was an amateur mathematician and logistician, and had determined at precisely what time the ladies would get their packages, and approximately what time they would open them. “They first have to look for a card,” he had told Stony, sitting in the backseat of his patrol car. “They look for a card because they want to know who to thank. They hope it’s their son or daughter or an old beau they’d forgotten about. Then, they take one minute and look at the gold wrapping paper as if it tells something about the sender. Then, they take two minutes unwrapping, to save the paper and ribbon. When they see the timer, either they will know what it is and throw it, or they will look at it curiously for the sixty-seconds margin of error I give myself. And then, my friend, kaboom. Kaboom. Little-old-lady confetti in every direction.”

Kaboom.

Stony had salvaged one of the small bombs. He knew as soon as he saw it what he would do with it. He knew, in the months ahead, when he finally found the boy, what he needed to do.

It hadn’t made him nervous having the device in the glove compartment. Swink had told him that he kept six of them regularly in the back of his Chevy truck. “You can have these C-6 devices for twenty years. You can toss ‘em in the air, you can smash ‘em with hammers. Nothing. Not until you attach a detonator. A spark is the only thing. You can even get it hotter than hell, but until it sparks, you got just a lump of shit in your hand.”

Stony had asked him, “How big is the explosion?”

Swink winked at him. “How big do you want it to be?”

2

The boy opened the front door. “Can I get in up here with you?”

Stony shut the glove compartment. “Sure.”

“Cool,” the boy said. He slid into the seat, reaching back for the seat belt. “Your seat belt’s broken.”

“It’s a lousy car. I bought it for practically nothing.”

“Yeah, I noticed it’s a piece of shit but I was too polite to say it.”

“Actually you said it a few times.”

“Oh, I guess I did,” the boy grinned. “I feel I can tell you anything. Your car’s a piece of shit and you are one twisted bastard.” The boy chuckled. “It’s just a joke. I don’t mean it.” The tattoos on the boy’s arms looked like eels wriggling. It was just the morning’s dim light playing tricks. Stony glanced back to the road ahead.

Stony felt a trickle of sweat at the back of his neck. He started the car up again, putting it in drive. They drove in silence for a few minutes. Then the boy said, “Why are we coming here anyway?”

Stony, trying not to think of the bomb in the glove compartment, said, “To end something that should’ve ended a long time ago.”

“Oh,” the kid said. “All that stuff you told me last night.”

“I told you?” Stony felt his throat clutch.

“Yeah, I mean, this stuff about town and your girl and all that.”

“Funny,” Stony began, but stopped. Funny, I thought you were the one telling me.

“You know that man,” the boy said.

“Which?”

“The one who took me to Texas in the first place. We had to call him the Great Father, but that was a crock. I mean, I remember him a little. When I was like three, and four maybe,” the boy continued. They passed farmhouses, in disrepair, off the wild fields beyond the trees, like sentinels at the outer edge of town. The village. It was coming up. It was coming. He hadn’t been there since he was fifteen. He hadn’t been physically in this town in all those years. The memories should’ve been wiped clean, but they were fresh wounds. The sign to Wequetucket at the crossroads—where Lourdes had lived. The sign for the opposite direction to the community college. A small truck passed in front of him, narrowly missing him.

“Your lights are off,” the boy said.

“Oh damn,” Stony reached forward and popped the headlights on.

“He should’ve seen you, but it is a little dark still.”

“A little. Sun’ll be up in ten minutes completely.”

“You think?” The boy glanced out the window to his right. They passed an old gray barn beside a pond, a light steam rising from it. “This is nothing like Texas.”

“Why do you think he took you to Texas?”

“Well we were in Mexico first. He had a place down there. It was nice. A big old house. I don’t remember a lot of it, just that this one maid was really nice to me. We used to even play marbles sometimes. She liked kids. She had two kids, too, she told me, further south.”

Out of nowhere, Stony flashed on a memory he had never had:

A short woman, her face nearly serene, her hair tied back and up, her thick body covered in a blue dress.

Someone had taken a needle and thread and sewn her lips together.

When she opened her eyes, he saw that one of them had been replaced with a cat’s eye marble.

The world flashed back to him, the road ahead. He slowed down as they drove beside the cove.

“This is where I grew up,” Stony said, ignoring the damning vision he’d just had a moment before. The cove was placid. The thickets had grown up and wild and died down with the death of summer. It was a dead place. No swans glided upon its surface. No seagulls circled overhead.

The boy gave a cursory glance to the cove, but his mind was on other things. “I remember when we went to El Paso because it was so hot that day. We had to wait forever at customs. It was so hot I could barely breathe.”

“It gets hot down there, huh,” Stony said. He searched the cove for swans, but there were none.

“Yeah, especially in the trunk.”

Stony laughed. “You weren’t in the trunk.”

“Yeah. They put me in there. He told me that no one was supposed to know I was alive. I don’t know why. But he tied me up and put me in the trunk. It was hot as hell. It felt like I was in there for nine hours.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. And even then they opened the trunk.”

“Customs?”

“Yeah.”

Another vision:

A man in a tan uniform lifting the trunk lid, and his face beginning to turn waxy, and then his lips began to melt down like a burning candle.

Then, his eyes bubbling with heat.

Then, the screaming begins.

“Why Texas?”

“Search me,” the boy shrugged. “He had this thing about the Wild West or something. When I was six he told me that there were people out there who were believers. That’s about all I remember. Sometime around then, he took off. Down to Mexico I think. The people who got me, the Rapturists, I heard them talk about the old guy was a pervert and he did drugs and shit. They said he was useless and old. Some of them told me that maybe the Azriel Light got him, but between you and me I always thought it was a bunch of bullshit. He’s probably just livin’ down in Chihuahua. It wasn’t like I was real attached to him.”

“Alan Fairclough.”

The face of Alan Fairclough, its pockmarked skin, its shiny pallor, its eyes like mirrors.

Alan Fairclough was an It.

“Maybe,” the boy said. “Could be. I just always called him the Great Father. Ever since I can remember.” Then, “Hey!”

Stony slammed his foot on the brake. “What?”

“You almost hit it.” The boy pointed to the thin slice of road. A stag leapt from the woods, darting across the road. In the headlights and fog, it was a shadow of antlers and a blue-gray blur.

“Christ,” Stony gasped.

“Whew. Hey, can you read?”

A sign on the old bridge that led to the borough:

PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. NO HUNTING. NO FISHING.

Someone had spray-painted at the bottom of this:

no nothing

“Pretty funny,” the boy said. “Hey I got a joke.”

“Not up for jokes right now,” Stony said. His unease grew as he drove across the bridge. The vibration felt bad here. It felt like no one had come here, no one would ever trespass here, if he could help it.

You’re a fool to do this.

Worse than a fool.

You are the most despicable being who has ever existed. You are the bogeyman and this boy is an innocent despite himself. You are an abomination on the face of the earth and you can’t keep hiding behind who you make other people think you are.

You are the Devil and Hell doesn’t even want to let you back in.

You will do something terrible to this boy.

“Here’s my joke. Okay? It goes, this guy is like a punker freak and he’s on this train. And his hair is all orange and spiky and he has tattoos and he has nose rings and nails through his hands and feet and eyebrows and stuff. This old man is staring at him. Real rude. And the punk guy goes, why the hell are you staring at me old man? Didn’t you ever do anything wild when you was a kid? And the old man goes like, Yeah, I did, when I was in the army I got stationed in Singapore and I got drunk and screwed a parrot. I thought maybe you was my kid.” The boy howled with laughter.

Stony smiled. “That’s a nasty joke.”

The boy kept laughing. “Only if you think about it. Think about it.” His laughter was infectious. “I bet if someone screwed a parrot for real they’d kill the parrot. Or get their pecker bit off!” He roared louder, slapping his stomach when he laughed. “Oh man that was a good one!”

“I guess kids are different now. When I was a kid I would never have talked like that to a grown-up.”

“Kids are different now,” he said. “Well, I’m different.” Then, the boy’s laughter died. Quickly, he rolled down the window. Inhaled deeply. “Oh man, I really smell the ocean! It’s so clean! Oh man!” he shouted, holding his hand out the window as if trying to catch the wind. “Smell it?”

Stony nodded. “Smells good.”

“Smells like everything,” the boy said. “I can smell crabs and fish and all that clean cleanness.” He laughed at his words. “Cleanness of sea-ness.”

“Look,” Stony said in a hushed tone.

Stonehaven Borough came up with the sunlight over the sea.

What was left of it.

Again, he stopped the car.

“Looks like God smushed it,” the boy said.

“You believe in God?”

The boy shrugged, looking at the ruins of the buildings. “No. I just said it because you were thinking it.” Then, the boy began shifting uncomfortably. “I don’t want to go here. Please. Not this place.”

3

“Don’t do this to me,” the boy said.

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t take me in here.”

“Why?”

“I can feel it.”

“Feel what?”

“You son of a bitch. You brought me here because you want me to die here. You want me to know everything about what you did. All the evil things. All the nasty things. You brought me here to kill me.”

“What is it you feel?”

“Torture.”

“Is it the pictures on your skin?”

The boy nodded. His face was threatening to crumple, as if he had tears or nightmares or pains in his mind that rippled across his scalp and down his nose and eyes and lips.

“Take off your shirt. I want to see.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Just calm down. Take off your shirt. I want to see the pictures. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The boy pulled the T-shirt off over his head. He looked sullen. No longer that happy kid of five minutes past. He looked up at Stony with sunken eyes. He seemed younger with the shirt off, more like a boy of nine or ten than his twelve years.

“On my back,” the boy said. He turned around in the car seat.

His back was scrawny, his ribs stuck out, his shoulder blades jutted as if not quite in place.

Stony had not fully understood the extent of the tattoos. They were swirls of color all across his skin, interconnecting stained glass windows, faces, houses, the sea, and the heavens.

“Who the hell did this to you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he did. He always said I was born like this.”

“Holy—” Stony gasped.

From the swirl of earth tones on the boy’s shoulders, a face began to emerge as if from a pool of oil-slick water.

It was a face Stony had not seen in twelve years.

“Lourdes,” he whispered. His eyes felt heavy. A fog in his mind blurred his vision. He felt the tears as they coated his face, tears as he watched her slowly open her mouth in a silent cry.

Then the boy’s back seemed to grow, his skin stretching, the picture of her face deepening, enlarging, until it was as if the skin was a canvas of the world, and he was watching her. No, it was as if he was in someone else’s skin, raising a knife on a night of an orange-yellow moon, a knife that glinted and flashed and made a noise like a fist going into mud as the knife went into her breast.

4

At first, it was the orange-yellow moon

The Moonfire grew pale from this and stretched and burst

The Moonfire

And at its cold blue heart:

The past.

Alan Fairclough stood before him, his hand out. “Come on, Stony. Let’s go. It’s all over here. It’s time now. You’ll understand. You need to know what this is really about.”

Then, the other pictures swirled around this one, Our Lady of the Sea, as he held Lourdes’ hand, the stained glass windows dissolving in the rainbow of colors and then reforming as Nora Chance’s old shack, the tarpaper roof peeling back in a strong wind. Stonehaven itself, was there, with the lighthouse at Land’s End, and the summer homes on Juniper Point, all mixing and then reforming into other shapes, other colors, other remembrances of a place of years ago—

And then he saw his brother, Van, who was still seventeen, his body soaked in blood, his hand up, and a hunting knife gleaming in the moonlight.

Chapter Seventeen

SKINNING THE BITCH

1

Time was a river of blood and fire. Van Crawford waded through it, the jagged pebbles cutting his feet, his arms raised above his head. It was only clear, clean water, and he was up to his waist in it now.

He looked about. For a moment he thought he’d been in the woods near Stonehaven at night, but now he was in a place that was like a summer’s day, with the heavy sun beating down on him. He leaned over and grabbed something that flashed and shimmered in the clear water. It eluded him.

Diana stood on the far bank, her blond hair hanging past her shoulders. She looked perfectly natural there, as if this is where she should be, naked at a river’s edge waiting for him. “Catch it!” she said, when he glanced up at her. “We need it!”

He looked at her for a long moment, not wanting this dream to disappear...

(He knew it was a dream, it had the feeling of dream, and he knew that a river of blood and fire could not suddenly transform into a clear beautiful summer river full of silvery fish.)

Then, he reached again into the rushing sparkling water, and grabbed it, wriggling, bringing it up to the sunlight.

A knife.

It’s not a knife, but a silver fish wriggling in his grasp.

Its small mouth opened and closed upon air, its eyes staring at the spherical world as he squeezes it. It felt slick and slimy, and as it paddled its small fins at him, he felt a series of small stings run along his palms.

(I don’t believe it)

Believe it, she said, but she said it without being near him. All it takes is your belief, your faith. Let yourself go, let it take over, let it move you.

(Move me? Where?)

To the Other side.

(Heaven?)

Come over and find out.

To Diana crouched down on the far bank, looking down into the water. Flowers seemed to blossom from her silky hair. The sunlight created a halo behind her. “Come to this side, Van, come on!” she shouted gaily.

He glanced down into the rushing waters, and saw another face there, beneath the surface.

A face that might have been a young Latina girl of sixteen whose dark hair streamed behind her in the distorting current. The water turned red as it passed over her, and her left eye was red, as were her lips, red as a rose, red as blood. All was red.

“Lourdes?” he asked, holding the wriggling silver fish high. “Lourdes? That you? You okay?”

She opened her mouth in a scream, and several small flat worms spiraled out of her mouth, dispersing in the bloody water.

He glanced over at Diana, but something was wrong with her. Her skin moved across her features like heat. Emeralds seemed to shine along her arms and shoulders in the intense sun which felt warmer by the second. An unfelt wind whipped her hair back, until it looked as if Diana were going to be blown away, yet the air was calm where Van stood in the water.

Lourdes came up from the river, like a mermaid, like a dream, and wrapped her wet arms over his shoulders, closed her eyes, pressed her lips to his. His mouth opened at her tongue’s insistence, and he tasted the warm water and their tongues flicked over and under each other. Her flesh was sweet and firm, and her breasts pressed against him, making his manhood swell.

Manhood.

For that’s what he was now, a man, it was his manhood growing, and Lourdes the Bitch was bringing it all out for him, the slut was making him do this to her—

2

He knows he’s in some kind of fabric of unreality, of dream without the comfort of sleep, even as he raises the knife up. Night, October, the woods, Diana, hunting, Lourdes, BITCH—

It all comes to him.

The summer day rips apart like a paper screen, and the dark woods return, the freezing night, and the knife in his hand. Moonlight and blood splash against each other across the fragrant skin of her, of Lourdes, of the girl who has flowers of crimson through her hair and down her neck.

3

“And up,” Van gasps, and DOWN! The blade goes in—ooh, with a SUCKING SOUND—am I the only one who hears it? THE SUCKING SOUND OF KNIFE IN BREAST AND OUT IT COMES, UP AND DOWN AND ALL AROUND—

The night, the moon, he no longer feels like Van Crawfish, loser of the cosmos, the chill is under his skin, others look out from his eyes...he is more than just the son of a lobsterman and a nurse with fat ankles. The look on her face in the moonglow. The look. Eyes still so lovely and dark. I can see why my baby brother fucks you. I can see why now. I couldn’t before. You’re something you’re a piece of work and a piece of ass and you have really pretty lips that curl around your WHITE WHITE WHITE teeth when you scream only I’m a-gonna cut that scream outta you through your lungs Lourdes, Lourdes Maria Castillo bitch. You’re really Russian right? Lourdes Castillobitch. Ho ha ha ha. Mmm listen to that knifey go cutting—lovely lovely music of squish and squash and gush and spurt—

She fights like a girl, hee hee ho—she raises her hands because she doesn’t understand what he’s doing or even why he’s doing it, but the knife knows.

THE KNIFE ALWAYS KNOWS.

Rule of thumb: the knife has a mind of its own and is in fact pulling the levers in his hands. OFFICER I DIDN’T MEAN TO PLUNGE IT INTO HER FOURTEEN TIMES BUT SHE GOT IN THE WAY OF MY KNIFE. SHE PUSHED AGAINST IT OVER AND OVER. I TRIED TO PULL BACK, BUT SHE KEPT COMING AT ME WITH HER SKIN.

Up and down and all around, the knife slices and dices and flays and makes the mushy stuff come out.

Can’t scream no more Lourdes Maria Castillobitch, can’t scream, and I bet right now your eyes are going pink with blood and you’re not even feelin’ NOTHIN’ because you can only get cut so many times before it’s just like a summer day in the park and NOTHIN’ can touch your pretty pretty skin—

He looks back in the dark as he holds the wet body of the girl against himself and wonders why Diana isn’t joining in.

What he sees behind him makes his hair turn white, and he knows it’s turning white because he can feel it, he can feel the girl’s blood all over him and how his skin is wrinkling and how his hair turns thin and white in just a moment, in the moonlight, in October.

4

Holy Mother of Jesus! What the hell am I doing? Why am I doing this? Why is my hand doing this, bringing this knife under her skin, making her bleed, making her hurt?

The other voice that bore like a worm through the rotting fruit of his brain told him,

You’re making love to her.

She feels so damn good! She feels so HOT, writhing with your touch, with your THING going INTO her, IN and OUT and IN and OUT! Her whole body is PUSSY! It’s all PUSSY!

Again, the lightning flash of a summer’s day with the crushing sunlight, all around the river, as Van’s manhood rose up to meet her, to dip inside of her river, to fathom what mystery Lourdes held, inside her, deep within her, so deep it was almost like crawling up inside her womb. The river water splashed across his face, chilly, and it gave him goosebumps. He looked up at the sun as he drove into her, and thought he saw great birds flying there, so huge and massive they could not possibly be what he thought they were, their wingspans so enormous and broad—

Then the fabric tore, the hymen of the dream, and behind it, the woods, the blood, the knife, and the girl.

5

Van felt his pecker grow huge, a mastodon pecker, so big and thick, but not even that—it was his skin moving outward, his flesh taking over hers as he pressed himself against her body.

Lourdes was beautiful in the red light, her eyes were glowing with lust, her hands swept over his back and buttocks as she drew him into her...into the red light...his flesh melding with hers, washed with the crimson moisture...

The knife was no longer a knife in his hand, it was a tool of the ultimate love, and he brought it to her and she accepted it like a flower in her hair. He gave her red poppies for her hair, and then the poppies sprouted along her neck, and shoulders. Her breasts became a garden, her belly a wild row of poppies blossoming.

“I love you,” he whispered, tasting the opium that spilled from the prolapsing flowers, their petals curving and turning and spilling. He lapped at her for the sweetness of the drug, and still more flowers bloomed rapidly along her body.

Her breathing became faint, and she made a series of little moans as he held her, his face pressed to her neck.

No wonder Stony loves you so much, you are so beautiful, you are so desirable, he thought as he rubbed her face along her shoulders tasting the copper opium.

Chapter Eighteen

IN THE NIGHT

1

At night, along the sliver of coastline that is Stonehaven, the few lights of the village snuff out before ten, leaving the flash and spin of the lighthouse at Land’s End to sweep the gently tossing waters of the Sound. The mist of October moves like fine motes of dust in an old room, across the moonlit waters, until finally even the amber moon’s sheen dulls. Across the bay, on one of the three sister islands called Avalon, a richly modest two-story clapboard, an enclave made to look like a weathered Cape Cod summer home, glowed with its many lights flicking into high beam against the encroaching dark. By midnight, the temperature on the island had dropped to forty-two degrees. The seagulls all perched along the rooftops of the three houses, and down on the paved driveway, the refuse of cracked clamshells and crabs, dropped from great heights by the ambitious birds.

Alan Fairclough, his expression taut, stepped out among the lights of his courtyard. Raising a small pistol, he fired at the birds. The gunshot echoed, and the gulls scattered into the darkness beyond the white lights. The three houses, interconnected with breezeways between them, had been his since his purchase of the island and all that was within it years ago from the widow of Spencer Lewis. Lewis had been a curious sort, a collector of rare religious artifacts, an obsession not unlike Fairclough’s own. He kept the Coptic crosses and iconography in the smallest of the three houses, and lived completely alone in the largest. His goal in life had always been majestic isolation, although he hadn’t truly felt it before. He felt this even here, in these comparably modest digs from the palaces and manor houses of his youth. It was not mere aloneness, but a feeling that he participated in something greater, something more magnificent than any man had ever touched...

It was a warmth, a heat, he couldn’t explain. The grace he felt illuminated his flesh, opened the pathways of his mind...

He was more than just a man now.

He was a creature of history.

He was the engager of the future.

The midwife of a change in humanity, a ripple in evolution.

2

He had enjoyed his life on the island, punctuated occasionally by the arrival of a willing sacrifice to his pleasures, a youth bought and paid for to take punches to the stomach and face; a young woman or two who could be tied up and made to commit unspeakable acts. Alan Fairclough had grown bored with it all over the years, for the fire that was in his blood often thirsted for darker and more profound pains and eroticisms. He’d gone from punching and molesting, to more transcendent practices, the breaking of spirits and wills, the numbness that set in that was beyond pain. He winced sometimes thinking of what he had done to them, how he’d disfigured them, how one of them had—

Had—

Made him do something terrible to him. Something terrible that Alan Fairclough didn’t even like to conjure up, the image that pulsed in his brain.

The boy was a runaway who had lived on the streets of New York City for four years, living an existence in darkness and squalor. Pete Atkins, the Crowns’ butler, had found him through one of his diligent searches for Fairclough’s subjects. Atkins had called Fairclough that morning. “I caught one, sir. Young. Needy. Willing. Shall I send him up?”

It had been like ordering groceries.

But Fairclough’s divine depravity had grown and festered like constantly torn scabs over juicy wounds. “Yes,” he’d said to the butler. “Tonight, if that’s possible.”

And then, several hours later, the Crowns’ boatman had arrived on the island with a tall lanky eighteen-year-old. His hair was long, his face, gaunt.

“You look like me when I was your age,” Fairclough had said. “Just like me. You are all alone. You feel life has nothing to offer. You don’t know where to turn.”

The boy looked at him, hard jewels in his eyes. “Fuck off. Where’s the money?”

After payment had been made, Alan took him into the Dark Room.

“Why the hell you call it a dark room?”

A flicker of a smile across Alan Fairclough’s face. “It’s where I develop.”

Sometimes, he could blank out his memory of what happened in the Dark Room since he’d set it up, but other times the images came at him like flashes of a strobe light.

In the Dark Room, the other Alan Fairclough came out.

Not the man of God, or the man of the Devil.

What came out was the true Alan Fairclough, the one beneath the skin.

The one that got high from the feeling a razor gave him as he brushed a young man’s back with it.

The one that waited until they begged to be killed, until they looked through the streaming blood on their faces and asked that he push the slender spike into their heart.

The one who never satisfied this request.

Until the runaway boy who had just become a man, and within six hours, lay on the drainage floor of Alan Fairclough’s Dark Room.

Fairclough pressed his face against his throat, feeling the last of the young man’s life pour from him. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he cooed, “just sleep, just sleep.”

When he’d risen from this, he went to the bathroom to shower off the blood. He was still in his fever, caught between an erotic dream of flesh torn by pincers, and fire escaping from the slashes of epidermal armor. There, in the mirror, he saw it.

He saw the thing of his dreams, the creature of red fire, its skull consumed in the burning.

Me.

I am the Devil.

Not just a true believer in the Faith of the Almighty Creation.

I am the Archfiend of that Creation.

I am the Abyss.

I am the Betrayer.

The ritual of it all rejuvenated him. It was all in the ritual, that’s what priests had always known, that was what all great religious men had known. Even the Holy Sisters of Maupassane, they had guarded it with ritual, they had held it with ritual until they no longer existed. But the ritual existed, still. The ritual would outlast all. The ritual was what brought the power to mankind. “Hallelujah!” he’d shouted, reaching up to wipe the blood across his face and smear it like jelly across his face until his features were obliterated. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow! Praise Him all creatures here below, Praise Him above, ye heavenly host! Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!” His cries echoed and carried out into the night, and as the young man breathed his final breath, Alan Fairclough was certain that he had gone on to the true heaven. Then, the old words came to him, the words of magic and truth, as they always did when the ritual of blood had begun, “pari nue sathath yog alaai tekeli tekeli li-aluana—”

When Diana had come to him the following morning, she held him in her arms while he wept and she had whispered, “It’s going to be soon, my love. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. We’ll open the door together.”

3

The lights in the courtyard between his compound’s houses were as bright as day, which was how he liked it. The night bothered him now. The night no longer held warm dreams, but a vague terror for him that there was something Other out there...another Alan Fairclough perhaps whom this one would not want to meet. The low roofs were bathed in flat white light that even the fine mist could not cloud.

Fairclough held up his The Anubis Mysteries, a translation from the Coptic, reading the passages again, eager for what was to come.

4

“The fire from heaven is upon the earth once in a generation. It has been known by many names, and before there were names, it was known by its radiance. When the first man walked upon this earth, it burst forth from the Mind of Ra and traveled like an flaming arrow across the body of the earth. It parched the Nile, and blackened Isis’ beauty. At the heart of its flame, the secret of the gods’ powers, and man and woman both were struck as by lightning with its touch. It comes with the dying of the crops and the season of the barren land...”

He compared this with the Gnostic Gospel of the Betrayer:

As we sat together, my beloved master turned to me and kissed me lightly on the cheek. I said unto him, “Why, Lord, do you touch me so?”

And Jeshua ben-Joseph saith, “Jude, you are closer than my brother to me. We were born of the same moment, and made of the same fire. Yahweh gives us this fire from the touch of his finger, and it cuts like a burning sword into your heart, and mine.”

I said unto him, “Lord, Lord, if we are brothers, why do you gaze with such terror upon me?”

“The divine fire is too much in you,” Jeshua said. “In the miracles and healings, what was within me awoke something within you. You have been too close to me. You will betray me.”

“What is the nature of this divine fire?” I asked of him.

“It is that which darkens the sun. When Adam walked in the Garden, it came like a flaming sword from the archangel, to separate man from paradise. The Angel of Death possesses its radiance, and it is said that a man dying sees it but once and then sees no more. But it is within us now. Within you, within me. Its nature is to turn against itself.”

I wondered at his words, and when the meal was done I said thrice, “You are most wondrous in your supreme countenance, oh Lord.”

Jeshua turned to me and nodded. “It is in your nature now. Do what you must do.”

5

Then, Alan closed the two books. All his life he had searched for this, all his life had been drawing him towards this place, this village, and these people.

Finally, the manuscript he’d purchased at great expense at private auction three years previous.

THE DEVIL’S OWN, THE PROFANE HISTORY OF THE ARCHFIEND AND ALL HIS WORKS, by Cagliostro, recopied in 1923 by Aleister Crowley

6

...It was in Paris that I first heard of the nuns of Maupassane. These Holy Sisters had lived in the catacombs of this city from the time of the Dauphin, but were expelled by the church for harboring various perversions among them. Several of the sisters were bound together and set afire in the Chambre Argent, but most managed to escape. Devout to the Holy Word of God and to Jesus, they were hid by good folk in the countryside of Bretagne, and then managed to resurrect their small order in a series of caves once inhabited by the earliest people of Gaul.

They had been there for at least one hundred years, when I traveled by coach through the rugged and backward countryside with three very agreeable companions. One was the young Loup Garou, the wild boy of the Pyrenees, so famous now that he had been educated at court. At seventeen, he was a strapping youth who, it was rumored, could speak with animals and birds. It was also rumored that he had been sired by the Devil himself owing to his wolf-like demeanor and excessive hair. My other two companions for the journey included the ever-youthful dowager from that backward and savage country, Countess Erzebet Bathory, along with one of her lovely young maidservants, Minoru. The Countess had some ugly rumors following her, one of which, to my great amusement, was the story that she was already three hundred years old, but through black magic had retained the youth of a girl barely out of her teens. We often laughed about these tales, since Erzebet often commented that if she were truly three hundred years old, she would not still be depending upon her husband’s money, for she would have soon run out of it given his gambling and general licentiousness. She was quite amiable, and her maidservant not only pleasant to look upon, but with a delightfully wicked streak and an unusual tolerance for her mistress’ constant caresses and pinches. The wild boy and she exchanged the longing glances of the very young, something which the Countess very wisely discouraged.

It took us six days to reach Maupassane, and not without some hostility were we four met by the locals at the tavern, owing to both the Countess’ finery and infamous reputation, Minoru’s childlike beauty, my own sorcerer’s demeanor, and of course Loup Garou’s notoriety. These country hicks believed that if someone were from Paris, he might very well be the Devil’s own. We were deemed bad luck, and it seemed the only folk who would give us shelter were the Holy Sisters themselves.

It was among the sisters, in that cave, that I first came to learn how Good and Evil were twin aspects of the one source of All. The sisters were of an order older than much of the Roman church, and had a creed that included the snake in the Garden of Eden, and believed that Christ on his cross was the fulfillment of temptation into redemption. The snake on the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was their emblem. “The snake is the fruit of the tree. Christ is the fruit of the tree,” so went their creed. This heretical belief had divorced them from the true Church, but their connection to Rome was never quite severed. It seems the Holy Pontiff himself (or so went the local legend) had visited the waters nearby and spoken with the Mother Superior of the Sisters. He had not given them his blessing, but had refused to allow the usual investigation of their heresy. The local priesthood did not touch them, either. They were a peculiar sect. I, of course, was there for something I’d overheard—the rumor of a rumor, the spark from something whispered in the Salons of Paris.

“It is said the Holy Sisters of Maupassane have a relic with them that is more powerful than Rome itself,” a charlatan of disputed reputation whispered in my ear. “They are witches more than nuns, and their convent reaches down to the very seat of Satan himself.”

These words echoed through my head as we were escorted into the famous caverns.

First, we stood in awe of the great and ancient painting, depicting ape-men hunting great horses and beasts along a rugged plain. Then, the pictures on the rock wall showed beasts with the arms and legs of man, but with the antlers of Satan, and the tail and buttocks of deer, and the chest of a bull. The Holy Sisters told us that these frightened them at first, but that they were Brides of Christ, and therefore Brides of Truth, they believed.

And finally, they showed us what they had captured deep in the bowels of their cavern.

A glimpse of the eternal, there. I knew even when I set eyes upon its fire that it was of the Devil, that its great countenance, its jaws, its monstrous eyes, could be none other than tools of Hellish design to lure even these Holy Sisters into perdition.

One sister told me that there had once been two, a mate for this one, but it had burned like a sword of fire across the earth, returning to its home.

“If it had a mate,” I ventured, “then perhaps it had progeny?”

She took me to another well, showing evidence of a mating between human and this terrible creature. I cannot begin to describe what I saw there. Were I to do so, I believe I would go mad, for madness is its name, madness is its form.

We slept at the feet of the trapped creature for seven nights before departing. As we left, the Countess Bathory drew me aside and whispered something to me that I shall never forget.

She said, “These holy women will burn in hell until kingdom come for what they have done here. They are monsters of the worst sort.” Then she offered up a curious smile. “Perhaps you and I shall see them again one day.”

I must say that her words could not seem more true to this humble servant of the Arts of Spirit and Darkness...

7

Alan shut the book when he heard the phone ringing. Slipping into his loafers, he got up from the porch table. He walked across the slight landing, up a half dozen steps to the central house. Opening the door, he flicked on the inner light.

Directly across from him, the huge stone with its fossil.

The bones crushed under some great weight, the wings splayed up and behind its hunched shoulders.

He went to the large oak table in front of the stonework. Picking up the phone, he pressed the speaker function, setting the receiver back in its cradle. “Yes?”

Out of breath, the woman on the phone gasped, “Oh, it’s...yes...it’s happening...it’s taking...it’s opening...I can feel it...”

8

A gull cried out above the sister islands, and flew out across the water, joining a half a dozen other birds as they soared up and then down, skimming the choppy waters, and then up again, now at the mainland, over the towering lighthouse, over the shingled rooftops of Stonehaven.

Tamara Curry took her slingshot and aimed for one of the gulls. “You flying rats, get out of my trash!” She shouted when the small stone she’d shot missed the bird. She ran out to the waterfront behind her house, and began picking up the wadded-up papers the flying rats had scattered. “I wish my guardian angel would tear those damn gulls to bits,” she muttered.

As the birds flew up, against the mist-covered moonlight, someone was crying out, it was a boy, perhaps a little boy lost in the woods, raising his voice to the skies.

No word could be distinguished in the sound, but folks heard it, those who lived on the edge of the woods, heard the cry.

Nora Chance, making her last cup of tea for the night, felt a pain in the back of her skull as if someone had just driven a needle of ice into her.

She reached for a bottle of aspirin up on the shelf over the stove, and tried to block out the memories that throbbed in her head.

9

Stony tried calling Lourdes twice, but each time one of her brothers picked up and he hung up the phone. He stared at the infernal machine for another hour, willing her to call him. But it remained silent. Occasionally, he walked into the small living room, and glanced out at the street. Watching for her, or waiting for his mother to come back from work, or his father from the bars. Made (and ate) two baloney sandwiches and drank one of his dad’s beers from the fridge. This gave him courage. Or maybe it was just a goofy feeling, he couldn’t tell.

Have to follow through on this.

It won’t just get better or disappear if I do nothing.

He went up to his small room, and looked through the closet. What do you take with you when you’re gonna run off with your girl and never come back? His jackets all seemed inadequate. He glanced down at the jeans he was wearing. They were filthy and threadbare in parts. He drew out a pair of khakis and a flannel shirt. Okay, good start: clean clothes. On an upper shelf was a stack of Storm King comic books. He drew them down and plopped them on his bedspread. Tossed them around, opening one at random. The Storm King was fighting the Ancient Enemy, Also Known As the Outcast. Stony grinned. He hadn’t looked at these since he was younger. He remembered his own imaginary battles in the backyard at eight-years-old with the Outcast. The Outcast at nine hundred eyes and seven arms, and each finger on his seven hands was a curved talon. One of the pictures showed The Storm King down on the ground, the Outcast slicing his talons through the air.

Stony tossed this comic aside, and opened another.

What he saw almost made him weep.

A note in a childish scrawl had been thrust between the pages:

Mommy loves me I know.

Mommy loves me I know.

I know Mommy loves me.

I am scared of her.

A memory from years before flashed upon him.

Something he had forgotten, had burned out of his memory...

10

He was seven and his mother and father had another of their big fights. He and Van hid in the bathroom, and Van covered his mouth to keep him from crying out. Van had been doing this since as far back as Stony could remember—they’d duck into the bathroom because it was the only room in the house with a lock on the door. They’d lock themselves in, and Van would cover his mouth to shut him up. This time, Stony was tired of not being able to stop the fighting. So he bit down on Van’s hand, and Van released him.

Stony unlocked the door and went running out of the bathroom to find his mother. As he ran into the center of their bedroom, it took him a minute to realize what his father was doing to his mother.

He was holding her down and punching her in the gut.

Stony stood there for a moment as if he could not understand what was happening, and then he began screeching. He ran into the middle of it and grabbed his father’s arm. “NO! DADDY! DON’T!”

His father looked at him, then at his mother.

His father pulled away, shouted some obscenities, and stomped off. A minute later, the front door slammed.

Stony had looked up at his mother. “You okay, Mommy?”

And something was different about her. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t the Mommy he knew.

Something had come into her.

Stony knew it was the Outcast.

Something evil had seeped into her.

She said, “You fucking bastard you ruined everything for us! Everything!”

Then, she lifted him up.

Stony Crawford, fifteen, picked up the note from the comic book.

Closed his eyes.

“You want to know what happens to little boys who ruin things for people?” His mother was shouting and crying, and Stony cried too, flailing his arms and legs around—

And she took him into the kitchen, and dropped him down, still clinging to his hand—a vise-like grip. “You want to know what happens to bad boys who FUCK EVERYTHING UP?” Her voice was like bombs blowing up around him, and he couldn’t see for the tears—

“Do you want to—” She began, and he saw the blue-hearted flame of the gas stove as she turned the front burner on—

And she took him up and brought the edge of his face down so close to the burner that the heat felt as if it were all around him

He could see the blue-white flame turning to yellow and then orange—

Moonfire, he thought. The Storm King could be destroyed by one thing, fire from the moon. It would take his powers away on earth, it was the one thing that could turn him to dust, to nothing...

He was numb and was perfectly quiet and still, expecting that the Outcast in the guise of his mother would now destroy him.

The heat on the side of his face grew intense.

But then she let out a small yelp.

She brought him back up, hugging him, her tears soaking his face and shoulders as she nuzzled him, her breath all gin, and her kisses smothering. “I could never hurt you, I never could hurt you, oh you poor baby, you poor baby, how could I hurt you, I’d go to hell if I hurt you, I could never—”

Stony set the old note back in the comic book. Closed it.

Time to go, he thought.

Time to leave all this behind.

I will never be like them.

11

In his parents’ bedroom, he hunkered down. Beneath his mother’s side of the bed, her candy wrappers and magazines. He pushed some of these aside, and felt around until he located the small box.

Drawing it out, he opened it.

The money was still there.

Because he had only seen it once or twice before—when he’d been too young to know how much was there—he was shocked to see that the bills were all hundreds. Why did she have all this here? Why hadn’t she ever used any of it? Or did she replace it? Did she hide some of her income from his dad?

These were all the questions he’d had ever since he’d first seen the little box beneath the bed.

“I’ll pay you back someday,” he said uneasily to the silent bedroom.

He counted out two thousand dollars.

It would be enough for a start.

He and Lourdes needed it.

His mother would understand.

She would.

12

Pulling on his heaviest sweatshirt, bringing the hood up, Stony left his home. He thought he might take his bike, but then figured he’d be better off on foot. He and Lourdes would catch the bus up the highway. In the morning. It all starts tomorrow at dawn. They needed to travel light.

The village was silent that night, or so it seemed to Stony. Perhaps he was feeling guilty for stealing the money, or perhaps his mind was too clouded with worries about the near future, but as he walked out along the damp lanes, the only sound he heard was a dog barking at some distance. The clapboard houses were dark, and only the smoke from chimneys indicated that anyone was home. This was part of what he was looking forward to leaving behind, the life that seemed to close up on itself like a snail in its shell when night came...the way people in Stonehaven never seemed to exist once the sun went down...

He looked at the neighbors’ houses. The Glastonburys and their adult children took up three houses in a row. Stony had spent much of his childhood running between their houses, the summers, watching them sit on their porches with cocktails and lemonade raising their glasses to him, nodding, but not ever really talking to him. And the Wakefields, with their German shepherd that got hit by a truck years ago, still mourning the dog after all those years as if they’d lost a son. The Railsbacks, who owned the butcher shop, used to give Stony old National Geographic magazines to root through for pictures for elementary school projects. He had rock fights with their nephew when he’d come to visit for his summer vacations.

He had known all these people here, and now, he was not going to ever see them again. Not that he was close to them, but he could only imagine what the world beyond Stonehaven would be like. He knew from TV, but he was not stupid enough to think that television had everything about the world. There was more to life than Stonehaven, and more than even Connecticut, more than New England. They could go down to New York by bus, maybe, and he’d get a job and they’d somehow get a place and raise their kid.

Somehow it would work.

It had to work.

God, I hope I never have to come back here again with my tail between my legs.

He took the route back to the Common, passing the library, feeling colder than the night air, feeling more alone than he had ever before felt in his life.

When he followed the roadside trail to the edge of the woods, he saw the feeble candlelight of Nora’s shack glowing within the woods. Stepping over the ditch, and through the moon-scraped trees, he went to the one place he knew would take him in.

13

“Tired?” Nora asked, as she stood in the doorway.

“Yeah.”

“I got a little supper still. Hungry?”

“No, thanks.”

“Sleepy?”

Stony nodded.

“What time is Juliet coming?”

He almost grinned, but something felt heavy in his face. “Morning.”

“Well, I got a sleeping bag with your name on it all ready. Come on in, Romeo.”

14

Nora awoke in the middle of the night, clutching her heart. “Stony!” she cried out.

Stony sat up quickly, tossing the sleeping bag cover away. “Yeah? You okay?”

Nora gasped. “Stony, I can’t tell you what it means, but I had a dream. Not a good one. It was a dream like one of my spins, and it was about Lourdes, baby. It was about your girl.” Nora leaned over the edge of her flat bed, lighting a candle on the floor. “She’s in a place of ice, Stony. She won’t come tonight, or tomorrow. She’s been taken.”

“It was just a dream,” Stony said. He rose from the floor, and went over to turn up the gas lamps. “It was just a dream.”

“True,” Nora whispered. “But dreams aren’t for nothing.”

They were both silent for several minutes.

“I can’t really sleep much I guess,” he said.

“After my dream, I don’t think I can either. You want to just sit up?”

“Wish I had a watch. I wonder what time it is.”

“I got an internal clock. I say it’s four A.M.”

“I’m hungry. You hungry?” Stony asked.

“Well, I see you recovered nicely from your starvation diet.”

“Do you think they miss me yet?”

“Maybe.”

“I know my mom’ll miss me.”

“Your dad, too.”

“He doesn’t miss people all that much.”

“He’ll miss you. I guarantee it.”

“Van I won’t miss.”

“You stole some money, remember? They’ll at least miss that.”

“She’ll understand.”

“Will she?”

Stony snorted. “What’s she ever gonna do with it, anyway?”

“Well, it was hers to decide that, wasn’t it?”

“I think it would have just sat there till kingdom come. That’s what I think. I think she would’ve squirreled it away until she was sixty or something, and then she wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“You think sixty’s ancient, don’t you?” Nora grinned.

Stony bowed his head. “All I mean is, it isn’t young.”

“Your mother was once your age. I wonder if she ever stole from anybody so she could be happy.”

“It’s not the same,” Stony said. “I’ll pay her back. Somehow.” Stony went over to the small pantry, and glanced around at its contents. “You don’t have any good snacks here.”

Nora laughed. “You’re feeling guilty.”

“If I told you I was, would it matter?”

“You’re just going to wait here till morning when Lourdes shows up, feeling guilty because you stole your mama’s secret savings account from right under her nose.”

“She’s a drunk.”

“And drunks should be robbed? You got a peculiar kind of morality. She’s a drunk, you’re a thief.”

“I didn’t ask for this,” Stony spat. “Will you just quit with the nagging?”

After he heard the echo of his voice, he said, “Sorry.”

“For what?”

“For sounding like my dad.”

“Maybe now you understand him a little better.”

“I don’t want to be from them.”

“Can’t help how we’re brought up or who by.”

“Like it never bothered you. You were raised by humble angel saints.”

Nora laughed even louder. “Oh Lord, Stony, you are gonna have me bustin’ a gut in a minute. Stop!” She laughed, waving her hands about. When she quieted, she said, “My father was a decent man. He never laid a hand on us and he worked hard. But he drank and caroused and more than once my sister and I had to go into one of the bars over in Somerville and pull him off some woman just to get him home in time for supper. And mama was one of those long-suffering women. She worked her fingers to the bone. But martyrdom is its own kind of hell, too. She turned suffering from a hobby into a lifelong mission. Martyrs usually take down a few people they care about because they want some company to suffer with. That was mama. Family is putting up with each other’s shit sometimes I guess.”

They were both silent.

Then, Stony said, “How much shit are you supposed put up with?”

“I guess whatever you’re willing to,” Nora said. “Why’d you come to me tonight, Stony?”

“You know why.”

“To run away with your girl and have a baby in some lonely place? To steal your mother’s savings, just so you can get out of town for a couple of weeks?”

“I guess.”

Nora sighed. She wiped her long fingers across her face. Then, she patted a space next to her on the bed. “Come on, sit up here, Stony.”

“I’m fine where I am.”

“Of course you are. I forget sometimes that you’re nearly a man. Remember when you were a little boy and you’d come out here to hear all my spins? We’d sit on the rug in front of the stove, or up here in my quilts, or out on the porch...Those sweaty summer nights. I’d tell you all my stories. Seventy years’ worth.”

Stony nodded. He walked over and sat down beside her on the bed.

“Well, I miss those times. Can’t turn back any clocks, but I miss that little boy. But you can turn the clocks forward if you want. I want you to think of yourself in fifteen years. You’re thirty. You have a good job maybe. You and Lourdes are happy. Your boy is your age now. And he’s going to ask, ‘Dad, how did you and my mama meet up?’ And what are you gonna tell him? How you fell in love with his mama? About the purity of that kind of love? About how you never loved any woman except his mama? About how men do the right thing, no matter what?”

Stony looked down at his hands, curled upward in his lap. He remained silent.

“I’m not going tell you the right thing. All I’m going to tell you is you’re welcome to stay here till morning. When Lourdes comes, you two need to talk. Then you need to think about the boy or girl of yours in fifteen years and what you’re gonna say to that child.”

Stony got up and went to fix a peanut butter sandwich at the table. He glanced out into the dark night. If there’d been a phone, he’d have called Lourdes and told her that he was going to come get her. He would’ve told her that it was all right to steal his mother’s money because it was worth a little time in hell for their happiness. It was worth some guilt. It was worth a little lying and stealing and pretending that they were doing the right thing. The universe wanted them to. The universe was made for those who took when the time was right; who jumped and grabbed what it was they needed for happiness. Happiness was all.

He saw his reflection in the dark window. It barely looked like Stony Crawford anymore.

15

The calls of night birds in the woods punctuated the more distant horn and warning bells of the train as it passed up from Mystic on its way north to Providence. The temperature dropped to thirty-eight, a jagged wind grabbed the last leaves on the trees along High Street, rushing down the narrow lanes that grew perpendicular to it. The oaks and maples held onto their colors for a future fight with the early winter wind off the sea. Clouds moved across the face of the moon like bridal veil, to cover her beauty, to protect her chastity, to increase her mystery.

JOHNNY MIRACLE! The voice boomed from the gathering clouds. JOHNNY MIRACLE! Again, like a clap of thunder through the trees that scraped the hazy moonlight.

Johnny Miracle stood shivering on Water Street, just outside the Blue Dog Tea Shop. The voice was both inside and outside of him. It boomed louder than any surf he’d ever heard.

“What?” he asked, looking up to the sky. “What?”

The sky was swallowing every utterance from his mouth until he was sure it just sounded like the bleating of lambs. He glanced at the passersby with their baby in a stroller, and at the old lady watching him from behind the Harper Real Estate Office sign. Oh, but they were ghosts! It was late—no one was watching him, no one was on the street, but in flashes of lightning he saw them—people standing there, mouths open...He blinked, and they were gone, these Watchers, these Spies for THEM.

THEM were the evil ones, THEM were the people who made him DO IT, who made him DO IT. Johnny often struck matches against them, struck matches to the burned bits of leaves, set fire to small trash cans, burned his fingers at times, too. Fire chased off THEM, fire made THEM scared. He always kept his pockets and busted-up old shoes full of packs of matches just so he could strike THEM in the face with the fire if it got to that point. THEM were so scared of fire it amazed him sometimes. God told him fire purified things, sometimes. God told him fire defeated the darkness and if anyone was darkness it was THEM.

Alone again, in the night, he raised his hands up to the sky as the first drops of rain began to fall. He tried to strike some matches against the dark, but the rain wouldn’t let him. “LORD GOD!” he bleated, “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE HERE?”

And the voice that came back to him was a whisper, tickling his ear.

The voice was always inside his head.

Every night for the past fifteen years.

16

In his head the images roiled and spun like multicolored taffy, turning in upon itself:

The man with the red eyes like rats, holding his hands as he stood in front of the church, as the people in the church raised their hands up—

As he, a boy, looked up at the man with the red eyes, who was dressed like a priest but not really a priest, the boy knew, not a priest like the way he remembered priests—

And how they’d pressed the blade to the lamb’s throat—

He was seventeen, working for the Butcher Shop, a strapping young man, ready to take on the world. The Crowns had paid for his upbringing and he now lived in their caretaker’s cottage. The world was a terrific place, and Stonehaven, the home of his ancestors, was the only place for him. And then, they brought him, that night, that night of Halloween, that night—

The flashes grew more intense—

That night—

“It’s something you must do,” Mr. Crown had told him as he unbuttoned Johnny’s shirt, a starched white shirt that Johnny had bought for twenty dollars from the mail-order catalog. Diana was there, such a pretty little girl, smiling up at him. Mr. Crown gave him the piece of paper and told him to lick it. “Like it’s a stamp,” Mr. Crown said, and Johnny licked the paper that had a sugary taste to it. Then, he started to feel funny, the faces in front of him became flowers and then it was like everything turned into a big cartoon. “Lick it more,” Mr. Crown said, and then someone pressed Johnny’s face into the paper, and his tongue swirled around on it.

Someone said, “We should’ve just put it on a sugar cube.”

“Or injected it,” a woman chuckled.

OH, Johnny screamed inside his skin, I WISH I HAD MY MATCHES! I’D BURN ‘EM ALL TO HELL IF I HAD MY MATCHES ON ME, I WOULD!

“Shut up, he’s like my son,” Mr. Crown said, and this made Johnny feel proud. “He’ll take it all.”

But Mr. Crown now looked like Mr. Magoo, and Diana looked like Little Orphan Annie with blank eyes and some of the people in the chapel looked like they were out of the Flintstones and the Jetsons.

Johnny hadn’t even struggled as he was told to pull his jeans down, too. The blue jeans melted off of him, they went like seawater around his feet—

Naked, he stood at the altar, and four of them held the struggling woman down—

Struggling?

Was she?

Was she struggling?

She shimmered, too, like a ripple on a golden pond—

Like silver fish darting beneath the surface of a glass lake—

The screams began and he looked at her mouth

But they didn’t come from her

(She’s not a her. She’s an IT.)

It was the cartoon characters that held her—their skin blackening and crackling—

But Johnny was gone somewhere too, he was in the swirling pattern of the stained glass window, the window with the picture of the angel holding the flaming sword to shut off the Garden of Eden.

And then he felt the rumbling within his flesh, as if his molecules were bubbling and transforming and getting all twisted up and bounced around until for a moment as he felt the intense heat all around him he thought—and this was one of his last coherent thoughts—that his skin was ripped off and he stood there at the altar, a figure of blood and bone and meat, looking out at all of them, all the cartoon characters as they sang praises and as he felt his brain scramble—

And then, nothing.

17

“Johnny,” God said, or was it Mr. Crown and Mr. Magoo together telling him things? It may have been the man with the red eyes, but it seemed like God. God had so many faces, and Johnny could always see through the normal face to the inner one where God lived. Sometimes he was so jumbled on the inside he didn’t know who was who, but God always came through. “Johnny, remember what time of year it is?”

He nodded.

“It’s time,” God said. “What happened was wrong. What we all got caught up in. It was a terrible thing to do. But it has to play out. We can never go back, can we?” God handed him a plate of food, which included a Burger King Whopper and coleslaw. “I got you some things. I forgot about the pear. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Am I a sinner?” Johnny asked, his voice emerging like a bleat.

“No, you’re not. You’re a good man. You’ve always been a good man,” God said. “We just reached too far, that’s all. It’s something we should’ve stopped years ago. Maybe the moment it started. I was too caught up in it. I’m the evil one. But to experience it—”

“No you’re not,” Johnny giggled, picking over the cole slaw. “You’re God, you can’t be evil.”

God gave him a look that he couldn’t figure out. “I just wanted you to know that I am sorry for what we all did.” Then God pulled his hat on and got back in his car.

God drove a Thunderbird, and kept the windows down even as cold as it was.

Johnny watched the T-Bird dissolve along the road, and then the air shimmered with its vanishing.

Chapter Nineteen

FLESH AND LUST IN THE OCTOBER PALACE

1

Diana Crown stood in the half-light of the hallway naked, and put her hand on the back of Van’s scalp. She grasped his hair in her hand.

“Drink the blood which is holy,” she whispered.

Forced him down on his knees before her. Brought his head to her thighs.

Smeared the blood on his face.

“Did you love it?” she asked.

“Yes. God yes I loved it,” Van Crawford, his eyes wild and quivering in their sockets, his hair matted, his face crimson. “Baptize me, baby, baptize me in the holy blood!”

Diana smiled. Almost innocently, she said, “I think you may have killed her, Van. That’s very very bad.”

Tears sprung from his eyes. “No, I loved her, I promise I loved her and I gave her red poppies to wear all over her face and body.”

“She’s dead, Van. Her heart stopped beating,” Diana said, her voice firm and cold. “But I understand, baby, I do, come here.” She let go of his scalp, and held her hands out to him. “Come on to me, Van.” And as he rose up, her arms enveloped him, pulling him to her. “How I love you, my strong killer. Driving your knife into her, the heat I felt, the thrust in every wound, the taste of her life—”

“Oh, yeah,” Van said, his tears drizzling down across his bloodstained face, pushing the rusty liquid into his mouth, down his throat. “Oh god, but I didn’t mean to hurt her—”

“Hurting is good sometimes,” Diana whispered, pressing her lips against his ear and biting down ever so slightly. “Pain is a ritual we all must endure.”

2

Van didn’t know what came over him, but he was chasing her up the stairs, up to the master bedroom where he’d first entered her, first made her feel like a real woman, she’d told him, taking her on the bed she’d said had been her mother’s. Even that had excited him further, and now, bounding up the stairs, two at a time, after her bloodstained flesh, watching the curves of her small, high breasts bounce as she went, her ass like smooth melons, he was going to have her again.

He was going to conquer what seemed just beyond his grasp.

She was giggling like a schoolgirl, her hair red, her skin red, too, slick and shiny as he pressed himself to her. She had surrendered, his Diana, his Diana of the Hunt who had stood by and watched him press his knife into the garden of Lourdes, had—

Remember what you saw?

Remember when you turned in the dark?

Turned and saw something there—

Something other than the girl you know as Diana Crown?

The voice was like a worm in his mind, but he ignored it as he took her up in his arms, and the room was spinning. Her legs surrounded his waist, and his pants began dropping to the floor almost of their own accord. He felt more powerful than any boy of seventeen had ever felt before. He felt lightning inside him, muscles of steel as he held her, as he pinned her—

Beneath her face, in the dark, in the moonlight, you saw her.

You saw the cracks along her eyes, along her lips...

What was it you saw Van Crawfish?

As you push yourself into her, into her depths, into that woman who changed in the October moonlight as if she were not a woman at all, but something made of red bright lava—

It was the blood!

No, it wasn’t blood, it was something else, something that looked out at you from the skin you now hold—

LAVA

IT WAS LIKE A FUCKIN’ VOLCANO BURSTIN’ OUT AT YOU—

And there it was again, as he held Diana in his arms, awkwardly shoving himself into her flesh. There it was in her eyes, as if the thin layer of her iris were pushing outward and something that looked like the pink of inner flesh showed through. Pink and then orange then red then... And as she pushed him backwards, onto the bed, he saw lying next to him the body of Lourdes Castillo and he screamed, “What the fuck have you done to her?”

Chapter Twenty

THE TALES OF THE STONES

1

When the sun came up, Stony began to regret his decision to run off, but he still didn’t think he could go back home. He stood on the little wood porch that overlooked the bog, a mug of Cat’s Claw tea in his hand.

“Second thoughts?” Nora said. Nora had gone back to sleep for a bit, and had only just awakened. She emerged from behind a screen where she took her sponge bath in a large aluminum basin filled with cold water and hog-fat soap. She looked refreshed in a pale pink sweater and dungarees, and poured herself some tea before joining Stony outside.

“Maybe,” Stony said, when they’d started walking out across the flagstone path in front of her shack. “I just wish Lourdes would show up.”

“Maybe she’s having second thoughts, too. Or maybe she’s just sleeping. She didn’t steal money. She has less to feel guilty about.” Nora grinned, reaching out to find Stony’s shoulder. When she did, she drew him close to her. She smelled like lavender and vanilla. “She’ll come. Don’t worry.”

“Yeah I guess,” he said. He was uncomfortable with her touch. He pulled away.

“Watch out that you don’t step in that mud,” she said.

He glanced over at her. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re really blind.”

“Sometimes I do, too,” she said, her grin growing broader. “Let me tell you, you live seventy years at the edge of these woods, you know where the mud seeps and where the pricker bushes are, real fast. Listen, Stony, seeing as how it’s Sunday and the last day of October, why don’t you lead me over to the stone garden? I need to pay my respects.”

“You got a stone garden? I never saw it,” he said, eyeing her suspiciously. “What you got up your sleeve?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said, almost gravely. “Just something I think you should see before you run off with your girl. Follow me.”

2

She led him around grasping vines and fallen and rotting trees, between laurel, and around undergrowth. “Mind your feet,” Nora said as she took him down a narrow strip of muddy land between a pond and some bushes.

Then, he saw it.

A rusty gate, barely noticeable for the tangle of dried vines that clutched at it, stood in the middle of a clearing. Ferns grew up around it, and within:

A circle of stones.

3

Some of the stones were large, some small, but all were neatly arranged. When they went through the gate, Nora stepped carefully over stones the precise location of which she must have memorized. She knelt down in the middle of the circle, and patted a small place beside her for Stony to do likewise.

“What is this?” he asked, squatting down upon the damp moss-covered ground.

“My family,” she said. She felt along various rocks, and then lifted a small stone. “This was my sister, Angelina. She chose the stone herself when she died. It’s not like we could afford expensive grave markers, Stony. And Mama never wanted any of us to be buried in the village. She said all my grand-daddies and grand-mamas were put in the sacred place, not in those devil places.”

The stones around him all had initials carved into them.

Then, as Stony glanced about the soft earth, he noticed the slight mounds. The stones formed a small circle, but radiating out from them, the mounds. “It’s a graveyard.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Crawford,” Nora said. “My grandmama told me that all of us Chances and Owldeers—that was my grandmama’s side—were buried here clear back before the village even existed. Back when I could see, I used to tend these graves and mow down all the new growth from the woods, but as you can probably tell, the woods have reclaimed much of it.”

Stony nodded, noticing how even further away, where the pricker bushes grew, the ground was raised or dropped like a brief trench. “Amazing.”

“I come out here when I’m troubled, to pay my respects, to put things in perspective, sometimes,” Nora said. Then, she picked up a small stone, and held it out for him. “Take it.”

Stony hesitated.

“Feel it first. Feel this stone. They say stones can speak if we listen.”

No initials were carved along its edge. It was nearly smooth.

“Let me spin a story for you, Stony. One last story. One I’ve been saving for a long, long time, but now that you’re going to be a man, I think you can hear this one. I think you’re ready. Many years ago,” and Nora began her final tale. “You listening, Stony?”

“Yeah,” he said.

4

Stony, now, you got to listen to this one. And not just listen but really hear it, you understand? This is the last spin you’re ever gonna hear from my lips because this is the last one I know. I told you all the others. But I’ve been holding back on this one.

A woman who drank too much gave birth to a baby. The baby didn’t have much of a chance. The baby was too small, came too soon, the baby was twisted around and backward inside this woman. It wasn’t the baby’s fault. It wasn’t even the woman’s fault, even though her drinking didn’t help. Didn’t help that she got kicked in the stomach that morning, either. But it was just life doing its worst to the most innocent of us I guess. This baby, he tried to get born but he couldn’t. He might’ve had two minutes of breathing clean air and seeing daylight, but then the Lord took him back. Maybe it was the Lord’s plan. Maybe it wasn’t. But this baby did not breathe too long or suffer more nor less than any of us will suffer in this life.

5

“Was it yours?”

“No. Nor was it one of my friends’ or relatives’ child, but I come from a long line of guardians of the innocent lost.” She pointed to another grave.

Stony glanced at it. The initials carved in it:

I-M-P

Nora leaned back on her haunches. “Remember that story about the misshapen Crowninshield boy?”

“The Halloween Man,” Stony nodded. “Sure. He slaughtered a bunch of people and crucified his father.”

“That’s the story that’s told. But there’s a deeper truth to it. The deeper truth is, Imp knew that something was in the blood of this town. Something that turned bad like the way milk turns sour, the way flies hover around a corpse. He was almost killed by the people of this town, and something maybe from the Devil got into him and he went on a rampage. But we knew, we who were of the slave families and natives, we knew...it was the earth here and it was the darkness within some of the people who had founded Stonehaven in the first place. Both within and without. That family called Crowninshield and the Randalls, they weren’t just nice Puritans coming here. You know their history? They got expelled from the Massachusetts Colony.”

“Witches or something?”

Nora smiled gently. “We would’ve been lucky if they’d been witches. No, these folks were too good as Puritans. They were too close to the source of divine evil.”

“I never heard of divine evil.” Stony would’ve laughed at the term, only Nora looked too serious.

“It’s worse than any other kind. You know how a fire can warm your bones in a hearth? But that same fire, if it jumps can burn your house down? That’s what divine evil is. It’s the power from the source of all, taken out of itself. That’s what those people did. That’s what Imp came from. That’s what he tried to destroy. But it got him, too, finally. But not before he fathered a child. Deformed and twisted just like him, that child fathered a child and so on. Imp had a bloodline.”

Stony looked at her curiously. “Maybe we should get back.” He glanced beyond her, toward the trees, and her shack. “Why did you bring me here?”

Nora put her hands on Stony’s shoulders. “Your mama and daddy are not who you think they are.”

Stony, holding the small stone from the grave, felt something squeeze inside his head—a pressure he hadn’t felt before. Swiftly, it became a throbbing headache. Then, he felt warm, too warm—warm like he had a fever.

Nora leaned closer, her breath against his face. Her glassy white eyes almost seeming to watch him. “The stone in your hand, that is who you were meant to be.”

“What? I don’t get it.”

“A baby was born fifteen years ago and breathed for only a few minutes. Then he died. His mother was in a station wagon down on Water Street. The rain began to fall. I could not see, but I saw within my mind. I am the last of my family here. I am the last who knows the true history of this place. I was afraid I might die before telling you. But you and this girl are going to start a family, and you need to know.”

Stony looked at the rock. It was as if something in his brain were squeezing, like a sponge, and it hurt so badly he couldn’t make sense out of what she was saying to him. He looked from her to the stone, back again. He was not even sure if he could breathe. “What—I don’t—what is...If this is my mother’s baby, who am I?”

Nora wrapped her arms around him. He tugged away.

“You’re angry,” she said.

“I don’t believe you.”

She drew him back to her, her arms around him, pulling him so close, her heat, her love, it was smothering, it was something he’d never felt...his mother had never even held him like that...not like that...not where he felt both safe and afraid...

He felt her breath near his ear as she whispered the damning words.

“You’re from the bloodline of the Halloween Man.”

6

Stony pushed her away, and Nora fell back slightly. He stood up, brushing dirt from his knees. “Shut up, just shut up. You and your stupid stories. Your stupid stories all these years I been listening to and buying into and making believe because I thought you made up—”

“You’re a man now,” Nora said. Her voice was deep and firm. Nothing about her face betrayed any emotion. “You should know. They should’ve told you, but I know they never would. Not until it is too late. And now—”

“Stupid bitch,” Stony snapped. Then, he said, “I’m sorry.” Then, he was almost afraid to ask the next question. He stood over her, not knowing where to turn. Who else could he trust but Nora? Who else would ever tell him?

And then all the fights came back, the nasty knock-down-drag-outs of his childhood, of his father screaming:

THAT BASTARD! EVER SINCE HE WAS BORN THINGS JUST GOT RUINED FOR US!

And his mother, holding him over the flame of the gas stove, his face so close to it. The Moonfire burning, weakening him.

It was almost a surge of relief that went through him now.

“So who is my father? My real father?”

“Your birth father is Johnny Miracle,” Nora said. “And he, in turn, is the descendant of Imp.”

Stony caught his breath. He felt blood pounding through his body like hammers. His heartbeat zoomed. He felt feverish, his hands trembling. “I came from him?”

“Don’t judge that man,” Nora spat, and for the first time Stony felt venom in her tone. “Do not dare to judge that man! He is from a sacred bloodline. You too are from that bloodline and you should look at what it means. You people in town with your cold ways and your attitudes judging those you best not pass judgment upon! Your birth father is a man of divinity and if you knew yourself better you would understand...” Then she knelt down again. Her tone softened. “It’s too much for you to understand. Sometimes I don’t even believe or understand it.”

“Who’s my mother then?”

Nora was silent. “Something I know nothing about.”

“Is it someone in town?”

Nora closed her eyes. She brought her hands to cover her mouth as if wanting to keep something in, to keep it from escaping over the dam of her lips. A hissing sound came from the depths of her throat. Tears pressed from her eyes like wine from grapes. She brought her hands down to her lap, holding them together in a fist of prayer. “I wanted to never have to tell you any of this. I wanted you to grow up and I wanted to hope that all these years it could be forgotten. Buried like the baby from your mother’s body buried beneath that stone. But I can feel them, I can feel them.”

“Feel who?”

“Them. Those people.”

“Who?”

“The ones who own Stonehaven,” she said. “The ones who did this.”

“Someone owns Stonehaven?”

“They’ve always owned it. They own every piece of property in the village. They have owned it since the village began.”

Stony brought his hand up to Nora’s face. He cupped it beneath her chin. “I always wished that you were my mother. I sort of wished that my mother was like you.”

“And I wish I had had a son like you, Stony, as badly as I wished for my sight to return, I’ve wished for that,” she whispered. “But I’m not your mother.”

“I know. But in a lot of ways you are.”

When she calmed, she said, “I told you all those spins about the children with flies in them, and about the ice house of damnation and about the Halloween Man, because you needed to know. Your mind needed to work those stories out.”

“What were you trying to tell me?”

“It’s not that everyone in town knows. Some are strangers, and have only come here in the past thirty years. Some commute in the summers from New York. Some just don’t know. But others do.”

“What’s so secret?” He felt the chill of morning seep into him, and the sun’s light felt cold on his back as it cut a swath through the trees.

“You’ve always heard about how you were born, Stony. And it’s almost the truth, what you heard. You always heard stories about how things happened before you were born and it’s almost the truth...but I have lied to you. So have others. Oh, I have lied like the worst sinner on the face of the earth.”

Something went placid like the calm surface of a pond, only inside him. “I don’t care. I forgive you. I really do. What is it? Tell me. Tell me the truth.”

She opened her eyes to him, and began.

Chapter Twenty-One

NORA’S PAST

1

This was back when I could see just like you can. I had pretty brown eyes flecked with cinnamon. They were my best feature my mama told me. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. My windows were always sparkling, I can tell you.

You know we got two lives, sometimes more. I don’t mean like reincarnation, I mean like we have our life of innocence and then it rams right into the real life. The life where innocence is just a mirror—looks nice, reflects a lot, but it ain’t the real thing.

I was not a God-fearing girl when I was growing up. I ran wild. I never finished grammar school, and never worked. My mama was always chasing me with a broom, and telling me I was going to hell. When I was seventeen, mama threw me out of the house. I lived in the streets most nights, searching trashcans for food, or going to the backdoors of restaurants for scraps like a dog. This was over fifty years ago, and I can tell you that in a little village like Stonehaven, girls like me were not well treated. I drank too much, too, which always got me in trouble, and then one day this nice man told me that he needed someone to help with his sick wife. I refused at first, but he told me I’d have a warm bed to sleep in, a roof over my head, and three meals a day. Plus all the liquor I could hold when I wasn’t working. Something about his offer got to me, and he seemed not only kind but also enormously wealthy, at least to me. “I ain’t no nurse,” I told him. He told me that was all right, his wife didn’t need a nurse, mainly a companion to sit with her, perhaps play cards. This sounded like the easiest job in the world to me then.

I went to this man’s house. Did I just say house? Stony, it was a castle. It was the biggest place I had ever seen the inside of. Marble and big fireplaces and views of the water and martinis as big as lobster traps. No fish-stinking men pawed me, no cheap whiskey, no sleeping under a gutter while the rain got under my bones. My room was small to this man who took me in, but looked like a room at the Ritz to me. I had my own big bed, and a private bathroom with a full tub. I thought I’d made it. My mama thought I was his whore, but she didn’t understand. The man never touched me. I spent mornings and afternoons sitting beside his wife. She seemed to be in a coma to me, but sometimes she’d flutter her eyes open and look at me almost serenely. I’d sit there and sometimes talk about nothing but the weather and what was in the magazines. Or I’d turn up the radio and we’d listen to the good shows, and I’d laugh when Jack Benny came on, and she’d flutter her eyes open. Easiest living I ever had. I was drunk half the time. Sure, sometimes I had to spoon-feed the old lady tapioca or wipe spit from her lips. But someone else did the bedpans, and another nurse was there for her at night. I never asked what was wrong with her, since I figured you don’t kill the golden goose, right? It was their business anyway. I was just happy to have a spring of comfort and good living.

Then, one morning, I had some beer, it was a hot summer day. Beginning of June. A cold beer with a little lemonade in it. I came up to her room, and drew back the heavy curtains.

“Rise and shine my mama always said,” I told her.

When I turned around, the bed was empty.

It had been neatly made.

I stood there looking at the bedspread as if I didn’t understand what this meant.

I went downstairs, looking for one of the other servants, but couldn’t find anyone. I had never looked around the house all that much. Never had much interest in it. But I got a little attached to the old lady, lying there practically dead but still there, still a resident if you know what I mean. She was really the only person I ever spent time with in that house. The servants didn’t talk much to me—they were too good for me I guess. So I figured oh Lord she died, or they took her down to the hospital or something. I wandered room to room, trying to find the man. But everyone was gone. I went into the kitchen, made me a cup of tea and sat for a bit. It was just too silent. Too damn silent.

I was feeling a little bad, too. I mean I had this gravy train in that house. I could have whatever I wanted there. And now, if the old lady died, I’d be out on the street again. I didn’t want that.

I went over to the liquor cabinet and pulled out a bottle of gin. Uncapped it, took a good swig.

Then another.

I started crying.

Poor little me! I thought. Poor little Nora Chance! Poor little girl whose mother didn’t love her, whose men abandoned her, and now this old lady went and died and took away Nora’s only shot at living the high life! Poor, poor girl!

I wandered that house in a daze aided by booze and then I see this door that looks like the door to heaven or something. The place was spinning around from all my drinking. I see this door with an arch, and it’s all dark wood.

Around its edges are these cute little carved angels, and in the middle of the door is this inlaid picture of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. I look at her a long time.

I say to Mary, “Look you may be the mother of baby Jesus, but you got no right to take away the old lady from me. She was my bread and butter.”

I raise the last of the gin up and just splash it across the picture of Mary.

Then I’m feeling repentant, drunk and sorrowful. I just blasphemed the Virgin, I know my life is a damp hell, and I need to get down on my knees and beg Jesus’ forgiveness right then and there. Words from my childhood come up, words of preachers, words of my mama, the words I saw written above the little chapel door:

BLESS THE FRUIT OF HER WOMB

And I’m thinkin’, now what the hell does that have to do with anything? The fruit of her womb? What fruit? She’s made out of stone, this particular Virgin. I open that little door, and walk into this room. Only it’s a little chapel with pews and banners and little stained glass windows and I walked down and then drop to my knees.

The chapel gets cold, real cold. I’m weeping and asking Jesus forgiveness, and then I hear something moving behind me.

The door closes, and the room gets real dark. Some kind of smoke comes at me—it’s incense, it stinks, and I start coughing. When it clears, a yellow mist seems to come off the altar, and I go up. I know I’m drunk, so I know this is half me and half a miracle because I know now Jesus is there with me. I know how wrong I’ve been. I see the error of my ways. I’m begging Jesus! Beggin’ him! “Help Nora Alice Chance!”

My voice echoes in the room. I’m raising my hands. The bottle goes crashing to the floor.

And I see something behind the altar as I crawl up to it. The altar’s no ordinary one,  either. It’s stone slab on stone slab. And as I crawl up to it, penitent sinner that I am, I see metal behind it, some kind of metal box. A big one, one almost as big and long as the altar itself.

I pull myself up and I see the mist coming off the top of this box. It’s made of copper or something. Looks real old, all hammered out, and it has this...this figure sort of dented out around the top...this thing sort of sleeping in the picture, as if dead, and I think it looks like one of those Egyptian mummy cases, you know, and I’m wonderin’ what in hell these Crown people are into.

This gets my curiosity going, and I look at it for a minute thinking it’s strange.

And then, I hear someone weeping from within the box. Or maybe it’s just a child outside the chapel. Or maybe it’s some animal in it.

And then, I see its hand reach out from the small square window on the copper box. Bars like a prison there.

The hand.

2

Nora took a long breath, pausing in her story. Then, she continued.

3

I don’t remember what I thought then, whether I wondered if this were a child playing a game or if this were someone trapped there—

But it didn’t matter. The chapel door opened and light flooded the place.

I turned around, and there, standing in the doorway, was the man.

“What the hell are you doing in here? I told you never to go wandering,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Look,” he said, as he swiftly walked towards the alter. “You come into my house and I clothe and feed you and ask so little of you and now you betray me.”

He walked right up to me, grabbing me by the back of the neck with one hand, and slapping me hard across the face with the other.

Then, he looked from me to the box.

“You see it?” he asked. “It’s what you came in here for isn’t it? You want to see what has been forbidden from mankind for centuries to get near, don’t you? You want to gaze upon it, you drunken whore.”

I pulled away from him, but he grabbed me around the waist. I was too drunk, I felt weak. I started screaming and kicking out, but he lifted me up and then threw me down in front of the box.

“You want to see it! You want to!” he’s shouting. “Then look! Gaze upon its radiance!”

He opened the door to the cage, and for ten seconds I saw what seemed to be the burst of a thousand suns. Dazzling yellow and green light and within it something else.

A being.

A creature.

Something that you only read about but never see.

And then, the colors melted, the light dimmed, and a pain shot through my eyes as if someone took their thumbs and pressed them deep.

I was thrown back, and the wind got knocked out of me.

When I came to, the light still seemed dim, and I had a pain in my eyes. I was lying in bed in my room, and two of the servants were holding my arms and feet down.

The man leaned over me, his eyes wide and blank as if he were not looking at a human being but a thing.

In his hand, a small blade that was bright orange with heat.

“She’s coming to,” he said. “Quickly.”

Someone pushed their hands down on my forehead and the flat side of the red hot blade came down to my left eye. As I screamed, I realized that rags had been stuffed in my mouth. I felt as if I were choking.

Then he raised the blade and brought it to my right eye, too.

4

“I wandered for days in these woods, until my mother found me. I had been sleeping in the mud, eating grass and weeds, talking to myself. If someone had shot me then, it would have been a kindness. But my mama was a good woman. She took me in, and she and my sister never spoke of what happened, and neither did I. I learned to make candles and bring in peoples’ wash, the old way. My mother and some of her friends built this shack for me so that I’d never again have to go into that village. She told me the old stories, and she gave me the corn doll for protection,” Nora said. “She warned me about the village, but I still went back sometimes, Stony. I still wanted to know what that was, that light—as if by some miracle the old man could bring my eyes back to me.”

Stony remained silent. “Who was he?”

“It was Mr. Walter Crown. He got killed doing some business deal in the Far East, years ago. But his son, who is now Mr. Crown, was eighteen by then and took over the duties of the family. Before they were Crowns, they were Crowninshields. And it’s they who own this two hundred acres of land called Stonehaven. The lady I sat with, her name was Miranda, and she was Walter’s older sister, not his wife. I don’t know what became of her that day, whether she died or whether—as I suspect—she was destroyed by that demon in that cage.”

“It couldn’t be a demon. Nora, come on,” Stony said, almost playfully. “Come on. Demons? Monsters? That’s for movies and junk.”

Her face seemed to shine, as if there were ashes and fire beneath her skin. “I saw its hand, Stony. It was almost a human hand, but it had this...this...smoke coming off it. And when I beheld it...”

Then he said, “Why are you making all this up?”

Nora pushed herself up from the ground, using one of the large stones to help balance herself. “Truth and lies get mixed up with people, Stony. You know that. But I have been preparing you your whole life for who you are and what you are part of. You are a Crown. You are the son of Johnny Miracle and a Crown. And the Crowns are of the Devil. It’s a blessing that they gave you up to your mama and daddy rather than let you be raised by those Devil worshippers.”

Stony squinted at her as if trying to understand. “This is ridiculous. This is totally ridiculous. If this happened...if this really happened...” He shook his head violently. “Not that I believe it, it’s totally nuts, but if this did happen, why would they give me up?”

Nora reached over and held his hands still in hers. Her face, lined and dark, was nearly calm. He knew she was not a liar. She had never been one to lie outright. She was a storyteller, but had always separated her spins from the truth of things. He wanted her to be lying to him. He wanted it badly.

“When you were born, Mrs. Crown could not give you life. She could not take care of you. They needed a mother, and they needed a mother who would keep this secret. And I suspect that your mother never told you that she worked as a nurse in the Crown house the year you were born.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Stony asked, feeling numb.

“Because you are going to be a father soon, and a man. There are things you must know,” Nora said, her voice gentle. She reached up to the sky, her hand balled into a fist. “I vowed to God I would tell you everything when you came of age. I vowed I would not let them do to you what they intend,” her voice grew in strength, and a cold wind blew down through the trees, bringing with it damp brown leaves. She turned her face upward, sweat shining on her dark skin. “I am not going to let this lie live any longer. It has eaten at my soul as surely as if a wolf had crawled into my bed. I will not let them have the little boy who I came to love as my own son!”

Chapter Twenty-Two

THE VILLAGE, AT THE END OF OCTOBER

1

So many things happened that morning in Stonehaven Borough, so many threads that invisibly emanated from Stony Crawford, that to know everything, one would have to spread like fire from house to house, to see the Indian corn on Alice Everest’s front door, which she had just finished nailing up, and the fat little jack-o’-lantern she’d put out, hoping that the teens in town didn’t throw it into the street for just one Halloween night—

Yes, Halloween, Johnny Miracle laughed within himself, hanging onto a tree branch. All Hallow’s Eve! It’s glorious, it’s glorious and it’s coming in the wind, all has been foretold, all that has been now will be—

From his mouth, words that were mangled, spreading like the red leaves of the nearby birch across the drying grass of the Common. He struck match after match as if trying to set the air around him on fire.

2

Down at the General Store, Martha Wight had the cheap plastic masks and flimsy costumes of fairies and goblins and superheroes from half a dozen comic books, all hanging from a wire above the dry goods. Few children came in to buy them anymore, and even fewer would be trick-or-treating. Times had changed, and even though some of the adults would have Halloween parties in the houses on High Street, the children more often than not were warned of candy corn gone bad, or chocolate bars stuck with heroin needles, of apples poisoned and studded with razor blades by wicked witches right out of Disney’s Snow White. But the old ways of Halloween still showed through the cracks in Stonehaven. The multicolored corn strung across doorways like mistletoe, the pumpkins and stacked sheaves of straw leaning against the sides of the clapboard houses, the pumpkin-head scarecrow that the Doane sisters set out on their porch swing, all of it bespoke a remembrance of the harvest. The sons and daughters of Stonehaven had harvested the sea for centuries, from the now near-extinct whales off the islands, to the lobsters, crabs, clams, mussels, herring and cod that they were still supplying to restaurants along the coastline.

Harvest and bounty were two words that were strong in the soul of New England, and Stonehaven for all its isolation was no exception. The sea and the earth had provided all that the town really needed for centuries. All outside influence was superfluous at best; at worst, a curse. The forests of the area had provided the material for boats and housing, the granite quarries to the south had laid the foundations and sidewalks, the bounty of sea and woods and field had fed the original founders of the village, and although now tourists in the summer tossed coins in the local coffers, you’d never see this acknowledged.

Tamara Curry was the only resident who did not love the signs of Halloween as it approached. She felt it was far too pagan, too far removed from Jesus and the Bible. She told this often to Fiona McAllister at the library when she went to get her romance novels from the paperback section. “It all comes from witchcraft,” Tamara said, pointing across the desk to the poster of a big orange moon with a witch flying across it. The text of the poster read, “Halloween Is For Scary Reading,” which Fiona tried to point out to her, but Tamara would have none of it.

“It’s worshipping the Devil, bottom line,” Tamara said. “And I only wish we were living a couple hundred years back. They knew what to do with devil worshippers back then.”

“You know,” Fiona said. “It used to be assumed that a woman with a lot of cats was a servant of Satan.”

“My cats are all Christian cats, you know that better than most, Fee,” Tamara huffed. “All of them been baptized good with the sign of the cross and no one can say otherwise, and blessed. You know how they’re blessed.” She grabbed her books and stomped out of the library.

Walking down the granite steps, and then across the Common, she saw what seemed to her to be one of the signs of the Devil in Stonehaven itself.

Johnny Miracle, sitting up in the great old oak tree.

“That tree has been there for hundreds of years, Johnny, you just quit polluting it.” She raised her fist at him. She was in a bad mood now, what with Fiona’s smart mouth making a blasphemous joke about her cats. “You—you—Spawn of the Devil!” she spat.

Johnny Miracle smiled, as he usually did when someone yelled at him, and waved from his perch among the thick autumn-gold tresses of the oak.

3

Stony heard Nora calling to him, but it was too late.

He had to run, he had to run and get the hell away from her. Something was wrong with her, maybe living in the woods had gotten to her finally, maybe it had been there all along—her insanity—but the stories she was now telling could not be true, they had to be the imaginings of a crazy old woman who he had got too close to—

He ran across the mud and damp leaves, nearly slipping at points, wondering why the hell Lourdes hadn’t shown up—if she had, he would never have heard Nora’s ravings—

Nora whom he had TRUSTED! Nora who told him these crazy stupid things that could never be real! Nora who believes in demons and devils and old Indian curses and old slave ghost stories and was not logical—and had no electricity, for Christ’s sake, she didn’t even own a phone or a TV, how could she possibly know ANYTHING about ANYONE!

When he got to his house, he flung his bike across the yard, and ran up the steps. Throwing open the door, he shouted, “MOM! Where the hell are you?”

He took the stairs two at a time, and when he came to the landing, his mother stood there in the doorway. She wore her bathrobe, and her hair was greasy and hung in strands around her face.

“Stony? Something up?” she asked, almost suspiciously.

He pulled the roll of bills from his pocket. Taking off the rubber band, he threw the hundreds down at her feet. “Where the hell did you get this money?”

She was silent. She looked from him to the floor. Her lips trembled. “What you been getting into?”

“I want to know where the hell you got all this money. Two thousand dollars. In a box under your bed. I saw it when I was four, and it’s been sitting there ever since. You can’t pay your bills on time, but you have two thousand dollars cash sitting in a box under your bed.”

“Your father put you up to this?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

“No one put me up to this and I don’t give a damn what you think, you just tell me about this money. And tell me about when you worked at the Crown place. When you worked as a nurse there.”

“Who told you that?” she asked. “What liar told you that filth?”

“Just you tell me. Never mind anything else.”

“Don’t you come into my house acting like some nasty little man,” she spat. “You don’t know nothing about what my life is. And you going through my things and taking money. Money I been saving for you and Van all these years.”

“For me and Van? Is this how much it cost to keep you quiet? Is this how much it cost for you to raise me up? I know who my father is, Mom. I know I’m not your son! I know that’s why Dad always fought with you, because he knew. And you knew, too. You knew and they paid you off and now you’re gonna tell me just what it is that’s so damn secret that no one in this town is gonna give me a straight answer on!”

“You just shut up you bastard,” his mother said, her voice different in tone than he’d ever heard. She pointed to the money. “That is blood money, and you are lucky that your head wasn’t smashed against a rock the minute you were born. I’ll tell you who you are, you bastard. I’ll tell you how you changed this family when you were born. How my husband would never touch me again. How I’ve had to pretend I care about you when you didn’t even smell like a baby, you smelled like nothing when you were a baby, you wouldn’t even cry. You just stared at me like you knew everything, and I had to put your mouth to my breasts and it would turn my stomach when you suckled. It would make me want to vomit.” Her mouth was a snarl. “My son had to DIE and you have to LIVE and I had to take care of you because of this money that I can’t even touch because I know what I did. I know what I was part of!”

Stony dropped to his knees. He covered his ears.

“You want to know it? Did that bitch in the woods tell you? Did she? I knew she would one day. I knew she couldn’t be trusted. Did she tell you that you would be dead today if not for me? Did she tell you that I lost my little boy the minute he was born and then I had to decide in one minute if I was going to take you? And all I wanted was my little boy and something in me thought that you could be him. You could be him. And I spent the past fifteen years of my life pretending to love you, to love you and hope that it would somehow just work, but even your brother Van knew early. He told me when he was six that you had something wrong with you. He told me that you looked like other babies but you had something that made him think you were evil. And I knew you were, but I just pretended for so damned long! And I tried to kill myself—but I couldn’t! Even though I hated you, I knew you were a baby—and I knew that God would send me to Hell for eternity for killing myself and abandoning my children! Jesus tells us to bear our burdens gladly but I couldn’t! Not with you!”

Stony dropped his hands to his side. Steam felt as if it were building inside him, and he felt a ripple—a movement within him that he could not identify as if his blood were heating up, as if the sounds of distant waves crashed along his bones and muscles. He opened his mouth and the words that came out did not feel like his. “Tell me who my mother is! I want to know!”

“Listen you little ungrateful bastard, the only reason I took you is because a priest put you in my arms and gave me that money because I needed to know that I could get away from here if I ever had to. I took that money as payment for you and your sorry sniveling little ass and now you throw it up in my face. Now, get the hell out of my house. Get the hell out of my house!” Tears streamed down Angie Crawford’s face, and she looked uglier than he had ever seen her, uglier than he thought any human being could look. Her eyes were wild, her hair tossing up and down as she shook her head, as she slammed her fists against her stomach, screaming.

4

In the Castillo household, Lourdes’ mother turned to the police officer from Mystic who had shown up early and said, “She hasn’t come home all night. I told you people something happened. I told you last night. She’s a good girl. She doesn’t stay out all night. Something’s wrong. I bet it’s that boy. That boy from the village. That village has always been bad. He’s been up to no good with her.”

This was the most composed she had been in nearly nine hours, when she’d sent her sons out into the woods and to town to try and find their little sister.

5

Others in town detected a slight change, as if the coming winter had just drawn a breath closer, for frost was in the air, frost and something about the light of this day that seemed on the verge of going out completely.

Stonehaven Borough was arranged in a series of neat and tiny paths, all crisscrossing as if part of a labyrinthine design. At its heart, the Common with its old library, and at its autumn-yellow edges, the Post Office and churches. The old Customs House on High Street, the apartments above the few stores in what might generously be called downtown Stonehaven, the old venerable captains’ and their widows’ houses along Water Street...all intersecting, all winding around each other until, smaller and smaller, the village ended at Land’s End. There, the glassy water surrounded the stubby finger of rocky land. The gulls and cormorants rose and fell with the water, and Guff Hanlon was taking his morning constitutional before going back into the village to work his winter hours in the public library. A few boats were out upon the shining waters, and the Isles of Avalon were just gentle slopes of haze out in the Sound. Guff saw, as he rounded the tip of Land’s End, what looked to him to be a strange light coming from over at Juniper Point, back by the few summer mansions. The light was yellow-green, and flashed for only a few seconds. But it was enough to startle him. He checked the position of the sun in the east, and thought it might just be light glinting off one of the windows of the Crown place. Something about the light seemed interesting to him, so he went and sat at the edge of the water, crossing his legs on one of the large rocks that shored up the point. He watched the summer homes from the great distance for a few minutes, and then decided he had just imagined it. For nothing could produce a light quite like the one he’d seen.

He was about to get up and continue his walk, when he saw the light again.

And something else, too.

Later, as he pushed the cart of books down the Oriental rug in the center of the Stonehaven Free Library, he gave a nod to Fiona McAllister. She wore her low-cut peach blouse, and the tan skirt he liked so much on her. She followed him past a few early-morning patrons, into the narrow hall of the book stacks. In the dark, dusty room, he turned to her. She tried to kiss him, but he kept his distance. “Something’s wrong,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It’s not you. It’s me. I saw something this morning. Something that bothered me. No, wait, it didn’t bother me. It terrified me.”

She put her arms around his shoulders. “Tell Mama,” she whispered.

Guff shrugged her off. “Not now, Fi. Not now. I thought the Crown place was on fire this morning. I thought it was burning...” Then, tears poured from his eyes, and he no longer looked like a man in his mid-forties, but like a boy of nine. “I wanted it to burn. I wanted it to...”

“You imagined it,” Fiona said, trying to comfort. “Don’t say these things, Guff.”

“No,” he said. “I saw it in the clear light of day. It’s getting stronger...”

“Oh, baby,” she said sweetly, and this time, he fell into her arms, and she kissed him all over, she kissed his neck, his closed eyelids, his nose, his lips, his chin. His tears mingled with hers. “It was a long time ago,” she whispered. “A long time ago. We were all so young then. All so young and innocent. It’s all right. It’s a good thing.”

“I was there,” he moaned, a little too loud, not caring if others heard him. “I was there. You...all of us...”

6

“Where the hell you been?” Del asked. He had just managed to escape the school bus, and was down at the docks by eight-thirty A.M., drinking beer and skipping stones across the water. He had his wool cap pulled down almost over his eyes, and his sweatshirt was covered with seagull shit.

Van stood over him, not exactly looking at him, not exactly looking through him, either.

Something was funny about the way Van looked, but Del couldn’t quite figure out if he was just dirty or what on account of the way the sun was gleaming so damn hard and striking the water too so it made flecks of light dance around Van’s face.

And then, as Del shaded his eyes, he knew

It’s blood.

Goddamned blood.

And Van—his face, his hair, all crinkled and wrinkled and white as a worm—

Van was soaking, his clothes, his skin, and he left a trail of blood as he stepped closer to Del and took a beer from the six-pack. Van hunkered down beside him.

“I’m fucked,” Van said.

7

The Village had its own morning bustle, as Officer Dennehy walked shop to shop with a picture of Lourdes Castillo in one hand, and a Styrofoam cup full of coffee in the other. He stopped first at the Package Store, and walked among the rows of wine bottles to the cash register. Martha Wight, her white hair flecked with pepper, sat flipping through a copy of the National Enquirer, cigarette in one hand nearly singeing the pages. She glanced up, a ribbon of smoke curling around her craggy features. “Ben?” she said.

“Good morning, Marti,” he said. He set his coffee down. Tossed the photo on her counter. “She’s been missing since last night. Parents are worried.”

Martha Wight gave him a curious look. “Never seen her before. She from the Village?”

He shook his head. “Wequetucket. But she was over here yesterday. You got any rock candy?”

“Never seen her before,” Martha repeated, giving a light shrug of her bony shoulders. “Rock candy’s over in the jar.” She pointed to a series of small jars on the far counter. “You eat enough of that stuff, your teeth’re gonna fall out.”

“Too late. Half of ‘em are already gone,” Dennehy said. He walked over, lifting up the lid. The rock candy was blue, and on strings. He lifted one strand up, popping a bit of it in his mouth. He glanced around at the costumers and the liquor and magazines as if he’d never seen the Package Store before. “You probably know every kid in town, huh? Probably always trying to get some beer or candy or something?”

Martha Wight shook her head. “I don’t sell no beers to minors, you know that, Ben. These kids. They’re all the same. This one probably ran off with some boy. They run wild.” Taking a long drag off her cigarette, she raised her eyebrows. Exhaling a powerful lungful of smoke, she added, “If I see her, I’ll send her home.”

The cop hit three more shops, but reached a dead end on all of them, until he came to the Railsback Butcher Shop.

Butch Railsback, hacking at a side of beef, his apron smudged with blood and entrails, glanced at the picture. “Yeah, dat’s Angie Crawford’s boy’s girl. Lourdes. Like that miracle place. Lourdes. She’s a cutie. Hope she’s okay. She and Stony, dey’re prob’bly off somewheres toget’er.”

Then, Officer Dennehy asked, “You know, that’s what the girl’s mother said. But when I stopped by the Crawfords a half hour ago, Angie told me she had no idea who this girl was.”

Butch shook his head. “It’s her. I seen ‘em both together kissin’ behind my shop. Maybe Angie never seen her before. Could be. Could be Stony-boy don’t take his girl home to meet Mama.”

When Dennehy was out on the street again, he noticed that more than a few shop owners seemed to be watching him.

As if waiting to see where he’d go next. He waved to each of them and thought:

Dear Christ, what a beat I got. Save me from old New England and the way they watch and wait and then never really step in with information until it’s too late.

8

The kitchen at the Crowns’ house was long and wide, meant for entertaining company with dinner parties.

In the early part of the twentieth century, it had been used precisely for that. Dozens of the almost-rich and almost-famous would arrive in droves in the summer. Coming from Manhattan or down from Boston, the flappers and their feckless beaus with slicked-back hair, the charmed circle that the Crown family drew to them—never men as powerful as Crown, never women as wealthy as Mrs. Crown—but those who needed something from them, or got something just by being among the Crowns. Nouveau-riche movie stars, oil tycoons, upscale gangsters and their mink-glazed molls, all gathered for frolics and dalliances, and the kitchen was often the center of the hive as illicit liquor was, more often than not, hidden in one of its secret compartments beneath the long sink with its six faucets. You could almost hear the echo of laughter and gaiety as couples ran around the cooks, dipping their fingers to taste the sauce, or uncorked another magnum of Dom.

But the wild times and parties had ended, and within a few years, the summer home became a reclusive place. By the time Diana was born, so little entertaining had been done there that they no longer employed a cook in the summer.

Alan Fairclough stood in the kitchen, and poured himself a glass of aged Scotch. Sipped it, looking about the place. Glanced at his watch. Eight-thirty A.M. He had slept well, and was not surprised by her call two hours earlier. “It’s happening. I can’t believe it, but it’s happening,” she’d said, her voice thrilling, her excitement palpable.

“All Soul’s Day coming,” he had told her. “The rituals are the fine-tuning.”

“Yes,” she whispered. Then, after a pause, “There’s a lot of blood.”

“That’s all right. Don’t let it worry you. This is part of the plan, Diana. There’s nothing to fear. You know that better than anyone.”

“I’m not afraid of it. I’m afraid of—”

“Of losing yourself to its totality. Don’t be,” Fairclough said softly. “Look, I’ll have some breakfast and then I’ll bring the boat over.”

Then, Diana said, “I did the ritual. Just like you taught me. I wasn’t tainted with the sacrifice.”

Alan smiled, glancing out the window of his home, across the Sound, to the thrusting finger of Stonehaven, and the great white house at its edge. “Purity. Did he love her when he did it?”

“I think so. Yes. It almost brought it out in me,” she whispered.

“That’s all right, Diana,” Fairclough said soothingly. “It’s natural for that to happen. It’s nothing to fear.”

Now, two hours later, in the grand kitchen, Alan Fairclough felt as though everything he had ever searched for was at hand. Everything he’d ever believed in was coming true.

In a few moments, Diana Crown appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “It’s happening,” she said, sweat along her forehead. “Just like you said it would.”

Alan raised his glass. “Sometimes one has to prod these things along. For the sake of religion.”

Her face could not be more perfect, he thought. What she was, what was within her—

The magnificence of it.

All his life he’d been searching, and to find it here, among this family, tucked away...

“I have something for you,” she said.

“Him?”

Diana nodded.

Alan tasted the bitter fire of whiskey at the back of his throat. “Do you think he has much fight in him? Last night must have been...well, exhausting to say the least. You had to push him over the edge, no?”

She shrugged. “Does it matter?”

Alan Fairclough grinned like a little boy on Christmas morning. “Oh, infinitely so. I want to give him a sporting chance.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

VAN

1

“What’s all that?” Del asked, but looking at the blood on Van’s shirt, he didn’t need to be told. The smell was enough. It was like sticking his face into an open wound.

“I fuckin’ killed her,” Van said, and then began giggling. “Shit, does that ever sound goofy. I killed her.”

Del cocked his head to the side. Took another swig of beer.

“It was not like killing her though, Del, man you got to believe me,” Van said, his words coming out rapid-fire. “It was more like making cosmic love to her, it was like fucking something that opened like a flower, it was sweet, I know it was wrong to do, I know it was bad, man, but it was like not killing her, it was like she whispered to me to make holes all over her and then she opened them all for me—for me, man—for fuckin’ me—and then she said, well, come on in, Van, baby, I want you inside all my flowers—she was like this garden...”

Both of them were silent for a moment. Del heard the cries of seagulls overhead as they dropped crabs and clamshells along the pavement behind them.

Van popped the tab on a beer can, his eyes squinting as he glanced around at the sun-spotted water. “I’m fucked, man.”

“Is this a joke?” Del asked, and then it struck him—of course it was a joke, man, Van was always playing pranks and shit, he one time pissed on six different doorsteps in one night, and another time he took a dump on Tamara Curry’s back porch just so when she went to feed her cats in the morning, she’d step right in it. Van was a fucking genius at practical jokes and stuff. “I know, you went down to Railsbacks’ and got Butch to let you wipe like a dead pig or something all over you and that’s the blood and shit and stuff—” Del raised his beer can, “Good Halloween costume. Me, I’m goin’ as Dracula, but you—Man you are one sick mother, but my hat’s off to you, dude—”

Van’s expression flickered like there was a translucent mask of happiness over a face beneath it. A face that was like imploded flesh, like someone had stuck a hand grenade down Van’s kisser and pulled the pin.

“I mean, it’s pretty freaky for you to do this for a damn costume, but man, it’s gonna scare the bejesus out of the bitches from Wequetucket if we haul ass down there tonight—” But even as Del said these words, something about them felt hollow, as if in saying them he was hoping to cover up whatever black hole Van was sitting in.

“I killed that bitch that my baby brother knocked up,” Van said, his lips quivering, as if all the awfulness of the previous night had just hit him. He squinched up his face, looking like an old wizened man for a second. He drank the rest of the beer.

The sunlight felt good. Del looked out across the water to the south. He could see Stonington and Mystic down that way, and some trawlers pushing out to the east. The curve of land, and the yellow-gold of trees as their brilliant colors swept the sky with a chilly breeze, all seemed part of the world of normal life that gave Del some comfort. He didn’t look back at Van. “You’re shittin’ me, man.”

“No, man, I’m not. I really killed her. Look, she was walking home through the woods. Like she always does when she and Stony get together. Remember when you and me spied on them?”

“Yeah,” Del said, wanting to chuckle at this memory but something icy caught in his throat. “Yeah I remember. Last summer.”

“Yeah he was getting some off her, and whore that she was, she put out good. Well, it was like that, only it was me and Diana—”

“Something’s wrong with that bitch,” Del interjected.

“And then something got inside me, man. It was like I had swallowed some yellow jacket or something and it was all jiggly inside me and I heard these voices—”

“You’re loony tunes man.”

“Shut up,” Van snapped. “And then, it was like she gave me permission and I had this knife, this knife—”

Del glanced over at Van. Van drew a large hunting knife from his belt.

Several strands of dark hair were stuck to the blade.

“And it was like she gave me permission, like that bitch Lourdes gave me permission to jab her, only it didn’t seem like a knife it seemed like my wang each time I entered her and it didn’t seem like I was stabbing her, it was like—like—I was doing her—” Van caught his breath. Del wasn’t sure if he was weeping or laughing, but suddenly Van raised his hands over his head, the knife held high. “I’m gonna kill myself right now, right now, man, I need to take myself out!”

“Shit!” Del said, pivoting to the side to make sure that he didn’t get stabbed.

Van dropped the knife. It clattered to the dock. Then be bent down, wobbling as he went, to retrieve it.

“You really kill her?” Del asked, and wondered if he could get up and run fast enough to get away from his friend who looked like he was Charles Manson on a bender. “You really really kill her?”

“I stabbed her so many times, dude, that she squished when I hugged her,” Van whispered. Then, exhausted, he grabbed another beer, sinking back onto the dock. “What the fuck am I gonna do?”

Del, considering his options, shrugged. “What you do with the body?”

Van, a gulp of beer in his mouth, sprayed it. “Shit!”

2

Alan Fairclough took his time walking up the stairs. His morning glass of whiskey still in his hand, he glanced out the windows onto the stables. It was good to be alive at the end of the two thousand years since the God had descended; it was good to be alive when the Age of the Spirit was upon the world.

It was good to be the priest of the new age.

When he came to the bedroom on the second floor, he felt the old excitement. The tumescence in his groin. The feeling of youth within his muscles. That surge of energy that always accompanied his blood sport. The Crowns had, over the years, supplied him with a steady stream of youths and maidens, and it brought out the Minotaur in him. He loved sparring with an athletic young man, a young man who felt that he could easily take out the old bastard who tried to punch him.

But Fairclough enjoyed the sport too much. He’d let the boy have a hit or two at his expense, and then he’d begin the battering. The bewildered youth wouldn’t even understand what was going on, what this would lead to. Wouldn’t even guess at the power that grew in Fairclough, the pleasure that burst from his brass-knuckled hands as he pummeled a face into pulp. Or the girls, how he could torture them just by holding them down and doing nothing but slicing a gentle razor against their fine brows.

Killing was not his game.

The youths were paid, and sent on their way, hustlers and whores all to some degree, paid handsomely for the privilege of Fairclough’s brutal touch.

But this one, this boy, this Van Crawford, who had done the sacred duty, who had shed the innocent blood of the lamb—

Who had unwittingly begun the work of the gods—

He would be delicious.

His pain would be like communion wine.

To know the light of God, one had to know darkness first.

Alan Fairclough, opened the bedroom door, and saw the blood-soaked sheets, the indentation where Van had rested his head in the night, and the bloody footprints to the window.

Out the window, he saw the red stains along the flagstone walk.

“Damn it,” Fairclough said, setting his glass down on the windowsill.

“He’ll be back,” Diana said minutes later when Fairclough came storming downstairs, shouting curses. “He needs me too much. He needs what we have. I know him inside and out now. He’ll want me again.”

3

Within a matter of minutes, her words proved true.

Glancing up, Diana saw what seemed at first the face of a deranged clown, his hair matted, his face pale with redness around his eyes and nose. Van. He’d been crying. He was incinerating himself from the inside out with his need for her. His hunger. What he got from her was like an addiction, and he needed his fix.

She leaned over the sink, reaching up to push the window out slightly.

“Please,” he said. “We need to talk. Let me in.”

4

Van’s hunger for her was immense. Away from Diana, he felt weak and spent, but close to her...breathing the same air...

His brain felt as if it were at war with itself. The blood dripped from his scalp, blinding him as he went down the hall. Always, the house was in shadow, as if the Crowns did not want too much light in their sanctuary.

Van wiped at the blood on his forehead. He tasted the fire of his own fever.

The fuckin’ bitch! Look what she made me do! She sent me to Hell! She’s such a fuckin’ cunt! Oh my GOD what she made me do!

He looked down at his hands. The blood burst and suppurated like lava wounds, flowing across the palms, trickling down his fingers. Stigmata fountains—and in each of his hands, a mirror. In the mirror, a reflection, not of a face, but of a mask. A mask ripping apart like paper, it showed the yellow fat of life beneath it. Something gibbered and spat like a creature made entirely of nerve endings.

That’s me!

That’s fuckin’ me!

He screamed, slamming his hands against the walls. “No! You can’t do this to me, you fuckin’ bitch!”

Diana came out into the hall. Reaching over, she flicked on the hall lights so the morning shadows were wiped clean.

He had expected to see her in the light of day, a monster.

But she was not one. She was still beautiful, too beautiful, too damn alluring, her hair falling loose along her shoulders, her eyes full of sunlight. She wore a beautiful sheer white dress, showing off her pale thighs; didn’t she know what she was doing to him? She probably had not even slept, yet she looked stunning.

“You didn’t even say goodbye, Van Crawfish,” she said.

Couldn’t she see the hell he was in? Couldn’t she feel the pain that shot out around him like an aura?

“I almost called the police on you,” she added.

“Ha!” He laughed, clapping his bloodstained hands together. “That’s a good one!”

“Look at you,” she said, her voice low, “coming in here, out of control, tracking blood, reeking of dead meat.”

She stepped forward and he saw what he had seen in her in the dark the previous night, the thing that had zapped his brain somewhere, the thing that didn’t seem right, for when he looked at her, it wasn’t like looking at a woman at all, not a woman named Diana Crown, but it was like looking at a dark creature with golden eyes that shot fire—

He remembered then all that he had seen, all that had been wiped clean from his brain in the past month, since he’d met her, all that had somehow hidden in his mind, as if it was too terrifying to contemplate—

“You’re a fuckin’ devil worshipper!” He screamed. “You made me do that last night! And that thing you got in the chapel! That thing from Hell! Oh my god, I’m gonna go to Hell! You’re makin’ me go to Hell!”

Then, Van thought he heard footsteps coming up swiftly behind him, but when he turned to look someone slugged him hard in his jaw and he thought:

Damn, it’s true! You really do see stars—

A tall skinny old man stood over him, holding what the oar of from a boat. “You piddling little fuck. Time for me to have a little fun.”

Van tried to push himself up, but could not.

“There’s nothing I like better,” the man said in a clipped British accent, “than a local boy with a high tolerance for pain. Ah, what I will do with you, Mr. Crawford, will open up vistas you now only imagine. When the pain becomes too intense, like fire, it numbs. Then you don’t feel anything. I would never want to get to that point. I want to almost get there, Mr. Crawford. Almost. Just to the brink. Just enough so your nerve endings continue to scream for as long as possible. But don’t worry. I never kill a boy unless he begs me to do it.”

The man dropped the oar. It clattered on marble. The man crouched down over him, holding his face up. “You know what I get from this? No, of course, you don’t. Let me tell you my little secret. I get closer to God, Mr. Crawford. I get a little closer to the secret of creation. It’s one of the rituals that’s necessary for me to feel anything at all. I get what you might call a ‘charge’ from it. Permit me to introduce myself. I’m Alan Fairclough, and this, my friend, is your finest hour.”

The man raised his fist and brought it down, but that was only the beginning.

5

Eventually, it was over.

Eventually, the man named Fairclough who Van had begun to call God stopped slapping him, hitting him, whacking him, kicking him.

Eventually, Van lay in a heap, and was not sure just how long he lay there, or even if he was still alive.

The last words he heard from Fairclough were a wormy whisper in his ear:

“Now, Van, you have proven satisfactory. Thank you. Should you live, I’d advise you to get out of this house soon before my appetite returns. If you’re too weary to leave, I’m sorry, but as you know, sometimes the blood and the fight are enough of a charge, even without the kick inside, that little feeling you must’ve gotten when you stabbed her—what was it? One hundred and six times, yes that was the number, one hundred and six times, but you know, that was part of the ritual too, Van, that was part of opening up something that God has sent to us, and I thank you.”

Perhaps an hour, perhaps two, passed, before the will to live flickered within Van Crawford’s soul. All that was left within him longed to just make it right, to just somehow make it right again.

Chapter Twenty-Four

GOD, STONY AND JOHNNY MIRACLE

1

“You said I looked like my mother,” Stony Crawford said, his face flush, his eyes almost wild, his hair falling across his face as if windblown.

The priest glanced up from his desk. “Stony,” Father Jim Laughlin said. He closed the magazine he’d been reading. Picked up the rosary, fingering the first bead.

“You said I looked like my mother,” Stony repeated. “What did you mean?”

“I—” Father Jim began. Then, “Have a seat.”

“Just tell me.”

Father Jim nodded. Closed his eyes. “All I meant—”

“Not Angie Crawford. I already know. I know Johnny Miracle is my father. Who is my mother?”

“When I was younger,” the priest began.

Stony interrupted. “Listen, I don’t want to hear your private history, Father. I want to know who my mother is.”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Well then who can?” Stony asked.

2

Johnny Miracle climbed down from the tree when he saw God coming with the teenager. God always wore a smile for him, and God always took care of him and brought him food.

Johnny ran across the Common, and greeted God with a great big bear hug that made God groan slightly. Then, God said, “Johnny, I want you to meet someone. Someone you probably have watched grow up here—” and Johnny looked at the boy, the tall gangly kid who he’d seen ride his bike down the streets so many times. Johnny nodded to the boy, whose face seemed to be set in stone.

Then, God said, “Johnny, this is your son.”

Johnny Miracle felt as if his breathing had stopped, as if his whole body had split apart, as if God were touching the lining around his heart as it beat. Tears came to his eyes without his knowing fully why; he bit his lower lip to keep from shouting.

“My son,” he said. “My son.”

3

Stony felt nothing but pain in his head, and a feeling as if he were somehow a ghost and not real anymore.

“All I want to know,” he began, but before he could say another word, Johnny Miracle grabbed him up in his arms, hugging him tight. Stony pulled away, but Johnny’s grip was stronger than he’d expected. It was like being hugged by a grizzly.

“My son!” Johnny shouted, weeping, his smile as big as a jack-o’-lantern’s. “My son!”

After Stony managed to extricate himself from Johnny’s grasp, he asked, “Who’s my mother?”

Johnny Miracle didn’t seem to hear. He raised his hands up to the sky and shouted, “Thank you!” Then, looking at Father Jim, “Oh, God, thank you thank you thank you!”

Stony waited for the shouting to die down.

“Who is my mother?”

“Oh,” Johnny tilted his head to the side as if rattling the marbles around in his skull. When he spoke, his voice was its usual slurred nonsensical sound. What Stony’s mother—not my mother, not anymore, he reminded himself—had called “Village Idiotese.”

“Oh, your mother, your sweet mother, she was sent by God Himself, she was an angel, she was all beautiful and pretty and when they mated us—and they were all there, my son—oh, when they mated us, it was like heaven and hell meeting in the middle.”

Stony glanced at Father Jim. “Who are they? Who’s he talking about?”

Father Jim hung his head down. “I can’t speak of it, Stony. All I can tell you for now is, you were brought into this world, and you needed a family. You needed the Crawfords. You didn’t need the Crowns—”

“Fuck you,” Stony said, suppressing an urge to punch out the priest, feeling his fifteen years bubbling with steam that needed to get out and quit with all this bullshit adults were passing around.

“Don’t you talk to God that way!” Johnny Miracle shouted, his idiot grin turning maniacal. He raised his arms and swatted at Stony, clipping him on the chin. “Don’t you ever talk to the Lord Your God that way!” He swung his fist through the air wildly, but Stony ducked. “No son of mine is ever gonna—”

Stony was already running, running but not knowing where he would go, running past pumpkins piled in doorsteps, past the Blue Dog Tea Shop, past the Package Store, past the policeman who shouted for him, past the streets, back to the light house at Land’s End, back to where he could forget that this morning had ever occurred.

Wake up! Wake up! He shouted inside himself. It’s a dream! It’s a nightmare! You’re gonna be late for some math test! You had too much of that Cat’s Claw tea at Nora’s and now you’re hallucinating in her shack! None of this can be real, none of this can change so quickly! Nobody has been lying to you all your life!

When he reached the tall yellow grass behind the lighthouse, he looked across the Sound and screamed at the top of his lungs just to get it out of himself, just to let it go.

He looked back to Juniper Point, to the Crown house—

The Crowns.

He sat down on the ground, and lay back, staring up at the hazy sunshine.

Oh Lourdes, wherever you are, I hope you’re far from this, I hope you’re at school sitting in Chemistry class wondering why I’m not there. Wondering why, because you decided not to run away with me, that it was all foolishness. And you’re sitting there wondering why you can’t tell me about how you couldn’t slip out of the house this morning, or how you had to tell your mother you were pregnant and she and your dad threw a major fit and now they won’t let you talk to me anymore...

Lourdes Maria, I know you’ll understand all this, all this bullshit. I know you will.

And then, something snapped inside him, so loudly, it was as if a twig had been stepped on near his ear.

Something snapped, and he felt the world going black.

“See? I knew it was a dream. I knew it,” he muttered, and then pinpoints of dark and light fluttered in front of his eyes. A pain inside his head seemed to burst—

He thought he heard the hoof beats of distant horses galloping along a shallow surf.

Then, he blacked out.

Inside a dream, he saw the Cove, and Lourdes stood out on the water, wearing the dress she wore to church. She held her arms out to him, but when he stepped onto the still water, it turned red, and the swans all rose, their wingspans enormous, as they took to the skies.

He glanced up, watching the beautiful white birds, and saw fire erupt from their wings until the entire world burned from their beating.

Then, Stony Crawford opened his eyes. His head was throbbing. He wiped at his dripping nose. His hand came back bloody. “Shit,” he muttered, sitting up. He’d only been out a few seconds. He felt exhausted.

Officer Dennehy said, “Hey, kid. Stony, right?”

The policeman stood on the edge of the path by the lighthouse.

“You okay, kid?” the cop asked.

Stony sat up, heaving a sigh that felt larger than his six-foot frame. “Yeah, I guess.”

Dennehy stepped off the path, walking over to him. “Let me help you up, okay?” He squatted down, and put his hand under Stony’s elbow.

Chapter Twenty-Five

THE COP

1

“I’ve been looking for you all morning,” Dennehy said. “You want some rock candy?”

Stony shook his head. He leaned back in the seat, glancing out the window to the Sound. Seagulls dove down and up from the choppy waves. “I’ve been around.”

“You okay? Looked like you passed out. I don’t smell any alcohol...”

Stony felt very arch. “Let’s just say I’m having a shitty morning.”

“Hmm.” Dennehy cocked his head to the side, considering this. He popped a piece of the transparent hard candy into his mouth, crunching down on it. His back molar hurt, and he knew this probably meant another root canal for him.

“Why’ve you been looking for me?”

Dennehy brought out the picture of Lourdes. “This your girl?”

Stony nodded. Then, “Something’s wrong?”

Dennehy shrugged. “She’s missing. Know where she might be?”

“You tried her home?” Concern in his voice. The teenager was worried. Dennehy could see right away that Stony had little to hide; but he did look like someone who hadn’t gotten any sleep for a few nights.

Dennehy gave him a flat stare. Then, “Kid, you look like you’ve been through hell. What’s up?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Sure I do.”

“No, you really don’t.”

“All right. So, tell me about you and Lourdes Castillo.”

“She’s my girlfriend,” Stony said. “We were going to run away together this morning. We were gonna get married.”

“So what happened?”

“She never showed up.”

“Tell me about you.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Dennehy said. “Geez, kid, this village is full of you die-hard New England types. Get back into the world. I’m here to help. I’m here to find your girlfriend. I ain’t the enemy.”

Then, both because Stony didn’t know what else to do and because something in him felt like he would burst, he opened his mouth and let the story out, beginning with the revelation from Nora, all the way to the encounter with Johnny Miracle and Father Jim.

Afterwards, Dennehy said, “Holy shit. That is a mother of a morning, kid.”

“Yeah,” Stony nodded, “it’s Halloween and I keep hoping it’s all a big joke on me.” His voice cracked, fragile. Dennehy had a sudden impulse to drive the kid the hell out of the borough, down to Mystic, pass him to his sister Irene to give him a big bowl of clam chowder and a sandwich, and tell him to wait down there till Dennehy could locate his girl. If half of what the teenager said was true, this was not exactly the best time for his girlfriend to go missing.

Dennehy started up his patrol car. Voices from dispatch mumbled from his radio, but he turned it down. “Stony, tell you what. Let’s go out to her family’s place and maybe we can figure out where she might’ve gone. Okay?”

Stony shook his head. “No way. If she’s not there, I don’t want to have to take bullshit from them, too. I need to find her.”

Dennehy drove back up to High Street, taking the curve a little too fast, almost hitting a lazyass cat that stomped proudly into the street and then ran like hell when the police car was on it. Then, on impulse, he pulled over again. “Listen, you want to go take a nap or something? My sister’s got a spare room down in Mystic and you really look like you need a few hours of shut-eye.”

Stony shrugged, his eyes blinking closed. “No, I’m fine, seriously.”

“Yeah right,” Dennehy sighed, as he drove on out of the village, out to Route 1, down to old Mystic and the gray clapboard on Greenmantle Drive where Irene would already be making lunch.

The teenager in the seat beside him was already asleep before he’d even gotten to Wequetucket.

2

Stony awoke in darkness.

Sweat trickled down the back of his neck.

He heard voices out in the hallway. A needle-thin shaft of light from beneath the door. For a moment he thought he was a little kid again, and his parents were fighting, but these voices were more soothing.

“It’s only been four hours, let him sleep some more,” the woman said.

“Yeah, but he’s got to go back, he can’t stay here,” it was Dennehy’s voice. “Besides, maybe his girl is looking for him.”

“Why are you so concerned?”

“I just am. He’s been through hell.”

“That cockamamie story you mean,” the woman huffed. “He’s a teenager. Teenagers make up stories sometimes. You were like that.”

“No, Irene, I know he was telling the truth. Nobody lies about that kind of stuff. And you know about those stories—”

“Oh, good grief, and you believe them. A bunch of fundamentalists in Wequetucket spread a rumor nearly twenty years ago about devil worship in that village and—”

“It’s my beat. It’s a weird town. I’ve seen a few things—”

“And you’re a cop. You gonna tell me that you believe that a bunch of Satanists are living over there? The evil rich people who use the villagers for their sadistic black masses?”

Silence. Stony stretched, sitting up on the feather bed. He swiped at the sleep in his eyes, and tasted the sourness of the last of some dream in his mouth.

“You know I don’t believe that,” Dennehy said. He cleared his throat. “My point is, maybe this kid should never go back there. The situation with his family, with his—”

“That’s not your business,” the woman said. “Remember the last time you tried that? What was her name? Natalie?”

“Stop it. I did what I could for her.”

“Yeah, and now she’s a ward of the state and probably will never be the same again.”

“Well, they beat her. They probably would’ve killed her.”

“Maybe. Maybe,” the woman’s voice softened. “You can’t save everyone, Ben. You just can’t. Whatever that boy is going through, you have to let him.”

“It’s just that...”

“Ben?”

“It’s just that...I was there, Irene. I was there the day he was born.”

“That boy?”

Silence.

“I was doing my rounds, just wandering, and I heard the mother screaming, and I went over...It was raining hard. It started raining so hard I couldn’t see straight, and when I got there, the priest was there, and others were there, too, the Crowns, and well, lots of people, maybe ten or twelve, and it was like they formed a protective circle around the mother and I swear, Irene, I really am positive I saw two babies. One, all bloody and the other all clean and not precisely a newborn and...”

“Ben?”

“Both of them were crying. Both of them were alive. But the priest, he—”

“No!” The woman shouted, and then Stony heard a muffled cry.

“I could not believe my eyes. I would not believe them. But now, with this kid, fifteen years old, Stony Crawford, and the story he told me. It all fits.”

“They killed the baby? You’re sure?”

“That’s the sad part. I’m not sure. The rain, it was so hard, and I couldn’t really see, and then later I asked somebody—maybe Marti Wight, or that woman with the cats, Curry—and they told me there was only one baby. That I’d imagined—”

“And you’d been drinking,” the woman said, her voice softening again.

“Yeah, that was before. My six-pack suicide badass cop breakfast. Back in the bad old days.”

“Oh, Ben,” the woman said. “Oh my God. I’m sure this isn’t like that. Nothing is that bad. People aren’t that terrible.”

Silence.

Dennehy said, “Aren’t they?”

Stony got up out of bed, and went to the window. He pulled the blinds up, and saw a little garden in the light of early evening. Beyond it, a pack of trick-or-treaters, all about three feet high, were walking along the sidewalk of the opposite street, one of their fathers guiding them with a pumpkin-head flashlight.

Carefully and quietly, he lifted the window up, feeling the chill of night brush past him as he did so.

3

To get from Mystic to Stonehaven, even in the dark, was a five-mile hike, but Stony grabbed the six-fifteen bus up Route 1, jumping off just beyond Stonington, and then walked the final two miles along the dark slender offshoot highway that went into the borough. He thought of going on up to Wequetucket to see if Lourdes had returned home, but decided that if she had, it might be good if she stayed there awhile.

His blood was boiling, and he felt an anger surge through him that he hadn’t known before.

There were lies and lies upon lies, and he felt a fury at his family, and at the village which had raised him up only to slap him hard when he’d nearly reached manhood.

As always, Halloween night in the village rarely meant children trick-or-treating, it almost never meant anything other than darkened houses with their harvest displays out on front steps. The few kids that did trick-or-treat were usually taken up and down one block, but the neighborhoods tended to not open their doors, preferring instead to leave out bowls of candy for the little kids to grab up in their bags. Stony felt a breeze come up as he walked alongside the cove, over the bridge, into the village. The temperature had dropped several degrees in just a few minutes. He drew the hood of his sweatshirt up. He noticed that he stank, which came as no surprise since he hadn’t showered in twenty-four hours, and his exhaustion and anger seemed to come out of his pores. When he finally reached his house, it was nearly seven at night. It was silent, empty. His mother would still be on-shift at the hospital down the road, and his father would probably be drinking with his lobstering buddies down at the docks. Well, not really my mom and dad, he thought. The idea of it was vaguely comforting. Fuck ‘em all.

He took the longest, hottest shower of his life, and felt like he was scrubbing the past off his hide, Ivory-soaping all the memories, rinsing the badness that had infected his life.

He watched the filthy water run down the bathtub drain.

After he dressed, he went downstairs, and tried calling Lourdes. Her mother answered.

“Yes?” she said.

“Is Lourdes there?”

“Stony” Mrs. Castillo asked, and the voice was one of suspicion. “That you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Is—”

She cut him off. “What have you done with my daughter? Where is she? Why was she not home last night? What did you—”

And then, the line went dead.

Stony stared at the receiver, trying to make sense of what she’d said.

Last night?

Lourdes hadn’t even come home last night?

Stony felt the presence of someone behind him, perhaps a slight sound had clued him in, perhaps it was the fetid breath...

He turned.

Van stood there, with the phone cord, unplugged from the jack, in his hand.

“No calling out. Not right now. Not right now, Stony baby brother. I done something real nasty.” Van dropped the cord.

In his other hand, his large hunting knife, unsheathed.

4

“You trying to call her? Ha! You ain’t never callin’ her again!” Van, his face barely recognizable beneath a mask of blood and torn flesh, stood before him in the living room. “I killed Lourdes. I killed her.”

“Bullshit.” Stony felt his heart leap, felt something scratch at the back of his throat. His limbs felt heavy. This was pure hell, the day and now the night, this was pure hell, and he had somehow been plunked right down in the middle of it. His world had turned into a nightmare of questions and confusions, and now, this...

“She’s at the Crown place. They put her in this bed. They’re sick fucks. Diana Crown is...is...she’s something fucked up, Stony. She got this thing in her eyes. She got this power!”

Then Van drew something from his pocket.

Passed it to Stony.

It was the small purple flower that he’d given Lourdes, which she’d put in her hair. Last night. Standing in Our Lady, Star of the Sea. Put it into the Virgin’s hand, but Lourdes had laughed and said how Mary didn’t need it, and had put it in her hair. How beautiful the flower had looked in her dark hair.

Only it was no longer purple.

It was red and small and pulpy and smelled of blood. Three long strands of black hair were entwined around it as if they’d been pulled out violently at the roots.

“What the—” Stony looked from the flower in his hands, to his brother.

Van grinned, half his teeth rotted and yellow, his white hair almost on end. In his hand, his hunting knife. “You know you’re the one doing this to me. You are. I can feel you inside me making me do this!”

Stony stepped back, sure that Van was going to plunge it into him.

“I never fuckin’ liked you, baby brother,” Van giggled, and then thrust the knife into his gut, twisting and turning it as he brought it up to his throat.

Van Crawford spilled across Stony’s shirt.

Chapter Twenty-Six

1

“Jesus!” Stony cried out, falling back, wiping the blood off him, tearing his blue shirt off, pulling his soaked-jeans off. The blood seemed to go right into him, into his skin, into his throat. He felt the electricity of his brother’s life go through him.

A bloody grin spread across Van’s face, and he drew the hunting knife out just as if he still was there, still inside that bloodied and chopped body, and he held the knife out to Stony—
take it, a whisper within him said.

take it. use it on them. I couldn’t. I’m not that strong. you’re the strong one.

“No! Van!” Stony shouted, his skin soaked with his brother’s blood, watching the last of his brother shivering, falling like a marionette whose strings have just been cut, falling down in a heap of dark red-brown mess. Steam rose up from the body.

Some wire overheated in Stony’s brain, he felt as if he were teetering on the edge of a chasm—

It’s just a nightmare, none of this could be happening, none of it. All of it had to be a joke, a trick, a dream.

Feeling a power surge through him he held his arms out and screamed at the top of his lungs. His voice echoed. The screams came back at him, multiple screams, all with his voice.

Stony felt a strange rumbling inside him, as if a volcano within his own body threatened to erupt. I’m going crazy. I’m watching this going crazy. It can’t be happening. This shit doesn’t really happen. He held his hands to the side of his head. Don’t lose it now. Don’t lose it. Find Lourdes. Somehow you’ll find her. She can’t be dead. She has our baby.

Then, a deep calm swept over him. The room shifted, as if cleaning something horrible from it. The body still lay there, the cheap blue carpeting soaking up the pour of blood.

But Lourdes was his only thought.

Stony went and grabbed clean clothes from the hangers in his closet. He put them on. Don’t think about this yet, some part of him instructed. Don’t think about what you just watched your brother do. Lourdes is the only thing you need to think about. If she’s in some trouble, if she’s at that house, then you need to find her.

2

He took his mother’s station wagon, the station wagon that had contained the mythic story of his birth, but not his—oh no—the birth was of some other Stephen Crawford, this one, this Stony was born in the Crown house. Every damn thing in his life happened at the Crown house, only he hadn’t known it, and now it was all so fucked up he didn’t know which way to turn. He had only driven a car once before, with his old friend Jack the previous spring, driving out on the dirt roads down in Wequetucket once, in Jack’s father’s car, just dirt roads, and he’d learned how to use the brakes and all the other fun stuff, but now he didn’t care if some cop pulled him over. Who the hell cared? HA HA HA, OFFICER DENNEHY MY BROTHER JUST DROVE HIS HUNTING KNIFE FROM HIS NAVE TO HIS CHOPS AND YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT ME DRIVING WITHOUT A LICENSE?

Something had become so calm, so peaceful, as if his sense of—God? Was it God? Or was it just his sense of that nothing could be this bad, nothing could be worse than his brother driving his hunting knife into his own stomach and—(don’t think it, don’t conjure the image up, something inside is gonna erupt if you think too much about it)—

The hunting knife was not on the car seat next to Stony. He couldn’t even remember taking it from his dying brother, he could barely remember thinking that he could use the knife. He barely could remember holding the knife in his hand...

His sense of something he felt he must have always known, always felt inside, his differentness, his stranger in a strange land sense, his feeling that he was like the Storm King from another place, from another family—

Johnny Miracle and—who?

Who was his mother if not the woman named Angie Crawford? Who was she? Why couldn’t Nora tell him?

He almost crashed into the black iron gate at the Crown driveway. Opening the car door, he got out and looked at the mansion. How could Lourdes be here? Dead or alive? Why would she be in this place where she knew no one and no one knew her?

At the second-story window, Diana Crown pushed the curtain aside. She pulled the large window open, and the chilly October wind blew her hair back.

3

“Get out of my way,” he said to her as she greeted him at the front door. “Get the fuck out of my way.” He held the hunting knife up.

“Stony, you don’t need to be upset,” Diana Crown said. “It can all be explained. It’s all set up to be—”

“Just get the fuck out of my way,” he said. “I don’t even know you. Who are you people? Where’s the room? Where is she?”

“Upstairs,” she said. “On the left. The first bedroom.”

In a daze he walked up the stairs. It seemed to take forever to get to the landing. Once there, he turned left, counting the paces. This was too unreal. It was not really happening, but he would play along. It was just a big Halloween joke, it was just—

Then he saw her—

In the bed—

The mattress soaked

What the—

What the fuck—

What the fuck did they do to her?

Then, he thought the wildest craziest thought—

Van had lied. He killed himself in front of me, but he fuckin’ lied! That bastard!

Lourdes lay on the blood-soaked bed.

Lourdes, alive...

But her body—

“My god!” he shouted, “What the fuck have you done to her?”

—like a whitish pink larva of pulsing liquid around her face and neck.

Through a layer of mucus-scum, her face. Her body, covered with translucent skin, with a clear liquid—

Veins running outside her body—

—Two areolas and what seemed to him like the abdomen of some kind of insect larva—

Like a coating around her—

Like a protective shell—

But her eyes, fluttering open—

Beneath the layer of pulsing clear liquid, and blue-red veins branching out to the edges of the new skin that covered her from head to toe—

Blood pumping—

She can’t even see me.

She doesn’t even know where she is.

She’s in some kind of womb.

She’s—

A nearly clear pinkish liquid drained from the six dark areoles on the left side of her body. The liquid environment that covered her seemed to flow upward to her face.

Her mouth opened slightly, and for just a second he hoped—no he prayed—he would hear her voice just once more—

But then, her lips shut slowly, almost a smile on her face, almost a look of perfect calm across her features, and her eyes closed again.

PART THREE

OUTCAST

“The Storm King, weakened by the Outcast’s Moonfire sphere, cannot bring himself to save his earth-parents’ farm. The earth is doomed...”

From THE STORM KING: THE BURNING CITADEL, Vol. 2

INTERLUDE

THE VILLAGE

Chapter Twenty-Seven

TWELVE YEARS LATER

1

“Holy—” Stony shook his head. It all came back: the year, his age, the moments...

Her face beneath the watery pulp that covered her like a mucus membrane clouding over a wound.

But he was older now, late twenties; the past was a whisper, a photograph.

The pictures on the boy’s back stopped moving, a last image of Lourdes’ face still there, her face beneath the yellow-white pulsing sac. She looked strangely peaceful. She was at peace. Some kind of peace in the picture. It had to be peace, he told himself after all these years.

The boy called Prophet pulled his shirt back down. “Seen enough?”

“This is evil,” Stony gasped. “All of this. Coming back here, what you are.”

“What I am is what you made me,” the boy said.

“Smoke?” Stony asked ironically, drawing a pack out of his breast pocket. The car smell came back, the filthy old Mustang, then the road they were on, at the rundown bridge overlooking the cove.

“Kids can’t smoke.”

“Most kids can’t do a lot of things that you can do.” Stony lit up the cigarette. The smoke filled his lungs, but tasted awful. “Christ, Steve. I can call you Steve, right? I don’t go in for this Shiloh or Prophet stuff.”

“Yeah. Sure. I like Steve.”

“Christ, Steve, that’s some etching you got on your skin.”

“As long as I can remember, I had it. The Great Father said that it was the map of the world.”

“He would say something like that.” Stony felt the sweat soak through his shirt. “I wish Mr. Fairclough were still around, Steve. I’d like to expand his horizons, so to speak.”

“What are we gonna do here?” Steve asked, almost innocently. He glanced around the battered chain-link fence that had been clumsily erected with its no trespassing sign, and then some wiseass, probably kids, had cut through the chain-link and made it look like a big exploded spider web. On the road, the fence had totally been torn apart. Hungry vines pulled back at what was left of it.

“We’re gonna go look at the houses.”

They drove down what had once been Water Street, its dark pavement potholed, roots jutting from the great oaks. The Common was nothing but dirt, and the trees that had been torn out at the roots lay rotting, sprouting lichen and fern as if the woods just to the northwest of the village would take it over after all these hundreds of years. What had been the Stonehaven Free Library was a pile of rubble. “That’s where the P.O. was,” Stony pointed across the Common, “Three churches stood over there.” But the churches were still there; only their steeples and crosses had come down, their doors torn off hinges, their stained glass windows blasted out years previous.

“I want to see the ocean,” Steve clapped his hands together. “I never saw the ocean.”

“Okay,” Stony said. He drove the Mustang out to Land’s End. The car was on its last gasp. Stony could feel it in the bump and lurch as it moved over the jagged road. He thought he smelled oil burning, but none of the warning lights worked on the car, so he could not tell what precisely was going wrong. Everything was shot on this old classic, but it had done the job that Stony needed doing. It got them here.

Along the road, nothing but the foundations of houses, rubble, as if the bomb had been dropped. Nature had begun to reclaim this territory. A slender new growth of trees grew above tangles of berry vines and dried grass. Hedges had gone wild, and snaked and burst around the old granite stones. Then, they came to the seawall, and the Sound.

“Wow!” Steve shouted, rolling his window all the way down. “Look at that! I never seen the Atlantic Ocean!”

“You still haven’t, this is just Avalon Sound,” Stony said. “See those islands?”

“Barely.”

“That’s where you were born,” Stony said, closing his eyes, trying not to bring it back.

He didn’t want to remember it.

“Let’s get out of here. We have somewhere else to go,” Stony said after a minute. The air was fresh and clean, and as it pushed out the cigarette smoke in his lungs, it brought back too many sensory memories. The taste of fresh fish, of saltwater when he and Lourdes swam on the small beach, the same air he breathed when they made love and created this boy.

2

The car died a quarter mile down Juniper Point, so they got out to walk. Stony wrapped the small bomb in newspaper. Then, he brought his bags out and put them on the hood of the car. Opening them, he brought out the hunting knife.

“This was my brother’s,” he said. “Before him, it was my father’s. It is soaked in the blood of innocence. I figure that’s as good a mythological weapon as any. You ever hear any Greek myths?”

The boy—No, think of him as Steve. You can. He is Steve. He is your son—shrugged.

“Well,” Stony said, as he drew the gun out and stuffed it into his belt, “there was this guy who had to go kill this really awful woman. She had snakes in her hair, and half of her was lizard, and her eyes turned men to stone. She was a monster called a Gorgon.”

“I knew women like that in the Rapturists,” the kid joked.

“Yeah, well, this one was dangerous, and this guy had to go cut off her head without looking her in the eye.”

“Kind of cowardly you ask me,” Steve said.

“True,” Stony laughed. “See that house down there?” He pointed with the knife.

Steve nodded.

“It’s the house were they kept your mother.”

Steve took this in, and then looked up at his father. “Why are you doing this? You brought me all this way, and I can’t figure out why.”

Stony opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it.

3

“I’ve made people die before,” the boy said as they began walking towards the ruins of the Crown place. The morning sunlight slanted across the horizon and seemed to flatten the woods to their left. It was almost like the picture on the kid’s back. It was almost unreal. “I’ve made them hurt.”

The magnificent day was a good one for confessions.

“I know,” Stony said, nonchalantly. “It’s the Moonfire.”

“The what?”

“Moonfire. It’s like exhaust. Those people back in Texas, where I took you. They were already dead when I came, weren’t they?”

Steve nodded, a tear coming to his eye. “They called it Azriel Light. The light from the Angel of Death.”

“Shit happens,” Stony shrugged. “They brought it on themselves. You can’t turn the key in the door of the tiger’s cage and not expect that maybe now and then the tiger’s gonna jump you.”

When they reached the house, Steve said, “You’re gonna kill me aren’t you? You brought me here...to kill me.”

“You don’t even know what you are,” Stony said. “After all you know, you don’t know that much.”

“I know they worshipped me.”

“Weaklings. Idiots. Fools,” Stony nodded. “And those who weren’t, like Alan Fairclough, used you. He was weak in his own way.”

“I am a prophet,” the boy said.

“Of what?” Stony spat, almost laughing.

“Of...of...”

“They sold you a bill of goods, kid. Truth is, you’re my son, but you should never have been born.”

“They told me my father was evil.”

“Did they? What’s evil? Hurting? Killing?”

“If killing is righteous—” the boy began, but Stony reached out his free hand and grabbed him by the shoulder.

“What do you mean by righteous killing?”

“If killing is ordained by the living god and if it flies like a lightning bolt to sinners!” the boy shouted, as if by rote.

“Then kill me,” Stony shook his head. He chuckled mostly to himself, remembering the drama of childhood and how it made every kid feel like the center of his or her own universe. “Kid, you have a lot to learn about how people sometimes use you, don’t you? People who claim they believe in Jesus and God and then they do really terrible things because bottom line, Steve, everybody wants to be King of the Mountain. And to be King of the Mountain, you have to kick everybody else in the ass.”

Steve looked hurt. His face crumpled as if he were going to cry. They had spoiled him, those cultists. They had massaged his little growing ego until it was stunted and misshapen. Fuck you Alan Fairclough for doing this.

“They didn’t use me. They loved me.”

“And you loved them,” Stony nodded. “I saw that old woman in the shack I got you from. What, you call her Gramma? She take care of you when you were sad? But still, when I went in to get you, you’d already killed her. Okay, maybe it was the ‘Azriel Light’. Those biblical names sure cover up a lot of sin, don’t they? She hemorrhaged right there. I didn’t even have to fight her. She was gone.”

“Sometimes...” the boy said. “Sometimes it gets out.”

“Yeah, it leaks, I know. I learned just like you did. Sometimes, when you do something you think is good, it leaks. You think you’re healing somebody, or making the rain come down on parched land, or you—”

“You save a puppy’s life. That’s what I did, I saw a man beating the life out of a puppy, and I—”

“Sure, I know,” Stony cut him off. “Been there. You think: if I just get him to stop, if I just make the puppy all back in one piece again, no bleeding, then maybe it won’t leak this time. If I just make it so that little girl’s legs aren’t all twisted, it won’t leak. If I just help that old man with his pain, maybe...” Stony let his voice trail off. “I’ve lived as far away from other people as I could most of my life. Just so I wouldn’t let it leak.”

“You said, you said you were from some town.”

“Yeah, but when you’re like us, kid, you’re not from anywhere. My P.O. Box is in Winslow, Arizona. But I live up in the desert, farther out than that. Away. But even then, it’s not far enough.”

“How do you stop it from leaking?”

Stony squatted down in front of the boy. He held his shoulders. Tears came to his eyes without him even knowing why. He blinked them back. “Son, you can’t.”

4

The sign in front was no longer there, and the house itself resembled the Parthenon after the centuries and the tourists, for its columns stood, its roof had been rebuilt, the walls were still up, but it looked as if its meat had been sucked right out.

They walked in silence through the gaping hole of the front door.

A purple darkness permeated the house. Some windows were boarded up; others still were rimmed with the jagged teeth of broken glass. Rat and bird droppings were everywhere, as was trash—moldy bits of food, torn and wadded papers, something that might’ve been human excrement wiped across the walls as someone tried to write an indecipherable graffiti phrase. Tattered curtains fluttered like moth wings in the morning breeze. The stench was strong and rose and fell with the air.

Finally, Steve looked up at his father and grabbed his arm for comfort. “It’s breathing.”

Stony glanced down at him.

“The house. It’s breathing.”

Stony felt his skin change, and goosebumps rose along his arms just with the kid’s voice. He glanced up at the ceiling that undulated slightly. “It’s her,” he said. “It’s like residue is still here.”

“Who is she?” Steve asked.

“She is what we’ve come to destroy,” Stony said. He hefted the thing in his left hand, the thing wadded up in newspapers. “In this unclean house. Your Great Father and the others were here. I even had a hand in it. Look—” He pointed to a corner of what had once been the living room. It dripped with some viscous liquid, like a light slow drizzle of rain.

He felt the hallway tremble slightly.

“I’ll bet some Crown heir is still around, keeping track of this place, watching for omens.” Stony heaved a long drawn-out sigh. Christ, this was the moment he’d always dreaded, coming back to this place. “There’s a chapel here. That’s where we need to go.”

5

NOW! He thought, do it NOW!

When he walked in behind his son, into the darkness of the Crown chapel, Stony set the newspapers down on one of the pews. Then he reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and withdrew the handcuffs. When they clinked together, Steve turned. His face, even in the shadows of the chapel, was visible. His expression was not one of shock or fear, but of resignation. He held his hands out.

Stony got down on one knee, and looked up at his son’s face. His beautiful doomed son. The boy who should never have been brought into this world, and was not meant to be here, just as Stony should never have been born.

He handcuffed the boy’s left wrist to his own right wrist.

“Bound together forever,” he whispered, and touched the side of his son’s face. “You and me kid.”

“I guess we’re gonna kaboom?” Steve asked. “That’s why you brought me.”

“We have to,” Stony said, reaching up to comb his son’s wild hair from around his eyes.

“Is it ‘cause it’s evil? The Azriel Light?”

Stony thought a moment. “No. It’s because it was never meant to be here. It should never have been here on earth.”

“Yeah,” the kid said, sighing.

“You know how different you are?”

Steve nodded slowly.

“Do you love me?”

Steve nodded again. “I always wanted a dad.”

“I love you too, Steve. You are my only child. Your mother was beautiful then. She was the most wonderful and beautiful human being on the planet. You look a little like her.”

“But I should never have been born,” the boy said, his eyes glistening with tears. Stony could not resist. He tugged his son close to him, and hugged him hard. Perhaps the tears had all been cried out, for his eyes no longer filled with them, but he felt as if his soul were weeping, he felt as if his entire flesh and spirit cried out to the universe: Why have you led me here? Why have you done this? What did this boy ever do to deserve it?

He squeezed his son until he was afraid he would hurt him. When he drew back, his son’s inner translucent eyelids closed over his eyes briefly; then, opened. The tears were gone in him, too.

“I always thought I was some kind of alien, like from another planet,” Steve half-grinned, but then his face fell again, a flat-line. He was resigned to this fate.

“No, you’re not from another planet,” Stony comforted him as best he could. “You’re from me and your mother. But you were part of something terrible, like an experiment these people did. You know the Rapturists? How they used you for their beliefs? Used the Azriel Light too until it got some of them? Well, these people, that Fairclough and the Crowns, they had tried to do to others what they did to me, and to your mother and you. But it never worked. It never ‘took’. It almost did sometimes I guess. They tried it before, but—”

And the images came to him, images he couldn’t possibly know, but they came nonetheless as if the history of what was within him showed him the attempts—the girls with their bodies burning, the boy of sixteen who caught on fire at his crotch and it spread up his belly, up to his face until he was a pillar of fire— “It didn’t work, not until the rituals were used, and then all they needed was one or two, just enough to bring it into the world. Just enough to make it flesh where it was not wholly flesh before.”

“What was it?” his son asked, but Stony didn’t answer. He felt what the boy had said; the Crown place was breathing, and as he looked at the jagged empty eyes where the stained glass windows had been, he saw how the membrane had grown across it, a stained glass of its own, a pulsing life taking over the house, unable to die, unable to do anything but survive.

As he unpacked the small bomb that the mail-bomber Swink had taught him to construct, the boy watched carefully. It was a cheap device, and he might’ve used it earlier, but he knew that he owed it to Lourdes and to their son, to do this here. This earth, this place, was tainted with the past crimes against nature. This was the unholy sanctuary. To bring it back to where it had begun, just as Fairclough’s ritual had tried to do. To bring it to a cursed spot, an unclean place, a land even the natives had shunned because it was the Devil’s playground, it was the place of Walks Alone. As he brought the bomb out, careful of the wires, careful of the small timing device that would set off the spark, his son whispered, “Dad, I love you, don’t do it, I don’t want to hurt—”

He set the timer down. Ten minutes. That was enough time to say goodbye to the world, to his son, to what had taken over this house.

9:33

He glanced at the digital watch, at the melting liquid that pooled around the altar of the chapel.

9:25

He heard the breathing, as of some monster, architecture of a being, all around them, containing them.

8:00

Eight minutes, and it would be over.

Eight minutes, and then peace.

It was an eternity until the timer got to five minutes, and Stony felt as if he could no longer hold in what he’d held for so many years, over so much pain and distance.

“There must be some redemption!” he shouted at the darkness. “It can’t be for all this pain! It can’t be for all this...this nothing! There must be a purpose!” He slammed his fist down, bringing his son’s hand down too, and the boy cried out as if hurt. “There must be some redemption! I don’t believe that I would come this far and not find it! I did not imagine it! I know what happened here! I know what I set free!”

Then, all around them, encompassing the chapel and its shadows, a woman’s voice, “I knew you would come back.”

Stony turned, and saw her face for the first time in twelve years, the face that lay beneath the face, like the developing butterfly inside the sac, beneath silken layers of cocoon.

A vision of a ghost of a shred of memory, and then gone.

Lourdes.

In less than seconds, Stony Crawford relived that night, so many years buried, so quickly resurrected in her glance.

COMES THE HALLOWEEN MAN, REAPING

Chapter Twenty-Eight

ALL HALLOW’S EVE

1

Halloween night, and Stony is fifteen, and he watches as the nearly clear liquid pulsates along the blue and red veins within the outer covering, the thin sac, that surrounds Lourdes’ body. He is weeping, unable to touch her, afraid of hurting her with that thing—that liquid environment floating around her, pulsing and flashing with red and pink and blue. When his weeping is over, the other one, the one called Diana Crown, touches him lightly on his shoulder.

“She’s more beautiful now than any human being has been since the dawn of mankind. Your son won’t let her die,” Diana said. Her breath was warm on his neck; he moved forward slightly to get away from it.

“What have you done,” Stony gasped, and felt as if he were choking on his own words. He could not take his eyes off Lourdes. It reminded him for a moment of Snow White, the fairy tale he’d read as a kid, sleeping in her glass coffin, that’s what it was like, it was like she was sleeping under glass, or under some stream—

Diana chuckled lightly, but her voice was strangely soothing. “Nothing. It’s your child inside her that does this. If you were to try and open the covering, it would kill her and the baby instantly. This keeps her safe. That’s what you want, isn’t it? What you—and I have—within us, you were able to pass on, to ensure our survival in this species—”

“This species? You and me?”

He turned to face her. He was beyond shock, beyond tears. He felt a coldness grow within, as if he were turning to stone.

Diana Crown was beautiful. Sure, he’d seen her around town in the summers, not often, but now and then while he rode his bike past her house, or saw her in town picking things up at the Package Store. Sure, she’d always been beautiful but in a cold and not appealing way to him, but now he saw something else. Like smoldering ashes beneath the surface of her pale skin. She wore a thin white dress, opened down the front so he could see the curved edges of her breasts, her smooth whiteness—

Her eyes, pale blue and full of some inner radiance.

“Who the hell are you, anyway?” he asked, or thought he asked, but could not hear his own voice.

Her smile curved, and she seemed warm and more familiar than he wanted her to be. It’s a dream. I’m in some dream.

“I’m your sister,” she said, reaching her hand out to touch his. When she touched him, he felt a jolt of electricity. He struggled to pull away from her, but it was as if the electric current held them fast together.

Then it stopped.

And he knew.

2

She spoke inside him now, as she spoke images played across his mind—

“We are half-brother and sister, Stony. I was born five years earlier than you, and my mother was my flesh and blood mother. My father—well, this will be difficult to understand—but there’s something not right in me that is right in you, I did not turn out as well as they wanted, the Crowns, but they loved me and raised me since I was of their flesh, too. But I was there when you were conceived, and when you were born, Stony. It was the most beautiful act ever committed with a human being, it was a moment of triumph for those who live only in the flesh, these animals all around us. Your father—”

“Johnny Miracle?”

“Yes, he was handsome and smart and—”

“Johnny was smart?”

“The act of a human coming in contact with divine fire can destroy that human, but it did not destroy Johnny. He was forged from the bloodline of a god older than any human knows to worship—the same bloodline the Crowns came from. They were originally Crowninshields, Stony, a noble family, and before that, their name was SacreeCrois, and before that it was—”

“You’re joking. You’re crazy—” Stony gasped and in his mind he saw a thick nail being driven in by a flat rock to a man’s wrist on what might’ve been a cross in a large and seemingly endless garden. “Jesus Christ—”

“No, not Jesus Christ, Stony. Far older than that, in the fields of western France, a god that walked the granaries and gardens and all that was planted, a god who was king for a season and then was inhaled by certain men, ritually killed every season, whose blood drained into the earth—”

“Stop!” Stony pressed his hands over his ears, opening his eyes to try and stop the sounds and images that came after him.

“It is only legend that says that Johnny is from the same bloodline, it is only legend that says that Johnny is the first son of the first son of the first son—going back to all the Sacre-crois —”

Scarecrow, Nora’s words came back to him, the words spat across his mind. Sacre-crois, Scare-crow, Crowninshield, Crown, the lineage of the Halloween Man.

“And you, too, are the first son, Stony, and so is your child in Lourdes’ belly. You are descended from the Kings of the Gods. Do you know why they call him Johnny Miracle? Do you? Do you know that he died when he was seventeen, hit by a car out on the highway? And they took him for dead, these people. They took him for dead and they buried him and he rose from the dead, he scraped his way up from the earth like a madman, and he came back to town covered with the dirt of his own grave, smiling as if none of it mattered, all his wounds seemingly healed. That was his miracle. But only his first, Stony. His second was his fertility with your mother.”

“Who is my mother?”

She grinned. “Your mother and my father are the same being. There is no differentiation of sex in the realm of pure radiance. But you are finer than I am, Stony. I was not born of her womb but of the seed of her loins. You were born from within her, you were nourished from her blood, and you were made flesh from that which is without flesh. I have waited so long for us to meet, to talk, Stony. I have waited so many years to truly love my brother.”

3

The voice died within his head.

Diana stood there, seeming more ordinary now. The dim light from the bedside barely illuminated the bedroom.

“It’s in you, Stony,” Diana said. “The reason she won’t die. It’s in you. You planted the seed of greatness, of divine fire inside her...She is no ordinary human now, she has been touched by the gods.”

“What the hell—” Stony said. “What are you talking about?”

“You are the Halloween Man, Stony. You have the bloodline within you, and your mother was—”

Stony pressed his hands to his ears to drown her out, his body shaking involuntarily, the sound of wild horses stampeding inside his head, the feeling that a crack in the world had taken hold and was growing, and all of hell was seeping from it.

Diana reached up, touching the center of her forehead. “It’s time, Stony. Time to take off the mask, to show who we are, to run free, the feeling you’ll get will be like breathing for the first time in your life. Both of us. The rituals—”

“Rituals?”

“Rituals are the keys that unlock the many doors,” she whispered, her fingernails pressing into her skin. A thin line of blood ran down from where her fingernail cut into her skin. “Fairclough knew them. He knew how to open—”

She smiled, her teeth shining white. “You know Stony, I was there when your brother stabbed her. Your girlfriend was beautiful, too, with blood. He slammed it into her over a hundred times. Her blood burst out from all over her body, soaking us through, baptizing us—”

Stony felt something surge within him, and he brought Van’s knife up. “Just shut up!”

“That’s the knife,” Diana said. “That’s the one. Did your brother tell you how he felt when he killed her? How he got aroused from it? How he felt wave after wave of—”

Stony stepped close to her, holding the knife threateningly. “Just shut up! I don’t want to hear—”

Her voice within him, and the images, telling and showing him everything—

Van slicing the knife into Lourdes’ breast—

The look of terror, the pain, the fear as Lourdes tried to scream but the knife went into her throat—

“No!” Stony screamed, squeezing his eyes shut, and when he opened them he had already brought the knife down into Diana’s flesh.

He stared at it a moment. His fist around the knife.

He looked into her eyes.

A calm flooded him, as he saw warmth and yes, even love within the blue pools of her eyes.

“You have done what you needed to do,” she whispered.

Coming to his senses, he drew the knife out and opened his mouth to speak but only a thin stream of air escaped his lips.

He heard a tearing as of paper, and then the sounds like liquid and mud splashing—

Diana Crown tore at the place around her heart, where the knife had come out—

A split of flesh ran from it in spider web patterns, up to her face, around her eyes—

She was—

Oh god no

—Pulling off her skin, while splits in her face ran down the length to her chin, and then her neck, and where the openings grew—

MOONFIRE!

MOONFIRE!

Something within him smashed like a doll, and he felt himself curling up in a fetal ball—

DON’T WANT TO LOOK AT HER

DON’T WANT TO SEE HER

NOT WHAT SHE’S BECOMING

NOT THAT

The nausea rose in his stomach, up to his throat, but he held it in, forced it back down—

DON’T LOOK AT HER, IF YOU DON’T LOOK YOU WON’T SEE—

“Flesh is just a covering, it’s our upholstery,” the thing that had been Diana gibbered, as the last of the MOONFIRE shed the bleeding elastic skin—

THE OUTCAST STARED AT HIM WITH EYES OF MOONFIRE

What the hell are you?

What the hell IS that?

Her body turned to what seemed like spinning and burning molecules, thousands of tiny fireflies spiraling amongst themselves in the shape of the body of the young woman who had been.

Had been...

Opened. Set free.

Inside his mind, she answered him. We are what men have only dreamed. We are touched by the divine fire, Stony, you and I. Thousands of years ago men and gods mated, but the age of magic and gods has long died, until now—until now, Stony! You are the strongest, but you don’t know it, you have within that weak flesh of humanity the divine fire of other worlds! We are the first to take, and your child, growing inside her, is the future. Do not fear for her, for she feels nothing. It is like a deep sleep, and when she awakens, she will remember none of this, but she will give you a child, and that child will be of our kind—

They tried for decades for births, but none took. Young girls burned up from the fire, and could not conceive...but then we took, you and...they thought I wouldn’t make it, but I did...and now you, too...and they...

Stony shouted, “Who are they?”

The creature that stood before him, fire like an aura around its form, opened its mouth and said, “The devout. The faithful. Those who believe and have been touched by it.”

“By what?”

The creature’s light wavered, turning blood red, its eyes feral and sharp. “Your mother. Your real mother.”

“Who is my mother?” he shouted, and as he did a strong wind smashed against the window, bringing with it a small bird that broke its neck, as it shattered the glass.

Then, the thing that was Diana was caught up in a gust of wind, and shimmered before him—

What was beneath her skin, fragile as glass stained red and yellow—

Like sparks, separated—

Let your mind go, Stony. Be free. Let the Halloween Man out of his prison, you who are most sacred, most loved of the Eternal, you are part miracle and part human and part God, rain down on them all, your torture is in the secret, let it out, let it go—

You are Holy.

Like red poppies bursting into bloom, petals blowing—

Humans sacrifice themselves for us, Stony. We are Gods. We are the future of life. We are creation itself!

—Out across the night sky, like blood spattering along a sheet of wind, and then the thousands of bits of red light that had been Diana returned and glowed across the surface of the ceiling, which began dripping with crimson droplets.

He felt fear in the back of his throat, a tickling up and down his spine as the blood spattered the top of his head.

It’s in the blood, our power, our light, it’s mixed with what humans have now, we are eternal and we are mortal at the same time.

Stony was no longer afraid, no longer terrified, and no longer within the grasp of a nightmare.

The flesh that had contained what was inside Diana Crown, fell like dust. Her skull cracked as it hit the floor.

He turned to what Lourdes had become, to the bedside, and knelt down beside her.

The sweat had dried on the back of his neck. He clasped his hands in prayer and said the two or three prayers he could think of.

Above him, red sparrows flew from the ceiling, reforming across the bed from him, forming again as Diana Crown, in a vision of molten silver, an aura of yellow fire around her body. “The rituals are complete, brother. And now it’s the night of the harvest. We own all of Stonehaven, and all who dwell there are meant for our pleasure.”

“What the hell are you?” he gasped.

“I am a god,” she licked her shiny lips. “And I hunger for my flock.”

Her metallic skin glowed red, and burst again like sparks from a fire, like fireflies, no, like burning wasps all heading to the open window. Her voice, a humming of words, “Join me, brother, join me, and I will show you the pleasures of freedom that even the gods don’t know!”

Stony rose up and ran towards the swarm, but the spiraling lights flew out into the night, across the strip of water, to the village. “No! Diana!”

He heard a single scream, as of a child who has thrust his hand into a nest of yellow jackets.

4

He prayed to Lourdes, I am not going to let them hurt you. I know you can hear me, Lourdes. I love you. God, I love you more than anything. You, me, and our baby will get out of this somehow. Somehow...

Then, he began to hear more screams, echoing across the water, coming from the village.

He reached out and touched the shimmering edge of the sac across Lourdes’ face. A thin ripple, like gelatin, ran across its surface. Her eyes opened, blank, staring out into the watery nothing surrounding her.

It’s protecting her.

“Lourdes, I’m so sorry. I need to go. I need to go find help. Somehow...” Stony wasn’t even sure where to go for help, who to turn to. He thought about the cop from Mystic, but it was too far. Part of him wanted to run off into the woods and just hide. He thought of Nora, wondering if she could help—but how? How can you fight a nightmare? How can you stop what Diana had become?

And then, his own voice within him told him:

You are the Halloween Man.

Remember the story.

Remember what he did.

The story wasn’t everything, was it? The story wasn’t about Imp killing children, or about crucifying an evil man. The story was not about revenge, even though that’s how Nora told it.

No, the story was told to prepare you for something.

The Halloween Man...The bloodline...Sacred. Holy.

The story went that they killed Imp, and buried him. But he rose from the dead, with a greater power within him. And he went on a bloody rampage.

Or did he?

Perhaps what the Crowninshields were, and what the Randalls, and all the other old families in the village were—-

Evil.

And the Halloween Man stopped their evil once. They found ways to revive it; they had discovered some great secret for their evil, their beliefs, some way to bring a supernature into Diana, into him, too.

Nora’s words in his head:

“The Halloween Man...He’s thousands of years old. He’s the King that’s been killed and his blood makes things grow. He’s the Magic One. You got to understand that everything we know now is as under a layer of dust. But one day, each one of us sees clearly...”

As the sun rose, people came from their houses...even those who did not leave their houses could see the terrible handiwork of the Halloween Man:

“Strung like pigs, by their legs, twelve men and women from the village, their throats slit, their blood dripping down, strung from two great oak trees, the ground soaked with their blood. And between the trees, a great cross had been erected, and on it, nailed with spikes, Old Man Crowninshield—his eyes and mouth sewn horribly shut, and his nightshirt torn open.

“On his chest, the words:

“I CAME TO SAVE YOU

“...And it took one of my own people to do the work that would seal the Old One into that flesh until it returned to the damp earth and slept again...”

“I’ve got to find Nora,” he said aloud.

All this time she’s been trying to tell me who I am, to warn me.

5

Gerald and Angie Crawford were at it again, fighting like cats, unaware that if they had but moved from the kitchen into the living room, or even the narrow hallway, up the stairs, they would’ve seen the blood in the carpet and on the floor, and upstairs they would’ve found their dead and slightly mangled son, Van. But instead, Angie was shouting at Gerald who stank of fish, whiskey and another woman’s perfume; while Gerald was shouting at Angie because supper was late and the house stank and where the hell were the goddamn kids anyway; when the kitchen window burst wide, glass flying, and what Angie thought at first was a meteor brushed past her face, burning her skin slightly.

Angie looked at Gerald, and he at her. Their eyes were wide, but Gerald’s took on a suspicious aspect as if he were about to blame her for this meteoric intrusion as well as everything else.

The fiery ball burst upward in a column, and when Angie stared at it long enough—surely minutes went by, she told herself, surely it’s hypnotizing me in some way—she felt as if the room were spinning. She heard Gerald shouting from across the room, but the beautiful fire branched out like a tree and suddenly she was not in her house at all, but shot back nearly twenty years to when she worked her night shift at the Crowns’, checking to make sure old Mrs. Crown had her oxygen on right, taking her blood for tests, massaging her legs when they swelled up too much. Angie turned, and there was little Diana Crown, not more than three-years-old, a smear of blood on her face.

“What happened to you, dear?” Angie asked.

Diana, looking like the most perfectly made little girl doll in the world, looked up at her with those innocent eyes and said, “I just drank blood from Father Jim. He let me.”

Angie stared at her, wondering if she should smile or laugh at the little girl’s joke.

And then, behind Diana, Mr. Crown stood, dressed in a dark suit. “Hello, Angela,” he said, nodding. Then, he grabbed Diana’s arm. “Come on little moppet, we have to go to the ceremony.”

“Someone getting married?” Angie asked.

Angie heard a strangled sound from poor old Mrs. Crown from the bed, and she turned to look and see what was wrong.

Mrs. Crown, who could no longer speak, opened her mouth slightly, and it reminded Angie of a fish pulled out of the water. Her eyes went wide with some kind of terror.

Angie was sure that Mrs. Crown was mouthing the words,

KILL ME.

Then, this vision memory from the past burst into fire, as Angie heard Gerald screaming, and she was back in her kitchen, and red and yellow hornets circled around her husband.

Then, he burst into flames, running to her, falling against her, tearing her flesh apart with his burning fingers and teeth.

She fought him off as best she could, but the fire ran all around her, slicing into her, and when her eyes melted from the heat, she tasted the red-hot coal of death.

What had been Diana, now Azriel Light, burned across the house, and from that house, burned through the grass to others, dancing wildly as rain began falling from the sky. As the light singed the doors and melted windows, screams along the village rose in the night, and strangely enough as the sounds carried across the water to Mystic and Stonington and other boroughs and towns along the coast, the screams took on the quality of hymns, as if an entire town were somewhere in the distance singing the praises of the Lord.

6

Stony went and looked down upon Lourdes, whose eyes fluttered open and closed as if some invisible current pushed her eyelids back and forth.

“I love you, Lourdes. Somehow I’ll make sure you’re safe. I promise.”

Then he ran as fast as he could, out of the bedroom, down the stairs. He thought he heard some kind of singing—but how could there be singing? —From another end of the mansion, but he didn’t stick around to find out. He ran out onto the porch, down the steps, and into his mother’s car. Starting it up, he drove down the gravel road. To his left, he saw what looked like houses burning out along Land’s End, but he didn’t care, he didn’t give a damn about what happened to anyone—

All he cared about was Lourdes. Lourdes and why.

Someone had to tell him the why.

7

Nora’s shack was dark and silent. He pushed through the front door, out of breath, and quickly grabbed one of her long matches, lighting the candle near the front door. When the feeble light came up, he carried it around to her bed and work area, but she was not there.

But there, on the small table next to her bed, a note she’d begun, and then left off in mid-sentence. In a scribbled handwriting, the best that Nora had ever been able to do owing to her blindness:

Stony,

Forgive me. I wanted to

He set the candle down on the note.

He was beyond any feeling, as his mind seemed to push down on itself.

After a minute, he left the shack, walking on foot through the dark woods, back to the station wagon.

The screams from the village grew louder, and he knew that the thing that had been freed from Diana’s skin was taking its harvest from the village, and he cared less than he ever thought he would care about anything in all his life.

He longed for sleep, and even death.

Even death would be a relief now.

But Lourdes.

Your baby, too.

I just want to die.

He heard the wind push Nora’s door closed, and then open again. He turned at the sound, the candle went out in the breeze. Silhouetted against the moonlight, in the doorway, a stranger.

“Stony,” the man said from the doorway, his accent clearly British. “Let’s go. It’s time for you to know who you are.” Then, “She needs you. Lourdes needs you. She won’t survive without you being there.”

As if this were the most normal thing in the world to say, the man added, “Look it’s starting to rain. A storm is coming from out at sea. Let’s go, Stony. It’s time for you to meet your mother.”

8

Clouds gathered around the enormous harvest moon, and the scraggly trees grasped at its light. They walked along the old path, alongside the bogs, through the woods. The rain trickled down, the wind died for a brief while.

Stony felt a great heaviness grow within. His urge to run had long passed; his urge to die was still there within him. Lourdes—his only thought. He would go back, and he would get her out of that place, that madhouse, this nightmare. He could not leave her there...

The stranger walking beside him might’ve been fifty, thin, his hair silver and cut short, dressed in a white shirt that had mottled dark stains across it—the moonlight seemed to make him glow as if he were absorbing the night. “I know this all must be a shock. We should’ve prepared you better—”

“Who are you?” Stony asked with no interest in his voice. He glanced down the dark trail, watching the way the moonlight jagged along the tree trunks and branches.

“Alan Fairclough. I am the—”

“I don’t give a damn.” Stony kept walking slightly ahead of him.

“One day you will. Part of the ritual was not preparing you. If we had, you might not have mixed with us. You might not have created a child. Do you know what that means?”

“You one of the devil’s own, too?”

Alan Fairclough didn’t answer until they’d reached the edge of the woods, with the Crown mansion ahead of them. Several cars were parked in its driveway now, and the house was completely lit, its outside lights glaring. The wind picked up, and the rain began to come down faster.

“Are you Satanists?” Stony asked, knowing that there probably were such things, but even when he asked it, he doubted any worshipper of Satan could be this terrible. He doubted anyone could be as evil as the people who had been inside this house.

“We’re not of any devil,” Fairclough said. “You and your sister are part of something that will change the destiny of humanity. It will probably save us, too. Our future, anyway. There was the Age of the Father, and then the Age of the Son. Now, Stony, it is the time of the Holy Spirit. It is the fire from heaven that comes among us.”

“Why did you do this to Lourdes?”

“I didn’t. It was your child, growing in her that did it. If it makes any difference, the child has also protected her from death. You believe, don’t you?”

Something went calm inside Stony. “Yes.”

“She’s beyond any hurting. She’s in a beautiful dream, and when she wakes, she’ll be holding your child in her arms.”

“This is all crazy, it’s—” Stony said.

“You know deep inside it isn’t. Part of you knows that what your sister told you is true. You’ve never felt like part of the world, not like other boys did. You’ve always felt separate.”

Stony kept his eyes on Lourdes’ face. “My brother said he killed her.”

“He thought he did!” Fairclough shouted, raising his fists to the wind and rain like a madman. His voice became like a storm, as he cried out against the night, as the clouds covered the brilliant moon until a harsh grey shadow covered the earth. “It’s the beauty of it! It was a ritual, Stony! Rituals of sacrifice are nothing new, and after every sacrifice, a rebirth! Lourdes was reborn as the mother of your child the moment that your brother thought he had taken her life away. It was proof of your son’s divinity. If he’d been purely flesh, they both would’ve died, but they weren’t, he wasn’t, your baby, and his life created protection for his mother.”

Stony took a long slow breath. “She doesn’t hurt?”

“Not one bit.”

More screams carried on the growing wind.

“What’s that? More tricks?” Stony asked.

The man shook his head. “No. It’s Diana. She’s on a rampage through the village. No one can stop her, not once she found release from flesh. She is like a ravening wolf among a flock of young lambs. She’s not like you Stony. They didn’t know the rituals when she was born. They didn’t know how to make the sacrifices. She is the shadow of what you are. The Azriel Light within her is darkened—”

“Cut the bullshit.”

Fairclough turned to Stony, and his grin seemed enormous in the shadowy light from the house. Then, he slammed his fist into the side of Stony’s face. Stony felt as if he were flying across the gravel, and when he fell, stinging pains blistered along his back and arms. Fairclough went over and lifted him up, kissing him on the forehead. Stony struggled to pull away, but Fairclough had a strong grip.

Fairclough looked deep into Stony’s eyes and whispered, “I am the one who set the ritual at your conception. I am the one who coaxed your mother into a form for taking the seed of Johnny Miracle and carrying you for nearly eight months. If you wish to despise someone, despise the woman who raised you whose silence was bought cheap. Do not fuck with me little god, for I know the ancient words, I have the knowledge, I have gone through the portals of Hell and the smashed gates of Heaven just to bring you into this world. I have smashed the brains from boys twice your size. You have a power within you, but you are still trapped in flesh and blood, and I know a hundred ways to make boys like you suffer for their insolence.”

Alan Fairclough set Stony down again, pushing him forward. Stony glanced back. Fairclough’s face was pale and shiny, like a worm’s, in the house lights.

The man gestured forward. “Go, boy. You want to protect your girl, your baby, you want to know the mystery of all of what you are? It’s in there. I can show you. Mankind is dying out—you can see it. You can feel it everywhere. We’ve lost touch with the divine spark, the fire of creation, ancient savagery. We have lost it; we are destroying all that is fertile. Men used to walk with gods, Stony. Men used to sacrifice to the Almighty. Abraham took his son Isaac to be sacrificed to God. He did, in fact. Did you know that? But the words were changed to make it all nice and sweet so that God was no longer a force of the cosmos, but merely a nice father sitting in the clouds. When the Age of the Son began, we put ourselves higher than the Divine. We set ourselves up as gods. That is unnatural. That is blasphemy. No. Man is doomed as a species, but you, and your progeny. What I did—what I did with the Crowns—with what they sheltered—what I did was I brought the rituals. I brought the means of communication with the Divine. We midwifed the gods when we brought you into this world, and through you and your children, slowly, over time, mankind will be saved. Diana, she was brought forth in ignorance. These Crown people,” he said with contempt, “they have no respect for the rituals, they think they’re all just so much ancient history, but there’s a reason that religion, in all its forms exists, Stony, it exists to create a bridge to the gods, to God, to the divine fire—the ritual is the way of controlling the power rather than just setting it loose upon the world—”

The screams from the village continued unabated.

“Listen,” Alan Fairclough said, cocking his head to the side. “That is what she is. She is like electricity without a wire to conduct its flow. Her fire leaps from tree to tree, house to house, a wild talent of the gods, but without control, without conscience. But you, you were born with the rituals, with the respect for the power, with the old words and keys.”

“I don’t know anything,” Stony said, now crying, not wanting to, feeling such great pain within him, as if his bones longed to pushed outward from his flesh, as if his blood wished to burst from its veins and arteries—

“Ah, but you do not know what you know,” Alan Fairclough said. He threw his head back, opened his mouth and began ki-yiing like a wild dog, and through the howling sound, crazy words, “ya thaeia nue pari sothga” he sang into the rain. Stony’s ears began ringing as the words were intoned.

Fairclough shut his mouth, nodding to Stony. “Within you, they mean things. They are the language of your spirit.”

“No!” Stony shouted, thinking he might run, thinking—he had the knife, he still had the knife, thrust into his belt, he could draw it out—

Fairclough pushed him toward the driveway, almost making his knees buckle. In the driveway, so many cars, as if they’d begun a party inside the mansion. Stony recognized some of them—the Glastonburys’ Volvo, Mrs. Doane’s Buick Skylark, Tamara Curry’s Subaru—what were they all doing here? Why?

Fairclough’s voice softened to an insinuating whisper as they stepped up on the porch. His words then came out rapid-fire, spittle flying from his mouth, “All Hallow’s, Stony. This isn’t just happening by chance. This is the harvest from the ancient days. It is the rite of passage for you. This is the night when the gods may walk with humans. It’s the space between the two worlds. The birth of Christ was not in December, Stony. And it wasn’t in midsummer, as many scholars seem to think. No, it was at the end of the harvest, and across thousands of miles, harvest kings like your Crown ancestors were being cut down with scythes in fields and resurrected within days at the same time the Nazarene cried from the cave in which his mother gave birth. Gods are never born in grand palaces, they are born in stone, they are cracked like egg yolks from the shell of rock, from the earth, from the place which is both beneath our feet and controls our lives. And she is at the heart of it. She is growing stronger after centuries of weakness in captivity.”

“Diana?” Stony asked, entering the foyer, glancing briefly up the stairs, wanting to see Lourdes so badly, to hold her, to never let go of her.

“Not your sister,” Fairclough said, coming up behind him. “Your mother.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

MOTHER

1

“In there,” Alan Fairclough nodded to the open door of the chapel.

Over the arched doorway, Stony read the words, Bless the Fruit of her Womb. The door was open, and the sound of voices singing died almost immediately. The chapel was lit with dozens of candles. The smell of a dead animal permeated the place, mingling with the thick smoke from powerful incense.

The walls within the chapel were carved from some rock, and the effect as of a cave that had been transformed into a small church.

Great stained glass windows were lit brilliantly with the candlelight within, and the flashes of distant lightning from without, the saints and the Virgin and the crucifixion and much martyrdom, all arranged in beautiful colors. It was not that much different than the main section of Our Lady, Star of the Sea had been, only on a smaller scale.

Stony saw a lamb, its throat cut, on the great stone slab of the altar.

The candles were tall and thin, and Stony had never seen so many in one place. When he looked at all of them, thrust along the stone wall, among the stained glass windows, on small holders at each of the pews, something about the candles themselves seemed to tell him something.

(But they were tall and white and old-fashioned, you only know one person who makes them like that.)

The chapel was full of people, some of whom he recognized as he passed, others he did not know. Martha Wight was there, and Tamara Curry, her breasts bulging under a low-cut dress, a fat gold cross hanging atop her mounds; Father Jim nodded to him, a half smile on his face, his hand held out as if for a handshake, which Stony declined; Butch Railsback, the butcher, and Fiona McAllister from the library sat side by side; others, too, and then strangers, all dressed as if for church in their Sunday best, suits, ties, some of the women wore hats, a few of the older women wore white gloves as well.

Stony laughed when he saw his friend Jack Ridley, his best friend growing up, the friend who had shared all his secrets, so Stony thought. Jack winked. “I knew you’d understand—” Jack said, somewhat nervously. “It was all ordained from—”

“Fuck you, traitor” Stony said, shaking his head. He reached into his belt, drawing the knife out.

Stony held the hunting knife up vaguely threatening in case anyone tried anything, but they just sat quietly watching him. Not as much fear in their eyes as he’d been hoping. Not as much fear as he was beginning to feel all over again.

Alan Fairclough stayed behind him until he reached the foot of the altar. Then he went around Stony, beckoning with his hand.

Stony shivered now, knowing that no matter what happened to him, the knife would not defend him if these insane people leapt up and attacked him.

As he approached the altar, the dead animal across it, he remembered Nora’s story about coming here. About being shown this.

About seeing the thing in the long metal box.

And there it was.

2

A dark metal box, jewels embedded along its lid. The outline of what looked like a Renaissance angel crudely battered along it, a round halo surrounding its flowing hair. It was the size of a small coffin, with slat-like windows in its sides and a reddish glow as of burning metal from within.

Alan Fairclough went and stood behind the altar.

“You have something trapped inside there?” Stony whispered, unsure what he was feeling.

“Not trapped. It contains the divine fire.”

“What is it?”

Then, Alan Fairclough brought Stony’s hand to the top of the box. It was warm. “It is she. Your mother.”

“How?” Stony trembled.

“Let her out, you can. You alone, her son, can let her out.”

“But...I don’t understand...I don’t...”

“She is the Great Mother who searches the world for her children,” Fairclough said, and his words took on a quality of chanting, “She is the Eternal Mother, she lost her Daughter to the Underworld, Her son, Her Son is Come Among Us.”

“Her son has come among us,” the people in the congregation whispered.

“Come among us to bring new light to a dying earth,” Fairclough intoned.

“To bring new light to a dying earth,” the people whispered.

Then Alan Fairclough opened the cage, and Stony saw the dazzling light that was like a blue and yellow fire in the shape of a body, and wings—

An angel?

She’s an angel?

Her eyes were large and warm

And full of some pity

As if a terrible sorrow had overtaken her

As if she looked upon him with knowledge of loss to come

She reached her burning arms out to him, and they dissipated into thousands of points of light spinning in the air, surrounding him, covering him like fireflies, they were hot and his body erupted with sweat, but she didn’t hurt—

MOONFIRE!

He felt her embracing him, all over, within the light, within the warmth that was her fire—

And words from another language whispered in his ears,

Words he understood as if it were the language of his dreams—

Others saw Jesus, or a great white-bearded figure, or a cosmic kaleidoscope, and the congregation rose up as one and began singing hymns, speaking in tongues, shouting hallelujahs to the creature that surrounded Stony.

3

“My son,” she said. “I love you so much, I love you so much, and I weep for you.”

But who are you?

What are you?

The light that encompassed him shimmered, and thickened so that he could see nothing but light, and within the light—

What are you? Are you an angel? A god?

And then the laughter began, not the laughter of the sweet mother’s voice he’d heard but something terrifying like hearing the growl of a wolf in the dark or—

Other, the voice came back, a deep growl. Just say that I’m Other than you. That I’m something who has been held in stone, something that once walked freely, and these...these humans...centuries ago—

And the light became pictures, moving, and Stony saw:

Perhaps fifty young children screaming tied together with thick ropes, while several men pushed an enormous rock over the mouth of a cave. With the ensuing darkness, a buzzing sound, and then a light, and then thousands of black flies flew from among the rocks, into the children’s faces, into their mouths, their eyes, eating at their skin while they screamed—

“I have been called the Lord of Flies,” the voice said.

The men outside the cavern, dressed in little other than animal skins, covering their ears while the children screamed—

And then the Holy Sisters inside the cavern, blessing and consecrating the cavern and the creature that moved beneath them in a dark pit—

“I have been called the Eternal Enemy,” the voice whispered in Stony’s ear.

You’re the devil? Stony tried to speak but his mouth wouldn’t open.

“No, I am none of these names, I am the Mother of all Life and I am its taker, I am the Father of Dreams and Nightmares, and I am the source of all that breathes—” and the voice was like lions roaring in his ears. “I was in the Garden when man and woman were created, not in flesh, but as bacteria and fungi, a flesh born of decay which must return to it. I was superior to all that lives in the flesh then. I still am. And you are my son.”

Are you God?

Again, the laughter, only now it seemed like the laughter of a thousand children.

I am that I am, the voice said. And you are my son.

Then, she stood before him, and the awe he felt made his entire being shudder.

It at first seemed to be the statue of the Virgin from Our Lady, Star of the Sea, but its flesh burned with life, and her eyes were warm with red blood.

“Good and evil are within my glance,” she whispered, red tears flowing from her eyes. “Do not judge either, for life is made up of All. Men and children shall live and die, but my power—our power—comes from the source of all creation.”

And within this vision, he saw others:

A demon from hell with a great wingspan like a dragon’s

A creature with a human face but with stag’s antlers on his thick-haired scalp and deer’s legs—

A beautiful woman with hair piled high, naked, three rows of breasts along her torso—

Another woman in her place with many arms and legs moving swiftly, a necklace of skulls around her neck, a curved blade in her hand—

A lovely man wearing flowing white robes and great swan-like wings settling behind his golden hair—

I am the image of all that men have worshipped, but I am unknown to man—

The Virgin Mary stood before him, in blue robes, her eyes doe-like, her lips full and gently curved upwards—

Then this split into infinitesimal bits of light

“Do not be afraid of what you have within you, my son. They fear it, because they fear death, but you need never fear death.”

“What about others?”

“Others?” the being asked, the light wavering.

“Those we love?”

Again the laughter. “I gave birth to you my son so that you would raise a generation against those who have kept your mother prisoner for so long.”

“How do they keep you?”

“With the metal, the rock from the caverns, with rituals passed from ancient sorcerers, with what little magic men have.”

“But if you’re all-powerful—” Stony said.

The light flashed red and then a deep blue.

Then, Stony whispered almost to himself. “You’re not a god. You’re just some creature. You’re something...something that doesn’t belong here. Something that should never have existed.”

Again, the Virgin stood before him, her tears of blood coursing down her beautiful face. She reached her arm out, her palm upturned, to him. “I am and have always been. As you too shall be.”

And then Stony felt a swift pull on his flesh, as if a giant vacuum sucked at his pores, and the light whooshed by him in the wind, shooting upwards and then down again.

And there at the chapel, in the candlelight, Alan Fairclough stood beside him.

The creature of burning light, the shape of the beautiful woman, leaned over the dead sheep and began licking the blood from its neck.

4

Alan Fairclough reached his arms out to him. “Stony, we did this for all of mankind.”

“It’s a monster,” Stony spat. “And you—you and the Crowns have been feeding it.”

“No,” Fairclough said. “It’s a goddess. It’s the Mother Goddess. It’s an Angel from Heaven.”

The creature licked its flaming lips as it wolfed down parts of the sheep’s throat.

“Don’t you see what it’s doing?” Stony said.

Fairclough nodded, smiling. “I see the Divine Fire accepting our sacrifice.”

“It’s some kind of monster and you’re breeding it for god’s sake, you made me part of it! All of you!” Stony turned toward the congregation, and without wanting to felt that surge of energy, of some inner fire that he could no longer hold back. He shouted at the top of his lungs, “You used me to make a son, you used Johnny Miracle to make this cave-dwelling monster breed! You’re bringing it into the flesh when it’s just been a vision, a fire, it’s an element not God— you damn evil—”

And then he saw her, at the back of the chapel.

Nora, standing behind the last pew.

“Oh shit,” he gasped. “Not you, Nora. You aren’t one of these—”

He walked slowly, carefully down the middle aisle between the pews, as the faithful turned to watch.

5

“You’re not one of them,” he said coldly, as he approached her. “Tell me you’re not one of them.”

Nora was silent.

He held her face in his hand, raising her chin slightly so that he was looking down into the milky white of her eyes.

“They brought the devil with them. I told you,” she whispered softly. “But I’ve always hoped it was an angel from God.”

“It’s not the devil. It’s no angel either.”

Nora attempted a grin, but it grew faint. “I could never fight them, Stony. I tried. But I could not. From the moment you were born—”

“No more lies, Nora. No more spins. No more tales.”

“Please forgive me, baby. Please forgive me. I should have told you before, but you weren’t ready. You weren’t strong...even now I’m not sure. You’re so young.”

He cupped his hand against her cheek, her tears dampening his fingers. “I can give you something now. You know that.”

“Don’t,” she said.

“I can do it. I can feel it now. I guess I could’ve done it before, but it—”

“Hadn’t been awakened,” she finished the sentence for him. “I know. Some things are not meant to be awakened within us. Don’t—”

Then, he pressed his thumbs lightly against her eyes, barely touching her eyeballs.

“No,” she murmured, “If that part of you wakes up—”

But it was too late.

It felt like he held a rose, a small rose, a rosebud so tiny and pink in his hand that when it broke open, he felt the warmth of creation—

She looked up at him, cinnamon flecks in her brown eyes.

“The blind shall see,” he said, remembering a line from Sunday school.

6

“Stony,” she whispered, seeing him for the first time, seeing the boy she had loved like her own child all the while he’d been growing.

She reached over and touched the edges of his face.

7

He felt a prickle of heat run along his skin; then a series of sparks where her fingers touched him.

Her eyes grew wide with terror, as if the first thing she could see after all these years was a horror greater than anyone would want to see.

A rushing sound filled his ears, as of the beating of thousands of wings—

“You’ve let it out,” she gasped, drawing back from him as if from a fire. “It’s the light of creation. You can’t let it—”

Her body slammed back against the wall, her arms splayed as if some great invisible pressure forced her into that position. “You let it out! Stony!” she cried, but the wind that had pressed her like an insect to the wall, stopped up her breath. “That’s why it gave birth to you! That’s why! It had to travel through you!”

“NO!” he shouted, but the very force that grew from him held him back. “NORA! NO!”

“It was waiting for you to do this! It needs your miracles! You let it out! Stony! No! You have to put it back—” she screamed, and then the tears from her newly-born eyes turned to fire, running like lava down her face, devouring her features in its wake.

Nora’s face steamed with the growing heat, and he knew just looking at her that she was trying to be brave, maybe for him, maybe for those who watched. Trying to fight back the pain.

Oh please let me take it back, he prayed. Please.

And then, she was a fountain of blood.

8

Where she had stood moments ago, a mass of pulp and blood and bone. He couldn’t look at it anymore, nor could he weep, nor could he think clearly. Was he shivering still? He couldn’t tell. The world shivered. Covered in her blood, he turned towards the congregation.

“A miracle!” Tamara Curry shouted, pointing back towards the altar. “The Angel of God has given us a sign!”

At the altar, the creature of light had shifted, and had become a handsome angel, wearing a great white robe, with a wingspan that covered most of the altar. The golden light burst from it like the dawn.

Stony held his hands up as he stepped forward up the aisle. His eyes were dark, the blood matted in his hair.

Alan Fairclough cried out, “The miracles of the Living God! Praise his Name!”

“His name is Glorious!” the congregation shouted.

“You’re worshipping a monster!” Stony shouted.

The angel of light shifted again, and the Mother Goddess stood at the steps of the stone altar, a crescent moon upon her golden hair, a blue robe covering her pale skin. Her hand was raised in a gesture of supplication.

But Stony saw the blood on her lips.

And the lamb on the altar—something was wrong—he couldn’t see it well—his eyes went in and out of focus.

It was no lamb at all.

It was his brother Van’s body, laid down, eviscerated, opened, fed upon.

The monster had already eaten the eyes from their sockets, and his nose had been gnawed upon. His throat was a bright red gash.

But they can’t see it, he thought. They can’t see what it’s done. All they see is a goddess or an angel. All they see is the energy they give it.

They probably didn’t even see Nora’s body when it burst. They don’t know what It has done.

9

He feels a wind go through him, a wind of light, a wind of darkness, and he’s running, running towards the very thing that will kill him, the very thing that brought him into this world, but he doesn’t care, for he thinks of Lourdes and his unborn child and all the fools who have been destroyed and distracted putting their faith into such as this—

10

“You bitch!” he shouted as he approached the creature. “You fucking breeding bitch with your magic and your light.”

As he reached her, he slammed his hand into her—

And his hand swarmed with the thousands of fireflies.

“They keep you in a box because they own you,” he whispered. “They raped you to have children. You aren’t powerful. You’re just energy. You’re just—”

The howling of wolves filled his ears, then the sound of locusts as millions teemed overhead, and the burning light rose up from where the creature had stood and hovered.

A whisper in his ear,

But she was right, Stony. I needed you to let me out, to set me free—

Your sister couldn’t do it. She was made wrong. She wasn’t formed as well as you. She was not of the flesh in as many ways as you are—

But you, my child,

You are the embodiment of my radiance, and now you’re making a child to be the New Adam for the world of Earth, so that we may walk again as gods in the light of day, in the dark of night—

Let me show you the wonders of the gods—

And then the light split apart and swooped down upon the people in the pews and the cries were so loud that Stony’s ears began bleeding before he even had turned around to behold the terrors.

Warm rain fell from the ceiling of the chapel, and as it fell, Stony looked up and saw the light holding them, holding the villagers, Tamara was screaming trying to grasp the stone walls, and Martha smashed her fists against her breasts in agony, and Father Jim his hands clasped in prayer as he floated just beneath the ceiling—the invisible pincers tore at them—all who had come to worship their demon god, flying above, their skin begin ripped open with lasers, their blood pouring down upon the chapel floor.

It rains blood, son, and power is in the blood—

They trap their power within flesh, but shall release them from that cage—his mother watched from beneath her encompassing light, whispering fondly to him as if he would enjoy the carnage.

Another whisper, but not from his mother, but as if Nora were there, inside him, a whisper of strength—

“The power is in the blood, Stony, the strength is in the blood, remember...”

And then her voice died within him, and he no longer cared if he lived or died. In a flash of lighting, the chapel returned to candlelit silence. The villagers were gone. Alan Fairclough, reciting some words silently, stood alone at the altar.

The creature, all burning with radiance crouched upon the altar like a harpy, her leathery wingspan wide. She began cleaning her face like a cat.

All along the ceiling, their bodies strung across what looked like razor wire, their torsos ripped open, their eyes torn out.

“Why do you bring me to witness this?” he asked.

But the creature at the altar dissolved again into shimmering light.

Chapter Thirty

THE STONE CAGE

1

After several minutes, Stony turned and left the chapel. He walked back through the long corridor, to the open front door. He looked out across the driveway to the woods, and above it the night sky. The rain poured, and seemed the only thing that would wash away the blood and the terror. He stepped out into the storm.

Closed his eyes.

Wished it all away.

Opened his eyes, and it was still there.

He dropped to his knees. Clasped his hands together in prayer.

Please God help me stop this. Help it end. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be here.

2

THE MOONFIRE IS HIS ONE WEAKNESS

BUT WHEN HE IS BURNED WITH IT

HE USES ITS ENERGY AND DESTROYS THE OUTCAST—

The words came to him, remembering The Storm King of his favorite comic books. MOONFIRE.

The divine fire. Within me.

It was in his mind— a new myth for the Storm King—a way of fighting that had not been imagined before by him—a way of drawing strength from the very thing that burned away who Stony Crawford was—

I AM THE HALLOWEEN MAN!

And in that second, he knew why Nora had told him the story of the slaughter on Halloween night so many years ago—

She was telling him that he could fight this.

She had warned him that he was enough, that the Halloween Man was not the evil one, but the force of the god in the flesh, the real power.

He had already let it out. But he was the power. He was the one with the power. That thing at the altar was weak. It was trapped, it was held. Only he could let its power go free...

Inside me. Moonfire.

Stony closed his eyes, and brought the hunting knife up to his chest.

It won’t hurt if you’re fast.

If you believe, you can do this. You can do anything.

He remembered the strange smile on Diana’s lips when the knife went into her. She wanted to be released. She wanted out.

Do not fear death, the creature that was his mother had warned.

The blade went in deep, and the pain was ice-cold, and spread like broken glass through his veins, through his flesh.

3

He opens his eyes and watches the fire—

The Moonfire bursts and crackles along the edge of his skin—his skin blackens—burning—the PAIN OH PLEASE GOD DON’T MAKE IT HURT SO MUCH—He doesn’t resist—he lets the power come out completely, destroying the flesh that was Stony Crawford—like molten lava—

Destroy my weakness!

Destroy this cage of flesh!

4

His consciousness lay within the stream of fire as it pissed down his pant legs, down to the ground. The burning sap formed a pool beneath the blackened body of a boy of fifteen.

Then, it re-formed again, bursting up from the ground in a tower of flame.

For a moment, he looked back at the body of who he had been.

Seared flesh, a mouth that lolled open, empty sockets where the eyes had melted...

NOW, BRING ME BACK, BRING ME A NEW SKIN

A NEW SKIN TO COVER THE MOONFIRE.

STRONGER FLESH THAN HUMAN FLESH, ARMOR AGAINST MY MOTHER.

He felt the change within his form, as if his consciousness alone could determine what shape his physical body could be. It hurt, it felt like small slivers of glass being shoved into nerve endings, and if he’d then had a mouth, he would be screaming—

But as terrible as the pain was, it brought a numbing with it that was like ice.

And then, he’d formed the flesh around himself again.

He was Stony.

He felt his own true power, the power of one who had died and been reborn, as much a god as any man had ever been.

5

I’m sorry Lourdes. I’m sorry my baby boy. I’m sorry Nora. I wish I had never been born.

As much as something within him told him to escape, he turned around and walked back to the chapel.

6

Inside, all was silent. The candles were extinguished.

Alan Fairclough stood alone by the savaged corpse that lay upon the altar. Hanging from the low rafters, the torn open bodies of people from the village that Stony had known since as far back as he could remember.

“You must accept that these people were meant to die,” he said.

“Just shut up you freak,” Stony said, walking up to the altar. “It’s like exhaust, isn’t it? I gave Nora her eyes, but something worse comes out afterwards. I make something good happen, but something terrible comes from it.”

Alan Fairclough said nothing.

The fire creature glimmered from within the metal coffin behind the altar.

“You have to ask yourself,” Stony said, “why would it let itself be kept in a coffin made of what—lead?—from the very cave it had been trapped within for hundreds of years? Why would it wreak this small amount of havoc, harvest these sacrifices, play into your fucked-up sense of religion if it had all this power?”

“We cannot question the gods,” Fairclough said.

“I can. I’m the son of this thing. I can question anything I want,” Stony laughed. “How could a creature with unlimited power be tamed by human beings, and kept in dark stone and in—this chapel, what is it made of? I’d guess the same rock as the rock from those caves, am I right?”

Fairclough nodded.

“You think this is really an angel from heaven, don’t you?” Stony asked.

Alan Fairclough nodded. “As much of an angel as there can be. As much as a god as has ever existed.”

“You’d think an angel would want to return to God,” Stony shook his head, smiling. “But not this one. This one likes to be kept in the dark, kept away from heaven, away from most anything but the few sad people who worship it.”

“There were others, I have the fossilized remains of its—” Fairclough began, but when Stony shot him a mean look, he kept quiet.

“I don’t want to hear any more of your crap. You don’t mind that all these people died, and died horribly, do you?”

Fairclough shrugged. “Human beings die.”

“I could kill you.”

“I know.”

“You don’t care?”

“I don’t love life over all things, no.”

Stony went around and looked at the metal coffin. “Sort of like a vampire, huh. Comes out to drink blood and goes back in to snooze.” The fire flickered from within the small windows. “I think I know something about this thing now. I think I know a little bit about my mother. I think I know what she’s afraid of. I was afraid of it, too, but I don’t have to be. I’m solid. I’m flesh. I even killed myself out there, but I re-formed. I can’t be killed. But unlike her, I can’t float away, either. I’m going to forever be flesh and this creature all in one. But not her. She’s just that fire. She’s form without flesh. She’s got to be afraid—”

“She’s afraid of nothing,” Fairclough said with malicious pride.

Stony shook his head. “Oh, no, I think Mama’s afraid of the one thing that won’t keep her inside a stone cave or chapel. One thing.”

“She’s all-powerful. She’s the divine fire,” Fairclough muttered, but Stony sensed his nervousness.

Stony grinned in his direction. “Is she?”

“What—what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that she needs to be set free,” Stony said, and he lifted the lid up. She was there, like a young girl—

Like Lourdes, a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl, lying naked in a bath of fire.

My love, she whispered.

“Look at you,” Stony said. “You eat, you run wild in here, and now you’re exhausted. You need to rest after all this, don’t you?” His voice was almost sweet. He lifted her up in his arms, carrying her. The fire tingled across his shoulders and arms, but the pain was nothing now, all pain was gone.

“What are you doing?” Fairclough asked.

“I’m setting her free.”

“No, you can’t, you’ve seen what she can do—” Alan began.

Stony turned. His eyes bore through Fairclough. “You want to see what I can do? You want to see what I’m capable of? You know, I don’t even know what I’m capable of yet, but I’m willing to find out. Are you?”

Alan Fairclough held his hands up in a peacemaking gesture. “Please, you can’t let it out now, Stony. You can’t. It can do terrible things. It has been trapped for centuries...”

“Get the fuck out of my way!” Stony shouted. “I’m letting it out. I’m letting my mother go back to where she came from!”

Fairclough reached over and grabbed Stony’s shoulder—smoke rose from where he touched the boy.

A vision flashed out like lightning

Fairclough saw it—

He was crucified against a tree, his hair on fire—

“I’m a god now, remember?” Stony said. “I’m your worst nightmare, I shed my skin, I let it go, and now I’m back from the dead. To be King, you have to die and be reborn, right? Well, say hey to King Stony.”

He carried the creature out into the night.

7

Don’t, it whispered inside him. Please, I don’t want to—

“You don’t want to return to your own source, Mother? After thousands of years imprisoned by these sheep?”

“Please,” she gasped, and he felt her weakness, the body that had been fed and then its energy spent as it had bled its own followers.

“I wonder why, mother? Why would you want to be here among men, trapped in rock?”

He took her to the doorway, and laid her down on the grass just beyond the front steps and the columns. The rain poured across them, the lightning flashed over the trees.

She looked up at him, and he could tell she was trying to burn more brightly, to shift into some creature, some power—

“All Hallow’s Eve,” he whispered to her as he stroked his fingers through the sparks of her hair. “The old rituals, the harvest, when the gods would be killed, sent back to the other worlds. Sent back to where they belong. Demons, too, souls traveling to between the worlds, it’s the right time for that, isn’t it? That’s why Halloween is important to you. That’s why you need the sacrifices. Why you’ve been trying to mate with humans all these centuries, because you want to be here, you know what will happen to you in the other place. Call it heaven or hell or the idiot frequency of the divine damnation highway. I don’t give a damn. You have power here, but there, you’re probably nothing. You gave me my humanity, so I wouldn’t have to go there, so that I could have power here. Mother, it’s time for you to take off your mask, too. It’s time for you to move on.”

“Please,” she whispered, and he almost responded to her pain—

Too late.

You’re free, he thought.

Its pain, for the humanoid form no longer remained as the rain poured down, the cleansing rain, and then her light burst across the grass like a brushfire, up the trees, across the woods.

Stony held his hands up to the sky.

I am the Storm King. Bring on the storm of storms tonight. Take the fire back to heaven!

He shut his eyes, grinding his teeth together, willing himself, willing what was of his mother within him to transform.

He burst into thousands of bits of red and yellow and spread out across the land, following her trail as she tried to find a rock, a cave, a basement, something to hide within—

Each time she did, her fire spreading after her, he brought her out again, into the storm that grew as he felt the power grow in him.

Until, finally, at the Common, with the rain pouring hard, her light turned silver, he felt her inside him,

Why do you do this to your mother? She asked. I carried you and felt the pain of human birth just so that you would live.

Because, he told her, you do not belong here. Not with us.

But you are of me.

I’m more of them, he said. Return to where you belong.

Her body turned to an enormous lightning bolt that grew from the burning grass and shot slowly towards the blackened sky, drawing streams of white electricity from all corners of the village and surrounding woods. For a moment, it was as if the most brilliant daylight erupted from the corners of the earth, and the village of Stonehaven seemed at the center of the light.

Stony covered his eyes.

8

People in the village, in houses left untouched by wild Diana’s fire, those of the nonbelievers, those who had never been inside the Crown’s summer house, nor had they mingled much with those who had, waking in their beds looking at the blazing light—

They saw for a moment the most beautiful thing they’d ever experienced.

And then the pressure of air was too much—oxygen was sucked inward through some unseen vortex...

Stony saw them, the men and women and yes even children, turning in their beds, looking at the bright daylight outside their windows—the horror of it struck him down—

Bodies prolapsed, or sucked forward into emptiness, houses crushed in the path of the divine MOONFIRE

MOONFIRE

OH GOD HELP THEM! Stony wept.

He felt a suction of pressure from above, as if he were at the center of a cyclone, and he knew that it would take him, that he too would ride the elements to heaven, or to the sky, to the space between worlds where he belonged.

Then the pressure slammed him back against the ground, into the mud, and he watched in horror as trees uprooted from the earth around him, and the earth shook, rooftops of houses smashed down, windows shattered.

And then, there was an unearthly silence.

He looked back toward the Crown place, and the mansion remained, seemingly untouched.

It’s protecting her.

It’s protecting Lourdes and the child.

God is protecting them.

When he stood, finally, he saw that the entire world seemed to be on fire. A green- yellow lightning bolt, so large it looked like a highway among the roiling clouds, shot across the sky into an infinite night.

Then, the fires snuffed suddenly, and all was rain and darkness.

The storm raged on, and Stony Crawford lay back down in the mud until dawn.

9

“Stony?” the man said.

He opened his eyes. The sun’s light had just come up. It was Alan Fairclough standing above him.

“It’s all right. It’s over.”

Stony tried to open his mouth to lash out at the man, but was too weak to even utter a single word.

“Yes, I’m alive. I told you, I am the keeper of the rituals. I will teach you some of it, Stony. I will teach you many things. It took a lot out of you, what you did. It did your mother, too. It’s a terrible gift, Stony. You can’t throw it away. And you’re not like she is. You won’t get caught up in the ether. Your element is the element of earth and water as well as fire. You are, for better or worse, one of us in as many ways as you are one of them.”

Stony tried to muster every ounce of strength, but he felt like he was dying. A tremendous battering in his head, a ringing and the sound of hammering, all came up when he tried to move.

“Don’t try to speak. Just rest. What you did must have taken a lot of your power. It may be years before you gain it back. But do not worry, you have something to live for, after all,” Fairclough said. “Lourdes is still alive, and your child within her is strong. You are the future, Stony. You and your son. We who are merely human are now part of a charming history.”

Alan Fairclough lifted Stony up from the mud, and carried him as he would carry a newborn across the muddy Common, past the smashed houses and fallen trees, out to the dock behind the Crown’s summer place, to a small motorboat in which lay the sac-encased Lourdes, her belly grown large with their son.

Epilogue

JOURNEY’S END

1

At a distance of twelve years, Stony Crawford reached to the ticking bomb and pressed the button near the timer. One minute to blast off, to kaboom, and he could not do it. He knew they should blow up into a million undying pieces, but he could not do it.

For Lourdes.

For our child.

Stony turned to his son Stephen and said, “He lied. How could I have put my trust in that human monster? You were born two months later, in winter, but I awoke one morning and found...what was left of...your mother.”

He closed his eyes, remembering the body, less a girl’s body than a cracked-open encasing for an incubator. Clear liquid had sluiced from between the burst stomach, and her face was all but obliterated by the glaze-like network of fatty tissue and veins.

“Fairclough had taken you, a newborn, in the night and left me on the island with just a small boat and provisions to last a week or so. I was still too weak, and I could not let what was inside me out again...I didn’t know what kind of bloodshed...I was like a walking bomb...By the time I returned to the mainland, I had no idea where to go, how to find you. And I had to survive. Ben Dennehy and his sister helped, they took care of me until I knew I had to run from them, too. Knew that the Moonfire in me could not be near full-blooded humans. I did things to survive that no man should ever have to do.”

“And then you found me.”

Stony nodded. “After all these years. Hunting, searching, trying to sniff out Fairclough’s trail wherever it might lead.”

“To kill me?”

“I thought so. Then. Not now.”

“I’m a monster,” the boy said.

“You and me, both,” Stony added.

“You stopped the bomb.”

“I don’t want you to die. Not for something you were no part of. You’re only a quarter of what my mother was. You’re half Lourdes, and a quarter Johnny Miracle, too.”

“But this house, it’s...it feels like it’s breathing,” his son said.

Stony glanced around. “It is. It’s what’s left of that Halloween night. The residue of her being.”

“We should end it all,” his son said. “After all that happened here, this place shouldn’t be standing, should it?”

“Right,” Stony grinned, feeling the melancholy of his memory seep through him. He touched the edge of the bomb, and the timer started up again. Ten minutes. Enough time to get a good ways away. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” Steve asked.

“Where no one will come after us. Where no one will worship us,” his father said.

2

The small boat that Stony had left the island on was still docked behind the Crowns’ house. They ran together down the landing, out onto the small dock.

3

“What are we going to do there?”

Stony shrugged, unable to predict the next few days, let alone the coming years. “I guess we’ll find out. I can come to shore for food and what we need to live on.”

“But it’s bound to come out in me some day. The Devil.”

“Maybe. And it’s not the Devil. It’s not Evil by itself. It’s Evil because it’s untamed. It’s evil the way the wind is evil or the lightning. It’s a force. But you have will.”

“If it does come out, what if—I mean, what if other people come and it gets loose?”

Stony glanced at his son, and saw Lourdes there in his eyes and his hair. Lourdes Maria Castillo, with the crooked grin. I love you because of your hair.

Your eyes.

Your muscles, she whispered.

Your voice.

Your heart.

You spirit.

Your love.

“I don’t mean to hurt people, but it seems to always happen around me,” the boy said.

“I’ll teach you how to let it out and still control it. We’ll find out what our purpose is for the future,” he said. His son grinned, a boy—only a boy, with his father, headed for the furthest of the three Isles of Avalon.

“Here,” Stony said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a piece of paper. It was loose-leaf paper with blue lines on it, and between the blue lines, a scrawl. Tattered and yellowed, it was still legible after all these years. “Your mother wrote this to me. I didn’t see it until after...until it was too late to save her...”

Stony read it aloud.

“I have heard that everyone has one GREAT LOVE in their lives. ONE GREAT SECRET LOVE. I didn’t know till I met you that I would have one. I thought I’d always feel alone and maybe get married and have kids someday but never really know REAL LOVE. I look at my mother and I think, THAT’S GOING TO BE ME IN TWENTY YEARS. Married with kids, cleaning, keeping my mouth shut, wishing something better for my kids. But when I saw you the first time, last spring, I knew just by looking in your eyes. I mean, I’d seen you before, you know that. But I had never really SEEN you. Did you know it too? It was like there was a chalk outline, or maybe a halo around you. When I looked in your eyes it was like looking into an ocean that was there just for the two of us. I knew that you were the one. I knew that there would be no others. You are my ONE GREAT SECRET LOVE. I don’t know if we will always be like this, but I know that I will never ever forget you. NEVER. I want it always to be like it is between us right now. ALWAYS. No matter what happens. And things do happen. I know that. I know that sometimes love is not enough of a miracle to cure everything. I just wanted you to know. What we did together is what I wanted. It was PERFECT AND RIGHT.”

When he finished, tears were in his eyes. The breeze picked up.

To the island. Not so very far from humankind, he thought.

Close, but not too close.

Far enough to learn together who we are. To set ourselves free and still control it.

Then, behind them, the sound of the explosion.

4

His son shouted, “Fire! It blew up! Holy—”

Stony didn’t look back. He closed his eyes, and saw nothing but darkness. Then an aura emerged, a glow of light in his mind, the orange and yellow Moonfire—and she was there.

She was there.

A being within him now—a being of Moonfire and cool green shadow.

Lourdes Maria. Her hands open as if accepting what he would offer up, accepting the gift he was about to return to the cosmos. He saw her within himself, within his son. Her eyes no longer dark, full of pain, but golden and warm...her voice smooth, sure, but still she was there, as she had been at fifteen, eternally young, eternally faithful.

And the gift, the gift both of them offered to the universe, to the momentum of mankind and all that would be in the future, there in their son. At war perhaps with his other nature. The Outcast that was within the Storm King. The weakness that was within the power.

But beyond that, she was there, as well.

Your voice.

Your face.

Your spirit.

Your heart.

Your purity.

5

The Isle of Avalon emerged through the dissipating haze and light misty rain of morning as a fiery sun grew along its low hills.

If I remember one thing, Stony Crawford thought as he watched the sunlight break like glass against the slate sea, it will be this. One thing from all that I was to all that I will be, this one thing burned into my memory, for Lourdes and me:

In the boat, his son watching the morning as it came. His son—his and Lourdes’ son—the light of creation within, but the human flesh and blood of his mother and father, too. Perhaps that was the strongest prison for divine fire that had ever been created.

Lourdes, see through my eyes. See him. See you within him.

Your purity.

Your heart.

Your soul.

Also by Douglas Clegg

Click here to discover more fiction by Douglas Clegg.

STAND-ALONE NOVEL

Afterlife

Breeder

The Children’s Hour

Dark of the Eye

Goat Dance

The Halloween Man

The Hour Before Dark

Mr. Darkness

Naomi

Neverland

You Come When I Call You

NOVELLAS & SHORT NOVELS

The Attraction

The Dark Game (Two Novelettes)

Dinner with the Cannibal Sisters

Isis

The Necromancer

Purity

The Words

SERIES

THE HARROW SERIES

Nightmare House, Book 1

Mischief, Book 2

The Infinite, Book 3

The Abandoned, Book 4

The Necromancer (Prequel Novella)

Isis(Prequel Novella)

THE CRIMINALLY INSANE SERIES

Bad Karma, Book 1

Red Angel, Book 2

Night Cage, Book 3

THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY

The Priest of Blood, Book 1

The Lady of Serpents, Book 2

The Queen of Wolves, Book 3

THE CHRONICLES OF MORDRED

Mordred, Bastard Son (Book 1)

Mordred, Dragon Prince (Book 2)

COLLECTIONS

Lights Out: Collected Stories

Night Asylum

The Nightmare Chronicles

Wild Things

BOX SET BUNDLES

Bad Places (3 Novels)

Coming of Age (3 Dark Novellas)

Dark Rooms (3 Novels)

Criminally Insane: The Series (3 Novels)

Halloween Chillers

Harrow: Three Novels (Books 1-3)

Harrow: Four Novels (Books 1-4)

Haunts (8 Novel Box Set)

Lights Out (3 Collection Box Set)

Night Towns (3 Novels)

The Vampyricon Trilogy (3 Novels)

With more new novels, novellas and stories to come.

Contact Douglas Clegg

Get book updates, exclusive offers, news of contests & special treats for readers—become a V.I.P. member of Douglas Clegg’s long-running free newsletter.

Click here to subscribe now.

Disclaimer

The Halloween Man is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright

Copyright 1998, 2014©Douglas Clegg

Published by Alkemara Press in the United States.

ISBN: 978-1-944668-02-0

Created with Vellum

Publication Credits

Cover art provided by:

Damonza.com

Formatting services provided by:

Robert Swartwood

About the Author

Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neverland, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among many other novels, novellas and stories. His short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award, and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Berkley, Signet, Dorchester, Bantam Dell Doubleday, Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Alkemara Press and others.

A pioneer in the ebook world, his novel Naomi made international news when it was launched as the world’s first ebook serial in early 1999 and was called “the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace” by Publisher’s Weekly, covered in Time magazine, Business Week, Business 2.0, BBC Radio, NPR, USA Today and more; his book Purity was the first to go onto a mobile phone in the U.S. in early 2001.

He is married, and lives and writes in New England in a house called Villa Diodati.

Praise for Douglas Clegg’s Fiction

“Clegg’s stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby.”

—Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author.

“Douglas Clegg has become the new star in horror fiction.”

—Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story and, with Stephen King, The Talisman

“Douglas Clegg is the best horror novelist of the post-Stephen King generation.”

— Bentley Little, bestselling author

“Clegg gets high marks on the terror scale…”

—The Daily News (New York)

Discover Douglas Clegg’s Fiction

Get book updates, exclusive offers, news of contests & special treats for readers—become a V.I.P. member of Douglas Clegg’s long-running free newsletter.

Click here to sign up.

Click here to explore more fiction by Douglas Clegg.

Want More?

Read Night Asylum, 18 Stories of Mystery & Horror.

Click here to learn more.

MEET THE INMATES

Mysterious children surrounded by houseflies; a strange woman in a small town stalked by a preacher; boys trying to survive a terrifying boot camp; fraternity brothers who find a deeper brotherhood during a wintry Hell Week; a boy named Charlie, who may have more up his sleeve than meets the eye; a cop named Paul who discovers a tenement that opens the door into a place of nightmares — or heaven; Nix — a patient in an asylum — who holds the key to the secret geometry of night itself…and more.

Get the Book

Author’s Note

Dear Reader,

I’ve been writing stories since I was just old enough to write and illustrate gothic tales of insects transformed to humans who wanted to love, mice that stood in for autobiography of my five-year-old self, and the moment when my very first official horror story arrived one night many years ago.

At the age of eight, in the month of March, we had a school assignment:

Write a Springtime-related story.

Given that St. Patrick’s Day was around the corner and I happened to love discovering snakes in the woods and fields, I decided to create a historical tale with mythological overtones mingled with action and adventure.

And horror.

Well, I doubt I thought all of that out.

It was more intuitive on my part.

The story came together in a St. Patrick’s Day horror gothic in which Patrick had just finished driving the snakes out of Dublin’s fair city…but then the creatures returned once their holy nemesis had left town.

They wanted revenge, those snakes.

The streets of Dublin flowed in a river of blood as serpents grabbed citizens and dragged them away into the sewers, their fangs spewing venom.

Back in those days, teachers didn’t think you were odd if you wrote such a story.

And the other kids loved that kind of tale.

I remember the gold star I got for my literary effort.

The stapled, lined paper, cursively-penned (but without curses) ten-page opus was thumbtacked to the bulletin board for days on end for all my classmates to see.

It contained my illustrations of Dubliners on cobblestone streets at the precise moments when they were caught in the jaws of snakes, their fangs long and twisted, improbably gleaming with a sketched-in sparkle or two.

The second story I wrote for school that year happened to be a Bambi-esque riff of a deer’s coming of age in the woods. I remember using the word “thicket” a lot in that story.

Not horror at all, just a sweet story.

I was less-satisfied with that one.

Not quite a year after my first cohesive, nightmarish story received its gold star, my mother gave me a typewriter (one that ONLY TYPED IN UPPERCASE and in red ink, no less.)

She told me to try and type out the story of our pet mockingbird, who had just died. She’d seen how sad I was at this death, and years later told me she wanted me to get it out through some form of art.

Emotions of loss, love and guilt hit me as I typed.

I’d been the one that left the mockingbird out of its cage, which ultimately led to its future illness and death. I felt that this story – a complete fantasy of our mockingbird’s alternate, unlived life – overwhelmed me in a way the snakes of Ireland had not.

Although I wouldn’t hear the term “catharsis” until I was much older, this was the thing itself.

In typing out that fantasy of a mockingbird that I’d loved and lost, well…it changed my feelings about writing.

Here, I thought, was where I could live and breathe and let my imagination roam.

It was the personal connection to the story. I couldn’t know what our pet bird had thought or felt, but I could draw it up from the well of imagination.

Or at least I assume now that I thought such things. I certainly felt it:

The pulse of life within the page as the story emerged. It was from me but not of me or about me. It was as if I’d excavated some relics of another life, another world, another way of experiencing things.

And the story became the rebuilding of these broken pots and finding something that I hadn’t believed existed:

My version of what the relic meant, of what its own story might be.

It didn’t even seem to come from me at all.

Writing stories offered me a kind of freedom and gave me a sense of the world as a place of enormous possibilities.

I have not stopped typing and scribbling stories since that time.

I didn’t see a short story published until I was in my late 20s.

The first one published, I believe, happens not to be in this collection (but it happens to be in my third collection, Night Asylum). However, several of the stories from my first ten years as a published writer appear in this collection.

The Nightmare Chronicles has won two awards (the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award). I still feel honored to have received them.

I’ve been even more thrilled to discover that there are readers who also enjoy dark short stories.

I hope you’re one of them.

Enjoy these 13 stories of the dark. Let them sink in. I don’t believe any of them are stories of the surface of things, but of the underneath, perhaps even the unspoken.

To some, they will be “horror,” to others “mystery” (but in a more mystical sense than a traditional mystery) and perhaps to some “dark fable.”

They are weird.

Strange.

Impossible.

The chronicles of nightmare and its logic.

I hope you enjoy this territory of my fiction.

Best,

Douglas Clegg

For Raul

Underworld

We were subletting the place on Thirty-Third Street, just down from Lexington Avenue—it was not terribly far from my job across from Madison Square Garden where I was an ink-stained drudge by day before transforming into a novelist by night.

Jenny was getting day work on the soap operas; nothing much, just the walk-on nurses and cocktail waitresses that populate daytime television, never with more than a word or two to say, so it was a long way to her Screen Actors Guild card.

She made just enough to cover the rent. I made just enough to cover everything else, plus the feeble beginnings of a savings account that we affectionately named The Son’ll Come Out Tomorrow, because at about the time we opened the account, Jenny discovered that she was pregnant.

This worried the heck out of me, not for the usual reasons such as the mounting bills. and the thought that I might not be able to pursue writing full-time, at least not in this life.

The worry came from Jenny’s habit of sleeping with other men.

It will be hard to understand this, and I don’t completely get it myself, but I loved Jenny in a way that I didn’t think possible. It wasn’t her beauty, although she certainly had that, but it was the fact that in her company I always felt safe and comfortable.

I did not want to ever be with another woman as long as I lived. I suppose a good therapist would go on and on about my self-image and self-esteem and self-whatever, but I’ve got to tell you, it was simply that I loved her and that I wanted her to be happy.

I didn’t worry if I was inadequate or unsatisfying as a lover, and she never spoke openly about it with me. I was just aware she’d had a few indiscretions early in our marriage, and I assumed that she would gradually, over the years, calm down in that respect. I felt lucky to have Jenny’s company when I did, and when I didn’t, I did not feel deprived.

I suppose that until you have loved someone in that way it is impossible to understand that point of view.

So I wondered about the paternity of our child, and this kept me up several nights to the point that I would slip out of bed quietly (for Jenny often had to be up and out the door by five a.m.), and go for long walks down Third Avenue, or down a side street to Second, sometimes until the first light came up over the city.

During one of these jaunts, in late January, I noticed a curious sort of building—it was on a block of Kip’s Bay that began in an alley, and was enclosed on all sides by buildings.

Yet there were apartments, and a street name (Pallan Row, the sign said), and two small restaurants, the kind with only eight or nine tables, one of them a Szechwan place, the other nondescript in its Americanized menu; also, a flower stand, boarded up, and what looked like a bit of a warehouse. The place carried an added layer of humidity, as if it had more of the swamp to it than the city.

I am not normally a wanderer of alleys, but I could not help myself—I had lived in this neighborhood about a year and a half, and in that time had felt I knew every block within about a mile and a half radius. But it was as if I had just found the most wonderful gift in the world, a hidden grotto, a place in New York City that was as yet undiscovered except by, perhaps, the oldest residents. I looked in the windows of the warehouse but could see nothing through the filthy windows.

All day at work, I asked friends who lived in the general vicinity if they knew about Pallan Row, but only one said that she did. “It used to be where the sweatshops were—highly illegal, too, because when I was a kid, they used to raid them all the time—it was more than bad working conditions, it was white slavery and heroin, all those things. But then,” she added, “so much of this city has a history like that. On the outside, carriage rides and Broadway shows, but underneath, kind of slimy.”

On Saturday, I convinced Jenny to take a walk with me, but for some reason I couldn’t find the Row; we went to lunch. Afterward, I remembered where I’d led us astray, and we ended up going to have tea at the Chinese restaurant. The menu was ordinary, and the decorations vintage and tacky.

“Amazing,” Jenny said, “look, honey, the ceiling,” and I glanced up and beheld one of those lovely old tin ceilings with the chocolate candy designs.

The waitress, who was an older Asian woman, noticed us and came over with some almond cookies.

“We’re usually empty on weekends,” she said. She glanced up at the tin ceiling, having noticed Jenny’s interest. “Nice, huh? This was part of a speakeasy in the twenties—the cafe next door, too. They say a mobster ran numbers out of the back room. Before that, it was just an icehouse. My husband began renting it in 1954.”

“That long ago?” Jenny said, taking a bite from a cookie. “It seems like most restaurants come and go around here.”

“Depends on the rent.” The woman nodded, still looking at the ceiling. “The owner hasn’t raised it a penny in all those years.”

She glanced at me, then at Jenny. “You’re going to have a baby, aren’t you?”

Jenny grinned. “How’d you guess?”

The woman said, “I can see it in your face. You’ll have a boy, I bet.”

After she left the table, we finished the tea, and just sat for a while. The owner’s wife occasionally peeped through the round porthole window of the kitchen door, and we smiled at her but shook our heads to indicate that we weren’t in need of service.

“When the baby comes,” she said, “Mom said she’d loan us money to get a larger place.”

“Ah, family loans,” I warned her.

“I know, but we won’t have to pay her back for a few years. Can you believe it? Me, a mother?”

“And me, a father?” I leaned over and pressed my hand against her stomach. “I wonder what he’s thinking?”

“Or she. Probably, ‘Get me the hell out of here right now!’ is what it’s thinking.”

“Babies aren’t ‘its.’”

“Well, right now it is. It has a will of its own. It probably looks like a little developing tadpole. Something like its father.” She gave my hand a squeeze. I kissed her. When I drew my face back from hers, she had tears in her eyes.

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh,” she wiped at her eyes with her napkin, “I’m going to change.”

“Into what?”

“No, you know what I mean. I’ve been living too recklessly.”

“Oh,” I said, and felt a little chill. “That’s all in the past. I love you like crazy, Jen.”

“I know. I am so lucky,” she said. “Our baby’s lucky to have two screwups like us for parents.”

Now, it could be that I’m just recalling that we said these words because I want her memory to be sweeter for me than perhaps reality will allow. But we walked back up Second Avenue that Saturday feeling stronger as a couple; and I knew the baby was mine, I just knew it, regardless of the chances against it. We caught a movie, went home and made love, sat up and watched Saturday Night Live. Sunday we took the train out to her mother’s in Stamford, and then as the week was just getting under way, I walked through the doorway of our small sublet to find blood on the faux Oriental rug.

Yet the door had been locked. That was my first thought. I didn’t see Jenny’s body until I got to the bathroom, which is where her murderer had dragged her, apparently while she was still alive, and then had dropped her in the tub, closed the shower curtain around her. It wasn’t as gruesome as I expected it to be—there was a bullet in her head, behind her left ear, and she was lying face up, so I didn’t see the damage to the back of her scalp. She didn’t even look like Jenny anymore. She looked like a butcher shop meat with a human shape. She looked like some dead woman with whom I had no acquaintance. I was pretty numb, and was thinking of calling the police, when it occurred to me that the killer might still be in the apartment. So I went next door to Helen Connally’s and knocked on the door. Helen, in her sweats, saw my panic, let me in, and made me some tea while we waited for the police. I hated leaving Jenny there, in the tub, for the ten minutes, but if the murderer was still lurking, I had no way of defending myself.

After the police and the neighbors and Jenny’s mother had picked my brain about the crime, it hit me.

I had not only lost my partner and lover, but also my only child. I cried for days, or perhaps it was weeks— it was like living, for a time, in a dark cave where there was no hour, no minute, no day, only darkness.

When I emerged from my stupor and weeping, the police had arrested a suspect in my wife’s murder, and then the mystery unraveled: we had been subletting an apartment from a man who had several such places around the city, and each one was used, occasionally, by the man’s clients as a place of business on certain weekdays for drug dealing. The dealers’ assumption had been that on a given day of the week, no one was home. Best the detectives could tell, Jenny had come home too early on the wrong Tuesday, a drug deal was in progress, and one of the men had killed her as soon as she’d come in the door. I was devastated to think that strangers could be in our apartment; but of course, it wasn’t really ours. The renter of the apartment was arrested; he pointed the finger at a few associates; and within a year, the guilty were behind bars, and I was living in a place off Houston and Sullivan Street, over in the SoHo area. I was seeing, on a friendly basis, Helen Connally, my former neighbor—it was almost as if the tragedy of my wife’s death had given us a basis on which to form a friendship. Helen was thirty-two to my twenty-eight, and, while I knew I would never love her the way I loved Jenny, she was a good friend to me through a most difficult time. We spent a year being slightly good friends, and then we became lovers.

I was taking some out-of-town friends of ours on an informal sightseeing tour of the Big Apple, and brought them down to little Pallan Row. I thought the Szechuan place would be good for lunch, but when we entered the alley, both it and the cafe were closed; windows were boarded up.

“Jesus,” I said, “just a year ago, the woman running it told me that they’d had it since the fifties.”

Helen took my elbow. “C’mon, we can go get sandwiches up at Tivoli. Or,” she turned to the couple we’d brought, “there’s a great deli on Third. You guys like pastrami?”

Their voices faded into the background as I looked through the section of the restaurant’s window that was clear, and thought I saw my dead wife’s face back along the wall, through the round glass window of the door to the kitchen.

“Oliver,” Helen said, looking over my shoulder, “what’s up?”

“Nothing,” I said, still looking at Jenny, her dark hair grown longer, obscuring all but her nose and mouth.

“It must be something.”

“It’s just an old place. It was once a speakeasy, back in the twenties. Think of all that’s gone on in there,” I said.

Jenny’s face, in that round window, staring at me.

“Cool,” Helen said. She was originally from California, so “cool” and “bummer” had not yet been erased from her vocabulary of irony. She stood back, and her friend Larry whispered something to her.

I watched Jenny’s face, and noticed that when her hair fell more to the side of her face, there were no eyes in her eye sockets.

“Let’s go,” Helen whispered. “They want to take a ride on the ferry before it gets dark.”

“Okay, just a sec,” I said.

Jenny moved away from the round window.

My heart was beating fast.

I assumed that I was hallucinating, but the thought of spending the rest of the afternoon escorting this couple around town when I had just seen my dead wife was absurd. I made an excuse about needing to be by myself—Helen always took this well, and I caught an understanding look from Anne, who nodded. I knew they would go on to a late lunch and talk about how I still hadn’t quite recovered from Jenny’s death; and I knew Helen would act the martyr a bit, because it was so hard to play nurse to me over a woman who had cheated constantly behind my back. I adored Helen for her care and caution around my feelings; I wished them a good afternoon, and stood there, along the Row, watching them, until they had rounded the comer and were out of sight.

After a few minutes, I took off my shoe and broke the window glass, and tugged at one of the boards until it gave. Within half an hour, I stepped in through the broken window and walked across the dusty floor to the kitchen.

The kitchen was all long, shiny metal shelves and drawers, pots and pans still piled high. But it was dark, and I saw no one. I walked across the floor, back to the walk-in freezer, and looked through its frosty pane of glass. Although I could see nothing in there, I found myself shivering, even my teeth began chattering, and I had the sudden and uncomfortable feeling that if I did not get out of that kitchen, out of that boarded up restaurant right then, something terrible would happen.

It didn’t occur to me until I was on the street again that there should’ve been no frost on the glass pane at the walk-in freezer; that, in fact, there was no electricity to the entire building, perhaps to the entire block.

Helen noticed, over the next few days, that I was becoming nervous. We sat across from each other in our favorite park, me with the Times, and her with a paperback; I looked up, and she was watching me. Another day, we went to a coffee shop, and she mentioned to me that my knees, under the table, were shaking slightly. She said this with some seriousness, as if shaking knees were an indicator of some deeper problem. But I doubted myself then, and I did not want to talk about seeing my dead wife in the Chinese restaurant kitchen on Pallan Row. Finally, my restlessness turned nocturnal, and I tossed and turned in my sleep. Helen, sleeping over, finally sat up in bed at four in the morning and flicked on the bedside lamp. Her eyes were bloodshot.

“You haven’t slept a full night for two days,” she said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

I spent about an hour dodging the issue, until finally, as she pushed and pushed, I told her about seeing Jenny.

“She was blind,” Helen said, speaking to me like I was a lying twelve-year-old.

“Not blind. She had no eyes. I felt she could see me, anyway. She was staring at me. She just had no eyes.”

“And you went in there and no one was there …”

“But the freezer. Why would it be going?”

Helen shrugged. “I’m going to make a drink. You want something?”

At five-thirty a.m., she and I had vodka martinis, and went and sat out on the fire escape as all of Manhattan awoke, as the sky turned several shades of violet before becoming the blank light of day.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said, sipping and feeling drunk very quickly. “I don’t believe that the dead can rise or any of that.”

“What do you believe?”

I watched a burly man lift crates out of the back of his truck down in the street. “I believe in what I see. I saw her. I really saw her.”

“Assuming,” she said, “that it was Jenny. Assuming that the freezer was running on its own energy. Assuming you saw what you saw. Assuming all those things as givens, what does it mean?”

“I have no idea. I thought at first maybe I was just crazy. If I hadn’t seen the frost on the freezer window, I don’t think I would’ve believed later on that it had been Jenny at all. Or anything but an hallucination.”

Helen was obstinate. “But it’s got to mean something.”

“Why?” I asked.

I slept through the next day fairly peacefully, and when I awoke, Helen was gone. I watched television, then called a few friends to set up lunches and dinners for the following week.

Helen walked through the door at six-thirty in the evening, and said, “Well, I found that alley again. I pulled back one of the boards.”

When she said this, I felt impulsively defensive—it was my alley, it was my boarded-up restaurant, I felt, it was my hallucination. “You didn’t have to,” I told her.

She halted my speech with her hands. “Hang on, hang on. Oliver, the windows are bricked up beneath the boards.”

“No, they’re not.”

“Yes,” she said, “they are. You couldn’t have gotten in there.”

We argued this point; we were both terrific arguers. It struck me that she hadn’t found the right alley, or even the right Pallan Row. Perhaps there were two Pallan Rows in the city, near each other, perhaps even almost identical alleys. Perhaps there was the functional Pallan Row and the dysfunctional Pallan Row.

This idea seemed to clutch at me, as if I had known it to be true even before I thought it consciously.

The idea took hold, and that night, on the pretext of going to see a movie that Helen had already seen twice with friends, I took a cab over to Pallan Row.

It was colder on Pallan Row than in the rest of the city. While autumn was well upon us, and the weather had for weeks been fairly chilly, down the alley it was positively freezing. My curiosity and even fear took hold as I peeled back one of the window boards, the very one I had pulled down on my last visit. Helen had been right: the windows were bricked up beneath the boards. But then, I had to wonder, why the boards at all?

I touched the bricks; had to draw my fingers back quickly, for they seemed like blocks of ice. I remembered the owner of the Chinese restaurant telling Jenny and me that it used to be an ice house. I touched the bricks again, and they were still bitingly cold—it hadn’t been my imagination.

I walked around the alley but saw no way of getting into the buildings again, for all were bricked up.

And then I heard it.

A sound, a human sound, the sound of someone who was trapped inside that old icehouse, someone who had heard me pull the board loose and who needed help.

I am no hero, and never will be. For all I knew, there were some punks on the other side of that wall torturing one of their own, and if I walked into the middle of it, I would not see the light of day again.

And yet I could not help myself.

I found that if I kicked at the bricks, they gave a little. The noise from within had ceased, but I battered at the bricks until I managed to knock one of them out. It seemed to be an old brick job, for the cement between the blocks was cracked and powdery. After an hour, I had managed to dislodge several.

To my surprise and amazement, there was light on within the old restaurant. I looked through the sizable hole I’d made and saw the former proprietress of the Chinese restaurant standing behind the bar, dressed in a jade-colored silk gown, talking with her barman. A few people sat at the tables, eating, laughing. None of them had noticed my activity at the window.

As I put my face to the hole, I breathed in air so cold that it seemed to stop my lungs up.

I moved back and stood up. I was sure that this was a delusion; perhaps I needed some medication still, for immediately after Jenny’s death, I had begun taking tranquilizers to help blot out the memory of finding her dead. Perhaps I still needed some medical help and psychological counseling.

I crouched down again to look through the opening and noticed that at one of the tables, facing the other way, was a woman who looked from the back very much like Jenny.

I noticed the ice, too. It was a shiny glaze along the walls and tables; icicles hung down from the chocolate-patterned tin ceiling. I watched the people inside as if this were a television set. I lost my fear entirely. All my shivering came from the arctic breezes that stirred up occasionally from within.

I thought I heard someone out in the alley behind me, and turned to look.

Helen stood there in a sweatshirt and pants, my old windbreaker around her shoulders; she held a sweater in her arms.

“I figured you’d be here. Look, it’s getting chilly,” she passed the sweater down to where I sat on the pavement. She noticed the bricks beside me, and the light from within the building. “I see you’ve been doing construction. Or should I say deconstruction.”

“Do you see the light?” I asked her.

She squatted down beside me. “What light?”

“I know you see it,” I said, but when I glanced again through the hole, the place within had gone dark.

“What is it about this place for you?” she asked. “Even if you did see Jenny here, or her ghost, whatever—why here? You and she only came here once. Why would she come here?”

“I think this is hell,” I said. “I think this is one of those corners of hell. I think Jenny’s in hell. And she wants something from me. Maybe a favor.”

“Do you really believe that?”

I nodded. “Don’t ask me why. There is no why. I think this is a corner of hell that maybe shows through sometimes to some people. I don’t even think maybe. I know that’s what this is.”

“You may be right,” Helen said. She stood up, stretched, and offered me her hand to help me get up. I took it. Her hand was warm, and I felt a rush of blood in the palm of my hand as if she had managed to transfer some warmth to me.

And then, the sound again.

A human voice, indistinct, from within the walls.

Helen looked at me.

“You heard it too,” I said.

“It’s a cat,” she said. “It’s a cat inside there.”

I shook my head. “You heard it. It’s not just me. Maybe Jenny can only show herself to me. Maybe hell can only show itself to me, but you heard it.”

“Wouldn’t Jenny’s ghost be in your old apartment where she died?” Something like fear trembled in Helen’s voice. She was beginning to believe something that might be dreadful. It made me feel less alone.

“No. I don’t think it’s her ghost. A ghost is spiritual residue or something. I think she is in here, it’s really her, in the flesh, and I think there are others in here. I need to go back in and find out what exactly she wants from me.”

The noise again, almost sounding like a woman weeping.

“Don’t go in there,” Helen said. “It may not be anything. It may be something awful. It may be somebody waiting in there the way somebody waited for Jenny.”

I took her face in my hands and kissed her eyelids. When I drew back from her face, I whispered, “I love you, Helen. But I have to find out if I’m crazy. I have to find out.”

We went and sat in an all-night coffee shop talking about love and belief and insanity. Because I was beginning to convince myself that Pallan Row was a corner of hell, I waited until the sun came up to investigate further within its walls. Helen returned with me, and between the two of us, we managed to break enough bricks apart and away from the wall so that the hole grew to an almost-window-sized entrance.

I asked her to wait outside for me, and if anything happened, to go get help. I went in through the window, scraping my head a bit. The room on the other side was empty and dark, but that unnatural ice breath was still there, and, through the kitchen portal window, there came a feeble and distant light.

Helen asked every few seconds, “You okay, Oliver? I can’t see you.”

“I’m fine,” I reassured her as often as she asked.

I walked slowly to the kitchen door, looked through the round windowpane. The light emanated from the freezer at the other end of the long kitchen. I pushed the door open (informing Helen that this was my direction so that she wouldn’t worry if I didn’t respond to her queries every few minutes) and walked more swiftly to the walk-in freezer.

The freezer door was unlocked. I opened it, too, and stepped inside.

The light was blue and as cold as the air.

Through the arctic fog I could make out the shapes of human beings, hanging from meat hooks, their faces indistinct, their bodies slowly turning as if they had but little energy left within them. I did not look directly at any of these bodies, for my terror was becoming stronger—and I knew that if I were to remain sane as I walked through this icehouse of death, I would need to rein in my fear.

Finally, I found her.

Jenny.

Ice across her eyeless face, her hair, strands of thin, pearl necklace icicles.

She hung naked from a hook, her head drooping, her arms apparently lifeless at her side.

Her belly had been ripped open as if torn at with pincers, the skin peeled back and frost-burnt.

I stopped breathing for a full minute, and was sure that I was going to die right there.

I was sure the door to that freezer, that butcher shop of the damned, would slide shut and trap me forever.

But it did not.

Instead, I heard that human sound again, closer, more distinct.

I heard my heart beating; my breathing resumed.

The sound came from beyond the whitest cloth of fog, and I waved my hands across it to dissipate the mist.

There, lying on a metal shelf, wrapped in the clothes that Jenny had been buried in, was our baby, his small fingers reaching for me as he began to wail even louder.

I lifted him, held him in my arms, and wiped the chill from his forehead.

Someone was there, among the hanging bodies, watching me. I couldn’t tell who, for the fog had not cleared, neither had the blue light increased in intensity. I could not see to see. I felt someone’s presence, though, and thanked that someone silently. I thanked whoever or whatever had suckled my child, had warmed his blood, had met his needs. The place no longer frightened me. Whatever energy the freezer ran on, whatever power inspired it, had kept my child safe.

I took my son out into the bright and shining morning.

“This was why I was haunted,” I told Helen upon emerging from the open window. “This is what Jenny wanted to give me.”

I can only describe Helen’s expression, through her eyes, as one approaching dread. She said, “I think you should put it back where it belongs.”

“Babies aren’t ‘its,’” I said, and recalled saying this to Jenny once, too, at this very place. Or had Jenny said it to me? We had been so close that sometimes when she said things, I felt I’d said them too. I glanced down at my boy, so beautiful as he watched the sky and his father, breathing the vivid air.

Across his forehead, I saw a marking, a birthmark, a port-wine stain, perhaps, which spread across his skin like fire until he became something other than what might be called flesh.

White Chapel

1

“You are a saint,” the leper said, reaching her hand out to clutch the saffron-dyed robe of the great man of Calcutta, known from his miracle workings in America to his world fame as a holy man throughout the world.

The sick woman said, in perfect English, “My name is Jane. I need a miracle. I can’t hold it any longer. It is eating away at me. They are.”

She labored to breathe with each word she spoke.

“Who?” the man asked.

“The lovers. Oh, God, two years keeping them from escaping. Imprisoned inside me.”

“You’re possessed by demons?”

She smiled and he saw a glimmer of humanity in the torn skin.

“Chose me because I was good at it. At suffering. That is whom the gods choose. I escaped but had no money, my friends were dead. Where could I go? I became a home for every manner of disease.”

“My child,” the saint said, leaning forward to draw the rags away from the leper’s face. “May God shine His countenance upon you.”

“Don’t look at me, then. My life is nearly over,” the leper said, but the great man had already brought his face near hers. It was too late. Involuntarily, the leper pressed her face against the saint’s, lips bursting with fire heat. An attendant of the saint’s came over and pulled the leper away, swatting the beggar on the shoulder.

The great man drew back, wiping his lips with his sleeve.

The leper grinned, her teeth shiny with droplets of blood.

“The taste of purity,” she said, her dark hair falling to the side of her face. “Forgive me. I could not resist the pain. Too much.”

The saint continued down the narrow alley, back into the marketplace of what was called the City of Joy, as the smell of fires and dung and decay came up in dry gusts against the yellow sky.

The leper woman leaned against the stone wall and began to ease out of the cage of her flesh.

The memory of this body, like a book, written upon the nerves and sinews, the pathways of blood and bone, opened for a moment, and the saint felt it, too, as the leper lay dying, my name is Jane, a brief memory of identity, but had no other past to recall, her breath stopped, the saint reached up to feel the edge of his lips, his face, and wondered what had touched him.

What could cause the arousal he felt.

2

“He rescued five children from the pit, only to flay them alive, slowly. They said he savored every moment, and kept them breathing for as long as he was able. He initialed them. Kept their faces.”

This was overheard at a party in London, five years before Jane Boone would ever go to White Chapel, but it aroused her journalist’s curiosity for it was not spoken with a sense of dread but with something approaching awe and wonder, too.

The man of whom it was spoken had already become a legend.

Then, a few months before the entire idea sparked in her mind, she saw an item in the Bangkok Post about the woman whose face had been scraped off with what appeared to be a sort of makeshift scouring pad.

Written upon her back, the name Meritt.

This woman also suffered from amnesia concerning everything that had occurred to her prior to losing the outer skin of her face; she was like a blank slate.

Jane had a friend in Thailand, a professor at the university, and she called him to find out if there was anything he could add to the story of the faceless woman.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” he said, aware of her passion for the bizarre story. “They sold tickets to see her, you know. I assume she’s a fraud, playing off the myth of the white devil that traveled to India, collecting skins as he went. Don’t waste your time on this one. Poor bastards are so desperate to eat they’ll do anything to themselves to put something in their stomachs. You know the most unbelievable part of her story?”

Jane shook her head.

He continued, “This woman, face scraped off, nothing human left to her features, claimed that she was thankful that it had happened. She not only forgave him, she said, she blessed him. If it had really happened as she said, who would possibly bless this man? How could one find forgiveness for such a cruel act? And the other thing, too. Not in the papers. Other parts of her, mutilated. She didn’t hold a grudge on that count either.”

In wartime, men will often commit atrocities they would cringe at in their everyday life. Jane Boone knew about this dark side to the male animal, but she still weathered the journey to White Chapel, because she wanted the whole story from the mouth of the very man who had committed what was known, in the latter part of the century, as the most unconscionable crime, without remorse.

If the man did indeed live among the Khou-dali at the farthest point along the great dark river, it was said that perhaps he sought to atone for his past. White Chapel was neither white nor a chapel, but a brutal outpost that had been conquered and destroyed from one century to the next since before recorded history. Always to self-resurrect from its own ashes, only to be destroyed again.

The British had Anglicized the name at some sober point in their rule, although the original name, Y-Cha-Pa when translated, was Monkey God Night, referring to the ancient temple and celebration of the divine possession on certain nights of the dry season when the god needed to inhabit the faithful.

The temple had mostly been reduced to ashes and fallen stone, although the ruins of its gates still stood to the southeast.

Jane had already written a book about the camps to the north, with their starvation and torture, although she had not been well reviewed Stateside.

Still, she intended to follow the trail of Nathan Meritt, the man who had deserted his men at the height of the famous massacre.

Meritt had been a war hero, who, from those court-martialed later, was said to have been the most vicious of torturers. The press had labeled him, in mocking Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, “The Hero Who Skinned A Thousand Faces.”

The war had been over for a good twenty years, but Nathan was said to have fled to White Chapel. There were reports that he had taken on a Khou-dali wife and fathered several children over the two decades since his disappearance. Nathan Meritt had been the most decorated hero in the war.

Children in America had been named for him.

But then news of the massacre surfaced, the stories of his love of torture, and his rituals of skin and bone.

It was the most fascinating story she had ever come across, and she was shocked that no other writer, other than one who couched the whole tale in a wide swath of fiction, had sought out this living myth.

While Jane couldn’t get any of her usual magazines to send her gratis, she had convinced a major publishing house to at least foot expenses until she could gather some solid information.

To get to White Chapel, one had to travel by boat down a brown river in intolerable heat. Mosquitoes were as plentiful as air, and the river stank of human waste. Jane kept the netting around her face at all times, and her boatman took to calling her Nettie.

There were three other travelers with her: Rex, her photographer, and a British man and wife named Greer and Lucy.

Rex was not faring well. He’d left Kathmandu in August, and had lost twenty pounds in just a few weeks. He looked like a balding scarecrow, with skin as pale as the moon, and eyes wise and weary like those of some old man. He was always complaining about how little money he had, which apparently compounded for him his physical miseries. She had known him for seven years, and had only recently come to understand his mood swings and fevers.

Greer was fashionably unkempt, always in a tie and jacket, but mottled with sweat stains, and wrinkled; Lucy kept her hair up in a straw hat, and disliked all women. She also expressed a fear of water, which amazed one and all since every trip she took began with a journey across an ocean or down a river. Jane enjoyed talking with Greer, as long as she didn’t have to second-guess his inordinate interest in children. She found Lucy to be about as interesting as a toothache.

The boatman wanted to be called Jim because of a movie he had once seen, and so, after morning coffee (bought at a dock), Jane said, “Well, Jim, we’re beyond help now, aren’t we?”

Jim grinned, his small dark eyes sharp, his face wrinkled from too much sun. “We make White Chapel by night, Nettie. Very nice place to sleep, too. In town.”

Greer brought out his book of quotes, and read, “‘Of the things that are man’s achievements, the greatest is suffering.’” He glanced to his wife and then to Jane, skipping Rex altogether, who lay against his pillows, moaning softly.

“I know,” Lucy said, sipping from the bowl, “it’s Churchill.”

“No, dear, it’s not. Jane, any idea?”

Jane thought a moment. The coffee tasted quite good, which was a constant surprise to her, as she had been told by those who had been through this region before that it was bitter. “I don’t know. Maybe Rousseau?”

Greer shook his head. “It’s Hadriman the Third. The Scourge of Y-Cha.”

“Who’s Y-Cha?” Rex asked.

Jane said, “The Monkey God. The temple is in the jungles ahead. Hadriman the Third skinned every monkey he could get his hand on, and left them hanging around the original city to show his power over the great god. This subdued the locals, who believed their only guardian had been vanquished. The legend is that he took the skin of the god, too, so that it might not interfere in the affairs of men ever again. White Chapel has been the site of many scourges throughout history, but Hadriman was the only one to profane the temple.”

Lucy put her hand to her mouth in a feigned delicacy. “Is it… a decent place?”

Greer and Lucy spent their lives mainly traveling, and Jane assumed it was because they had internal problems all their own that kept them seeking out the exotic, the foreign, rather than staying with anything too familiar. They were rich, too, the way that only an upper class Brit of the Old School could be and not have that guilt about it; to have inherited lots of money and be perfectly content to spend it as it they so pleased without a care for the rest of mankind.

Greer had a particular problem that Jane recognized without being able to understand: he had a fascination with children, which she knew must be of the sexual variety, although she could’ve been wrong. It was just something about him, about the way he referred to children in his speech, even the way he looked at her sometimes, that made her uncomfortable.

She didn’t fathom his marriage to Lucy at all, but she fathomed very few marriages. While Greer had witnessed the Bokai Ritual of Circumcision and the Resurrection Hut Fire in Calcutta, Lucy had been reading Joan Didion novels and painting portraits of women weaving baskets.

They had money to burn, however, inherited on both sides, and when Greer had spoken, by chance to Jane at the hotel, he had found her story of going to White Chapel fascinating; and he, in turn, was paying for the boat and boatman for the two-day trip.

Jane said, in response to Lucy, “White Chapel’s decent enough. Remember, British rule, and then a little bit of France. Most of them can speak English, and there’ll be a hotel that should meet your standards.”

“I didn’t tell you this,” Greer said to both Jane and Lucy, “but my grandfather was stationed in White Chapel for half a year. Taxes. Very unpopular job, as you can imagine.”

“I’m starved,” Lucy said, suddenly, as if there were nothing else to think of, “do we still have some of those nice sandwiches. Jim?” She turned to the boatman, smiling. Lucy had a way of looking about the boat, eyes partly downcast, which kept her from having to see the water, like a child pretending to be self-contained in her bed, not recognizing anything beyond her own small imagined world.

He nodded, and pointed toward the palm leaf basket.

While Lucy crawled across the boat—unbalanced and in terror that the entire thing would tip and throw her into the water—Greer leaned over to Jane and whispered, “Lucy doesn’t know why you’re going. She thinks it’s for some kind of National Geographic article,” but he had to stop himself for fear that his wife would hear.

Jane was thinking about the woman in Thailand who claimed to have forgiven the man who tore her face off. And the children from the massacre, not just murdered, but obliterated. She had seen the pictures in Life. Faceless children. Skinned from ear to ear.

She closed her eyes and tried to think of less unpleasant images.

All she remembered was her father looking down at her as she slept.

She opened her eyes, glancing about. The heat and smells revived her from dark memories. She said, “Rex, look, don’t you think that would be a good one for a photo?” She pointed to one of the characteristic barges that floated about the river, selling mostly rotting meat and stuffed lizards, although the twentieth century had intruded, for there were televisions, on some of the rafts, and a hibachi barbecue.

Rex lifted his Nikon up in response, but was overcome by a fit of coughing.

“Rex,” Lucy said, leaning over to feel his forehead, “my God, you’re burning up,” then, turning to her husband, “he’s very sick.”

“He’s seen a doctor, dear,” Greer said, but looked concerned.

“When we get there,” Jane said, “we’ll find another doctor. Rex? Should we turn around?”

“No, I’m feeling better. I have my pills.” He laid his head back down on his pillow and fanned mosquitoes back from his face with a palm frond.

“He survived malaria and dengue fever, Lucy, he’ll survive the flu. He’s not one to suffer greatly.”

“So many viruses,” Lucy shook her head, looking about the river. “Isn’t this where AIDS began?”

“I think that may have been Africa — or outer space,” Greer said in such a way that it shut his wife up completely, and she ate her sandwich and watched the barges and the other boatmen as though she were watching a television show.

“Are you dying on me?” Jane asked, flashing a smile through the mosquito net veil.

“I’m not gonna die,” Rex said adamantly. His face took on an aspect of boyishness, and he managed the kind of grin she hadn’t seen since they’d first started working together several years back, before he had discovered needles. “Jesus, I’m just down for a couple of days. Don’t talk about me like that.”

Jim, his scrawny arms turning the rudder as the river ran, said, “This is River of Gods, no one die here. All live forever. The Great Pig God, he live in Kanaput, and the Snake God live in Jurukat. Protect people. No one die in paradise of Gods.” Jim nodded toward points that lay ahead along the river.

“And what about the Monkey God?” Jane asked. Jim smiled, showing surprisingly perfect teeth, which he popped out for just a moment because he was so proud of the newly made dentures. When he had secured them into his upper gum again, he said, “Monkey God trick all. Monkey God live where river goes white. Has necklace of heads of childs. You die only once with Monkey God, and no come back. Jealous god, Monkey God. She not like other gods.”

“Monkey God is female,” Jane said. “I assumed she was a he. Well, good for her. I wonder what’s she’s jealous of?”

Greer tried for a joke. “Oh, probably because we have skins, and hers got taken away. You know women.”

Jane didn’t even attempt to acknowledge this comment.

Jim shook his head. “Monkey God give blood at rainy times, then white river goes red. But she in chains, no longer so bad, I think. She buried alive in White Chapel by mortal lover. Hear her screams, sometime, when monsoon come, when flood come. See her blood when mating season come.”

“You know,” Greer looked at the boatman quizzically, “you speak with a bit of an accent. Who did you learn English from?”

Jim said, “Dale Carnegie tapes, Mr. Greer. How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

Jane was more exhilarated than exhausted by the time the boat docked in the bay at White Chapel. There was the Colonial British influence to the port, with guard booths, now mainly taken over by beggars, and an empty customs house. The place had fallen into beloved disrepair, for the great elephant statues, given for the god Ganesh, were overcome with vines, and cracked in places; and the lilies had all but taken over the dock. Old petrol storage cans floated along the pylons, strung together, with a net knotted between the cans.

Someone was out to catch eels or some shade-dwelling scavenger. A nervous man with a straw hat and a bright red cloth tied around his loins ran to the edge of the dock to greet them; he carried a long fat plank, which he swept over the water’s edge to the boat, pulling it closer in.

The company disembarked carefully.

Rex, the weakest, had to be pulled up by Jim and Jane both.

Lucy proved the most difficult, however, because of her terror of water. The boatman pushed her from behind to get her up to the dock, which was only four rungs up on the ladder.

Then, Jane didn’t feel like haggling with anyone, and so, after she tipped Jim, she left the others to find their ways to the King George Hotel by the one taxicab that existed in White Chapel.

Jane chose instead to walk off her excitement and perhaps get a feel for the place.

She knew from her previous explorations that there was serendipity to experience. She might, by pure chance, find what she was looking for. But the walk proved futile, for the village was dark and silent, and except for the lights from the King George, about a mile up the road, the place looked like no one lived there. Occasionally, she passed the open door to a hut through which she saw the red embers of the fire, and the accompanying stench of the manure that was used to stoke the flame.

Birds, too, she imagined them to be crows, gathered around huts, kicking up dirt and waste.

She saw the headlights of a car and stepped back against a stone wall. It was the taxi taking the others to the hotel, and she didn’t want them to see her.

The light was on inside the taxi, and she saw Rex up front with the driver, half asleep. In back, Lucy, too, had her eyes closed; but Greer, however, was staring out into the night, as if searching for something, perhaps even expecting something. His eyes were wide, not with fear but with a kind of feverish excitement.

He’s here for a reason. He wants what White Chapel has to offer, she thought, like he’s a hunter. And what did it have to offer? Darkness, superstition, jungle, disease, and a man who could tear the faces off children. A man who had become a legend because of his monstrosity.

After the car passed and was just two sets of red lights going up the narrow street, she continued her journey up the hill.

When she got to the hotel, she went to the bar. Greer sat at one end; he had changed into a lounging jacket that seemed to be right out of the First World War.

“The concierge gave it to me,” Greer said, pulling at the sleeves, which were just short of his wrists, “I imagine they’ve had it since my grandfather’s day.” Then, looking at Jane, “You look dead to the world. Have a gin and tonic.”

Jane signaled to the barman. “Coca-Cola?”

When she had her glass, she took a sip and sighed. “I never thought I would cherish a Coke so much. Lucy’s asleep?”

Greer nodded. “Like a baby. And I helped with Rex, too. His fever’s come down.”

“Good. It wasn’t flu.”

“I know. I can detect the D.T.’s at twenty paces. Was it morphine?”

Jane nodded. “That and other things. I brought him with me mainly because he needed someone to take him away from it. It’s too easy to buy where he’s from. As skinny as he is, he’s actually gained some weight in the past few days. So, what about you?” She didn’t mean for the question to be so fraught with unspoken meaning, but there it was: out there.

“You mean, why am I here?”

She could not hold her smile. There was something cold, almost reptilian about him now, as if, in the boat, he had worn a mask and now had removed it to reveal rough skin and scales.

“Well, there aren’t that many places in the world… quite so…”

“Open? Permissive?”

Greer looked at her, and she knew he understood. “It’s been a few months. We all have habits that need to be overcome. You’re very intuitive. Most women I know aren’t. Lucy spends her hours denying that reality exists.”

“If I had known when we started this trip …”

“I know. You wouldn’t have let me join you, or even fund this expedition. You think I’m sick. I suppose I am. I’ve never been a man to delude himself. You’re very—shall I say—liberal to allow me to come even now.”

“It’s just very hard for me to understand,” she said. “I guess this continent caters to men like you more than Europe does. I understand for two pounds sterling you can buy a child at this end of the river. Maybe a few.”

“You’d be surprised. Jane. I’m not proud of my interest. It just exists. Men are often entertained by perversity. I’m not saying it’s right. It’s one of the great mysteries…” He stopped midsentence and reached over, touching the side of her face.

She drew back from his fingers.

In his eyes, a fatherly kindness. “Yes,” he said, “I knew. When we met. It’s always in the eyes, my dear. I can find them in the streets, pick them out of a group, out of a schoolyard. Just like yours, those eyes.”

Jane felt her face go red, and wished she had never met this man who had seemed so civil earlier.

“Was it a relative?” he asked. “Your father? An uncle?”

She didn’t answer, but took another sip of Coke.

“It doesn’t matter, though, does it? It’s always the same pain,” he said, reaching in the pockets of the jacket and coming up with a gold cigarette case. He opened it, offered her one, and then drew one out for himself. Before he lit it, with the match burning near his lips, he said, “I always see it in their faces, that pain, that hurt. And it’s what attracts me to them, Jane. As difficult as it must be to understand, for I don’t pretend to, myself, it’s that caged animal in the eyes that—how shall I say—excites me?”

She said, with regret, “You’re very sick. I don’t think this is a good place for you.”

“Oh,” he replied, the light flaring in his eyes, “but this is just the place for me. And for you, too. Two halves of the same coin, Jane. Without one, the other could not exist I’m capable of inflicting pain, and you, you’re capable of bearing a great deal of suffering, aren’t you?”

“I don’t want to stay here,” she told Rex in the morning. They had just finished a breakfast of a spicy tea and shuvai, with poached duck eggs on the side, and were walking in the direction of the village center.

“We have to go back?” Rex asked, combing his hands through what was left of his hair. “I don’t think I’m ready, Janey, not yet. I’m starting to feel a little stronger. If I go back…and what about the book?”

“Not back, no,” she said. “I just meant I don’t want to stay here. At the hotel. Not with those people. He’s a child molester. No, make that child rapist. He as much admitted it to me last night.”

“Holy shit,” Rex screwed his face up. “You sure?”

Jane looked at him, and he turned away.

There was so much boy in Rex that still wasn’t used to dealing with the complexities of the adult world; she almost hated to burst his bubble about people. They stopped at a market, and she went to the first stall, which offered up some sort of eely thing. Speaking a poor version of Khou-dali, or at least the northern dialect that she had learned, Jane asked the vendor if there might be another hotel – not an English one, but one run by locals.

He directed her to the west and said a few words.

She grabbed Rex’s hand and whispered, “It may be some kind of whorehouse, but I can avoid Greer for at least one night. And that stupid wife of his.”

Rex took photos of just about everyone and everything they passed, including the monkey stalls. He was feeling much better, and Jane was thrilled that he was standing tall, with color in his cheeks, no longer dependent on a drug to energize him. He took one of her with a dead monkey. “I thought these people worshiped monkeys.”

Jane said, “I think it’s the image of the monkey, not the animal itself.” She set the dead animal back on the platform with several other carcasses. Without meaning to, she blurted, “Human beings are horrible.”

“Smile when you say that.” Rex snapped another picture.

“We kill, kill, kill. Flesh, spirit, whatever gets in our way. It’s like our whole purpose is to extinguish life. And for those who live, there’s memory, like a curse. We’re such a mixture of frailty and cruelty.”

The stoop-backed woman who stood at the stall said, in perfect English, “Who is to say, miss, that our entire purpose here on Earth is perhaps to perform such tasks? Frailty and cruelty are our gifts to the world. Who is to say that suffering is not the greatest of all gifts from the gods?”

Her Khou-dali name was long and unpronounceable, but her English name was Mary-Rose. Her grandmother had been British; her brothers had gone to London and married, while she, the only daughter, had remained behind to care for an ailing mother until the old woman’s death. And then, she told them, she did not have any ambition for leaving her ancestral home. She had the roughened features of a young woman turned old by poverty and excessive labor and no vanity whatsoever about her. Probably from some embarrassment at hygiene, she kept her mouth fairly closed when she spoke. Her skin, rough as it was, possessed a kind of glow that was similar to the women Jane had seen who had facelifts. This may have been from living in White Chapel with its humidity. Something in her eyes approached real beauty, like sacred jewels pressed there. She had a vigor in her glance and speech; her face was otherwise expressionless, as if set in stone. She was covered in several cloths, each dyed clay red, and wrapped from her shoulders down to her ankles; a purple cloth was drawn about her face like a nun’s wimple. It was so hot and steamy that Jane was surprised she didn’t go about as some of the local women did, with a certain discreet amount of nakedness.

“If you are looking for a place, I can give you a room. Very cheap. Clean. Breakfast included.” Mary-Rose named a low price, and Jane immediately took her up on it. “You help me with English, and I make coffee, too. None of this tea. We are all dizzy with tea. Good coffee. All the way from America, too. From Maxwell’s house.”

Mary-Rose lived beyond the village, just off the place where the river forked. She had a stream running beside her house, which was a two-room shack. It had been patched together from ancient stones from the ruined Y-Cha temple, and tar paper coupled with hardened clay and straw had been used to fill in the gaps. Rex didn’t need to be told to get his camera ready: the temple stones had strange images scrawled into them. He began snapping pictures as soon as he saw them.

“It’s a story,” Jane said, following stone to stone. “Some of it’s missing.”

“Yes,” Mary-Rose said, “it tells of Y-Cha and her conquests, of her consorts. She fucked many mortals.” Jane almost laughed when Rose said “fucked,” because her speech seemed so refined up until that point. No doubt, whoever had taught Rose to speak had not bothered to separate out vulgarities. “When she fucks them, very painful, very hurting, but also very much pleasure. No one believes in her much no more. She is in exile. Skin stolen away. They say she could mount a believer and ride him for hours, but in the end, he dies, and she must withdraw. The White Devil, he keeps her locked up. All silly stories, of course, because Y-Cha is just so much lah-dee-dah.”

Jane looked at Rex. She said nothing.

Rex turned the camera to take a picture of Mary-Rose, but she quickly hid her features with her shawl. “Please, no,” she said.

He lowered the camera.

“Mary-Rose,” Jane said, measuring her words, “do you know where the White Devil lives?”

Seeing that she was safe from being photographed, she lowered the cloth. Her hair spilled out from under it; pure white, almost dazzlingly so. Only the very old women in the village had hair even approaching gray. She smiled broadly, and her teeth were rotted and yellow. Tiny holes had been drilled into the front teeth. “White Devil, he cannot be found, I am afraid.”

“He’s dead, then. Or gone,” Rex said.

“No, not that,” she said, looking directly into Jane’s eyes, “you can’t find him. He finds you. And when he finds you, you are no longer who you are. You are no longer who you were. You become.”

Jane spent the afternoon writing in her notebooks:

Nathan Meritt may be dead. He would be, what, fifty? Could he have really survived here all this time? Wouldn’t he self-destruct, given his proclivities? I want him to exist. I want to believe he is what the locals say he is. The White Devil. Destruction and Creation in mortal form. Supplanted the local goddess. Legend beyond what a human is capable of. The woman with the scoured face. The children without skins. The trail of stories that followed him through this wilderness. Settling in White Chapel, his spiritual home. White Chapel, where Jack the Ripper killed the prostitutes in London. The name of a church. Y-Cha, the Monkey God, with her fury and fertility and her absolute weakness. They say the river runs white at times, like milk, it is part of Y-Cha. Whiteness. The white of bones strung along in her necklace.

The white of the scoured woman, her featureless face covered with infection.

Can any man exist who matches the implications of this?

The Hero Who Skinned A Thousand Faces.

And why?

What does he intend with this madness, if he does still exist, if the stories are true?

And why am I searching for him?

And then she wrote:

Greer’s eyes looking into me. Knowing about my father. Knowing because of a memory of hurt somehow etched into my own eyes.

The excitement when he was looking out from the taxi.

Like a bogeyman on holiday, a bag of sweeties in one hand, and the other, out to grab a child’s hand.

Frailty and cruelty. Suffering as a gift.

What he said, two halves of the same coin. Without one, the other could not exist. Capable of great suffering.

White Chapel, and its surrounding wilderness, came to life just after midnight. The extremes of its climate: chilly at dawn, steamy from ten in the morning till eight or nine at night, and then hot, but less humid, as darkness fell, led to a brain-fever siesta between noon and ten o’clock at night. Then families awoke and made the night meal, baths were taken, love was made; all in preparation for the more sociable and bearable hours of one a.m. to about six or seven, when most physical labor, lit by torch and flare, was done, or when hunting the precious monkey and other creatures more easily caught just before dawn. Jane was not surprised at this. Most of the nearby cultures followed a similar pattern based on climate and not daylight. What did impress her was the silence of the place while work and play began.

Mary-Rose had a small fire going just outside the doorway; the dull orange light of the slow-burning manure cast spinning shadows as Mary-Rose knelt beside it and stirred a pan. “Fried bread,” she said as Jane sat up from her mat. “Are you hungry?”

“How long did I sleep?”

“Five, six hours, maybe.”

The frying dough smelled delicious. Mary-Rose had a jar of honey in one hand, which tipped, carefully, across the pan.

Jane glanced through the shadows, trying to see if Rex was in the corner on his mat.

“Your friend,” Mary-Rose said, “he left. He said he wanted to catch some local color. That is precisely what he said.”

“He left his equipment,” Jane said.

“Yes, I can’t tell you why. But,” Mary-Rose said, flipping the puffed circle of bread and then dropping it onto a thin cloth, “I can tell you something about the village. There are certain entertainments that are forbidden to women which many men who come here desire. Men are like monkeys, do you not think so? They frolic, and fight, and even destroy, but if you can entertain them with pleasure, they will put other thoughts aside. A woman is different. A woman cannot be entertained by the forbidden.”

“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that things are forbidden to women, anyway.”

Mary-Rose shrugged. “What I meant, Miss Boone, is that a woman is the forbidden. Man is monkey, but woman is Monkey God.” She apparently didn’t care what Jane thought one way or another. Jane had to suppress an urge to smile, because Mary-Rose seemed so set in her knowledge of life, and had only seen the jungles of Y-Cha. She brought the bread into the shack and set it down in front of Jane. “Your friend, Rex, he is sick from some fever. But it is fever that drives a man. He went to find what would cool the fever. There is a man skilled with needles and medicines in the jungle. It is to this man that your friend has traveled tonight.”

Jane said, “I don’t believe you.”

Mary-Rose grinned. The small holes in her teeth had been filled with tiny jewels. “What fever drives you, Miss Jane Boone?”

“I want to find him. Meritt. The White Devil.”

“What intrigues you about him?”

Jane wasn’t sure whether or not she should answer truthfully. “I want to do a book about him. If he really exists. I find the legend fascinating.”

“Many legends are fascinating. Would someone travel as far as you have for fascination? I wonder.”

“All right. There’s more. I believe, if he exists, if he is the legend, that he is either some master sociopath or something else. What I have found in my research of his travels is that the victims, the ones who have lived, are thankful of their torture and mutilation. It is as if they’ve been—I’m not sure—baptized or consecrated by the pain. Even the parents of those children—the ones who were skinned—even they forgave him. Why? Why would you forgive a man of such unconscionable acts?” Jane tasted the fried bread; it was like a doughnut. The honey that dripped across its surface stung her lips; but it wasn’t honey at all; it had a bitter taste to it. Some kind of herb mixed with sap?

It felt as if fire ants were biting her lips, along her chin where the thick liquid dripped; her tongue felt large, clumsy, as if she’d been shot up with Novocain. She didn’t immediately think that she had been drugged, only that she was, perhaps, allergic to this food. She managed to say, “I just want to meet him. Talk with him,” before her mouth seemed inoperable, and she felt a stiffness to her throat.

Mary-Rose’s eyes squinted, as if assessing this demand. She whispered, “Are you not sure that you do not seek him in order to know what he has known?” She leaned across to where the image of the household god sat on its wooden haunches. Not a monkey, but some misshapen imp. Sunken into the head of this imp, something akin to a votive candle. Mary-Rose lit this with a match. The yellow-blue flame came up small, and she cupped the idol in her hand as if it were a delicate bird.

And then she reached up with her free hand and touched the edges of her lips. It looked as if she were about to laugh.

“Miss Jane Boone. You look for what does not look for you. This is the essence of truth. And so you have found what you should run from, the hunter is become the hunted,” she said, and began tearing at the curve of her lip, peeling back the reddened skin, unrolling the flesh that covered her chin like parchment.

Beneath this, another face. Unraveling like skeins of thread through some imperfect tapestry, the sallow cheeks, the aquiline nose, the shriveled bags beneath the eyes, even the white hair came out strand by strand. The air around her grew acrid with the smoke from the candle, as bits of ashen skin fluttered across its flame.

A young man of nineteen or twenty emerged from beneath the last of the skin of Mary-Rose. His lips and cheeks were slick with dark blood, as if he’d just pressed his face into wine. “I am the man,” he said.

The burning yellow-blue flame wavered, and hissed with snowflake-fine motes of flesh.

Jane Boone watched it, unmoving.

Paralyzed.

Her eyes grew heavy. As she closed them, she heard Nathan Meritt clap his hands and say to someone, “She is ready. Take her to Sedri-Y-Cha-Sampon. It is time for Y-Cha-Pa.”

The last part she could translate: Monkey God Night.

She was passing out, but slowly. She could just feel someone’s hands reaching beneath her armpits to lift her. I am Jane Boone, an American citizen, a journalist, I am Jane Boone, you can’t do this to me, her feeble mind shouted while her lips remained silent.

3

Two years later, the saint lay down in the evening and tried to put the leper he had met that day out of his mind. The lips, so warm, drawing blood from his own without puncturing the skin.

Or had it been her blood that he had drunk?

Beside his simple cot was a basin and a pitcher of water. He reached over, dipping his fingers into it, and brought the lukewarm droplets up to his face.

He was, perhaps, developing a fever.

The city was always hot in this season, though, so he could not be certain. He wondered if his fear of the leper woman was creating an illness within his flesh. But the saint did not believe that he could contract anything from these people. He was only in Calcutta to do good. He was revered as a great teacher.

The saint’s forehead broke a sweat.

He reached for the pitcher, but it slipped from his sweaty hands and shattered against the floor.

He sat up, and bent down to collect the pieces.

The darkness was growing around him.

He cut his finger on a porcelain shard.

He squeezed the blood and wiped it across the oversized cotton blouse he wore to bed.

He held the shard in his hand.

There were times when even a saint held too much remembered pain within him.

Desires, once acted upon in days of innocence and childhood, which now seemed dark and animal and howling.

He brought the shard up to his lips, his cheek, pressing.

In the reflecting glass of the window, a face he did not recognize, a hand he had not seen, scraping a broken piece of a pitcher up and down and up and down the way he had seen his father shaving himself when the saint was a little boy, the way he himself shaved, the way men could touch themselves with steel, leaning into mirrors to admire how close one could get to skin such as this. Had any ever gone so far beneath his skin?

The saint tasted his blood.

Tasted his skin.

Began slicing clumsily at flesh.

4

Jane Boone sensed movement.

She even felt the coolness of something upon her head. A damp towel?

She was looking up at a thin, interrupted line of slate-gray sky emerging between the leaning trees and vines; she heard the cries of exotic birds; a creaking, as of wood on water.

I’m in a boat, she thought.

Someone came over to her, leaning forward. She saw his face. It was Jim, the boatman who had brought her from upriver. “Hello, Nettie,” he said, calling her by the nickname they’d laughed about before, “you are seeing now, yes? Good. It is nearly the morning. Very warm. But very cool in temple. Very cool.”

She tried to say something, but her mouth wasn’t working; it hurt to even try to move her lips.

Jim said, apparently noticing the distress on her face, “No try to talk now. Later. We on sacred water. Y-Cha carry us in.” Then he moved away. She watched the sky above her grow darker; the farther the boat went on this river, the deeper the jungle.

She closed her eyes, feeling weak.

Ice-cold water splashed across her face.

“You go back to sleep, no,” Jim said, standing above her again. “Trip is over.”

He poled the boat up against the muddy bank. When he had secured it, he returned to her, lifting her from beneath her armpits.

She felt as if every bone had been removed from her body. She barely felt her feet touch the ground as he dragged her up a narrow path. All she had the energy to do was watch the immense green darkness enfold about her, even while day burst with searing heat and light beyond them.

When she felt the pins-and-needles feeling coming into her legs and arms, she had been set down upon a round stone wheel, laid flat upon a smooth floor.

Several candles were lit about the large room, all set upon the yellowed skulls of monkeys, somehow attached to the walls.

Alongside the skulls, small bits of leaf and paper taped or nailed or glued to the wall; scrawled across these, she knew from her experience in other similar temples, were petitions and prayers to the local god.

On one of the walls, written in a dark ink that could only have been blood, were words in the local dialect. Jane was not good at deciphering the language.

A man’s voice, strong and pleasant, said, “‘Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, I delight in your offering.’ It’s an incantation to the great one, the Y-Cha.”

He emerged from the flickering darkness. Just as he had seemed beneath the skin of Mary-Rose, Nathan Meritt was young, but she recognized his face from his college photographs. He was not merely handsome, but he had a radiance that came from beneath his skin, as if something fiery lit him, and his eyes, blue and almost transparent, inflamed. “She is not native to this land, you know. She was an import from Asia. Did battle in her own way with Kali, and won this small acre before the village came to be. Gods are not as we think in the West, Jane, they are creatures with desires and loves and weaknesses like you or I. They do not come to us, or reveal themselves to us. No, it is we who approach them, we who must entertain them with our lives. You are a woman, as is the Y-Cha. Feelings that you have, natural rhythms, all of these, she is prey to, also.”

Jane opened her mouth, but barely a sound emerged. Meritt put his finger to his lips. “In a little while. They used it to stun the monkeys. What that bread is dipped in. It’s a drug called hanu and does very little harm, although you may experience a hangover. The reason for the secrecy? I needed to meet you, Miss Boone, before you met me. You’re not the first person to come looking for me. But you’re different from the others that arrived here.”

He stepped farther into the light, and she saw that he was naked.

His skin glistened with grease, and his body was clean-shaven except for his scalp, from which grew long dark hair.

Jane managed a whisper. “What about me? I don’t understand. Different? Others?”

“Oh,” he said, a smile growing on his face. “You are capable of much suffering, Miss Boone. That is a rare talent in human beings. Some are weak and murder their souls and bodies, and some die too soon in pain. Your friend Rex suffers much, but he’s of the garden variety. I have already played with him. Don’t be upset. He had his needles and his drugs. In return, he gave me that rare gift, that…”

Meritt’s nostrils flared, inhaling, as if recalling some wonderful perfume, “That moment of mastery. It’s like nothing else, believe me. I used to skin children, you know, but they die too soon, they whine and cry. They don’t understand, and the pleasure they offer…”

“Please stop,” Jane said.

She felt strength seeping back into her muscles and joints. She knew she could run, but would not know to what exit, or where it would take her. She had heard about the temple having an underground labyrinth, and she didn’t wish to lose herself within it.

But more than that, she felt no physical threat from Nathan Meritt.

“You’re so young,” she said.“You look like you’re twenty. I never would’ve believed in magic, but…”

He laughed. When he spoke again, it was in the measured cadences of Mary-Rose. “Skin? Flesh? It is our clothing, Miss Jane Boone, it is the tent that shelters us from the reality of life. This is not my skin, see.”

He reached up and drew back a section of his face from the left side of his nose to his left ear, and it came up like damp leaves, and beneath it, the chalk white of bone. “It may conform to my bones, but it is another’s. It’s what I learned from her, from the Y-Cha. Neither do I have blood, Miss Boone. When you prick me, I don’t spill.”

He seemed almost friendly and came closer to sit beside her.

“You mustn’t be scared of me,” he said in a rigid British accent. “We’re two halves of the same coin.”

Jane Boone looked in his eyes and saw Greer there, a smiling, gentle Greer. The Greer who had funded her trip to White Chapel, the Greer who had politely revealed what a monster he was and how he accept his own horror.

“I met them both in Tibet, Greer and Lucy,” Meritt said, resuming his American accent. “He wanted children. We had that in common, although his interests, oddly enough, had more to do with mechanics than with intimacy. I got him his children, and he paid his price with flesh. Two days of exquisite suffering, Jane, along the banks of a lovely river. Greer did not quite expect it. I had some children with me, bought in Bangkok at one hundred dollars each. I let them do the honors. Layers of skin, peeled back, like some exotic rind. The fruit within was for me. Then the children, for they had already suffered much at Greer’s own hands. I can’t bear to watch children suffer more than a few hours. It’s not yet an art for them. They’re too natural.”

“And Lucy?”

He grinned. “Ah, Lucy. I could crawl into Greer’s skin, but I enjoyed the game. But poor little Lucy couldn’t tell the difference because she didn’t give a fuck about him or anyone. Our whole trip down the river, only Jim knew that I was within Greer. Old Jim’s a true believer. Sweet Lucy, the most dreadful woman from Manchester – and that’s saying a lot. I’ll dispose of her soon, though, but she won’t be much fun. Her life is her torture—anything else is redundant.”

Jane wasn’t sure how much of this monologue to believe.

She said, “And me? What do you intend to do?”

Unexpectedly, he leaned into her, brushing his lips against hers but not kissing. His breath was like jasmine flowers floating on cool water. He looked into her eyes as if he needed something that only she could give him.

He said softly, “That will be up to you. You have come to me. I am your servant.”

He pulled away, stood, and turned his back to her. He went to the wall and lifted a monkey skull candle up. He held the light along the yellow wall.

“You think from what I’ve done that I’m a monster, Miss Boone. You think I thrive on cruelty, but it’s not that way. Even Greer, in his last moments, thanked me for what I did. Even the children, their life forces wavering while stains along their scalps spread darker juices over their eyes…Why, they whispered praise with their final breaths that I had led them to that place.”

He held a light up to the papers stuck to the wall. His shadow seemed enormous and twisted as he moved the light in circles. He didn’t look back at her, but moved from petition to petition.

“These are all blessings and praises and prayers from the locals, the believers in Y-Cha,” he said. “And I, Miss Boone, I am her sworn consort, and her keeper, too. It was Nathan Meritt and no other, the Man Who Skinned A Thousand Faces, who is her most beloved and to whom she has submitted herself, my prisoner. Come, I will take you to the throne of Y-Cha.”

Jane followed Nathan down winding corridors, their walls covered with dried animal skins.

They arrived to a pool of water, a perfect circle, filled with koi and turtles, at the center of a chamber. The area itself was poorly lit, but there was a fire in a hearth at its far end. She heard the sound of rushing water just beyond the walls.

“The river,” Nathan said. “We’re beneath it. She needs the moisture, always. She has not been well for hundreds of years.”

He stepped ahead, toward a small cot.

Jane followed, walking around thin bones that lay scattered across the stones.

There, on the bed, head resting on straw, was Lucy.

Fruit had been stuffed into her mouth, and flowers in the empty sockets of her eyes.

She was naked, and her skin had been brutally tattooed until the blood had caked around the lines: drawings of monkeys.

Jane began to scream, and knew that she had, but could not even hear herself.

When she stopped, she managed, “You bastard, you said you hadn’t hurt her. You said she was still alive.”

He touched her arm, almost lovingly. “That’s not what I told you. She did this to herself. Even the flowers. She’s not even dead, not yet. She’s no longer Lucy.”

He squatted beside the cot, and combed his fingers through her hair. “She’s the prison of Y-Cha, at least as long as she breathes. Monkey God is a weak god, in the flesh, and she needs it, she needs skin, because she’s not much different than you or me, Jane, she wants to experience life, feel blood, feel skin and bones and travel and love and kill, all the things animals take for granted, but the gods know, Jane. Oh, my baby,” he pressed his face against the flowers, “the beauty, the sanctity of life, Jane, it’s not in joy or happiness, it’s in suffering in flesh.”

He kissed the berry-stained lips, slipping his tongue into Lucy’s mouth.

With his left hand, he reached back and grasped Jane’s hand before she could step away. His grip was tight, and he pulled her toward the cot, to her knees.

He kissed from Lucy to her, and back, and she tasted the berries and sweet pear.

She could not resist—it was as if her flesh required her to do this, and she began to know what the others had known, the woman with the scraped face, the children, Greer, even Rex, all who must worship

Y-Cha.

Nathan’s penis grew erect and dripping and she touched it with her hand, instinctively.

The petals on the flower quivered.

Nathan pressed his lips to Lucy’s left nipple and licked it like he was a pup suckling and playing. He turned to Jane, his face smeared with Lucy’s blood, and kissed her, slipping a soaked tongue, copper taste, into the back of her throat.

She felt the light pressure of his fingers exploring between her legs, then watched as he brought her juices up to his mouth.

He spread Lucy’s legs apart, and applied a light pressure to the back of Jane’s head.

For an instant, she tried to resist.

But the tattoos of monkeys played there, along the thatch of hair, like some unexplored patch of jungle, and she found herself wanting to lap at the small withered lips that Nathan parted with his fingers.

Beneath her mouth, the body began to move.

Slowly at first, then more swiftly, bucking against her lips, against her teeth, the monkey drawings chattered and spun.

She felt Nathan’s teeth come down on her shoulder as she licked the woman.

He began shredding her skin, and the pain would’ve been unbearable, except she felt herself opening up below, for him, for the trembling woman beneath her, and the pain slowed as she heard her flesh rip beneath Nathan’s teeth, she was part of it, too, eating the dying woman who shook with orgasm, and the blood like a river.

A glimpse of her, not Lucy.

Not Lucy.

But Monkey God.

Y-Cha.

You suffer greatly. You suffer and do not die. Y-Cha may leave her prison.

She could not tell where Nathan left off and where she began, and seemed beyond the threshold of any pain she had ever imagined in the whole of creation.

She ripped flesh, devouring, blood coursing across her chin, down her breasts, Nathan inside her now, more than inside her, rocking within her, complete love through the flesh, through the blood, through the wilderness of frenzy, through the small hole between her legs, into the cavern of her body, and Y-Cha, united with her lover through the suffering of a woman whose identity as Jane Boone was quickly dissolving.

Her consciousness: taste, hurt, feel, spit, bite, love.

5

In the morning, the saint slept.

His attendant, Sunil, came through the entrance to the chamber with a plate of steamed vegetables. He set them down on the table and went to get a broom to sweep up the broken pitcher.

When he returned, the saint awoke.

The servant stared at his master’s face as if he were seeing the most horrifying image ever in existence.

The saint took his hand to calm him, and placed his palm against the fresh wounds and newly formed scars.

Sunil gasped, because he was trying to fight how good it felt, as all men did when they encountered Y-Cha.

His mouth opened in a small o of pleasure.

Already, his body moved. He thrust, gently, at first. He longed to be consort to Y-Cha.

He would beg for what he feared most, he would cry out for pain beyond his imagining, just to spill his more personal pain, the pain of life in the flesh.

It was the greatest gift of humans, their flesh, their blood, their memories. Their suffering. It was all they had, in the end, to give, for all else was mere vanity.

Words scrawled in human suffering on a yellow wall:

Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood

I delight in your offering

Make of your heart a lotus of burning

Make of your loins a pleasure dome

I will consecrate the bread of your bones

And make of you a living temple to Monkey God.

The servant opened himself to the god and the god enjoyed the flesh as she hadn’t for many days – the flesh and blood and beauty — for it was known among the gods that a man was most beautiful as he lay dying.

The gift of suffering was offered slowly, with equal parts delight and torment, and as she watched his pain, she could not contain her jealousy for what the man possessed.

O, Rare and Most Exquisite

“What is human love?” I have heard my mother ask this when she was sick or when she was weary from the wood-rotted dams of marriage and children.

It’s a question that haunts my every waking hour.

I, myself, never experienced love. I once learned about it secondhand.

When I was seventeen, I worked in a retirement home, in the cafeteria, and on my afternoons off I went up to the third floor.

This was the nursing facility, and I suppose I went there to feel needed; all the elderly patients begged for attention, often someone to just sit with them, hold their hand, watch the sun as it stretched down across the far-off trees heavy with summer green.

I don’t know why I was so taken with the older people, but I felt more comfortable around them than I often did around my peers.

One day, an old man was shouting from his bed, “O, rare and most exquisite. O, God, O God, O, rare and most exquisite creation! Why hast thou forsaken me?”

His voice was strong and echoed down the slick corridor; his neighbors, in adjacent beds, cried out for relief from his moans and groans. Since the orderlies ignored all this, routinely, I went to his room to find out what the trouble was about.

He was a ruffian.

Bastards always lived the longest, it was a rule of thumb on the nursing floor.

This man was a prince among bastards.

Something about the lizard leather of his skin, and the grease of his hair, and the way his forehead dug into his eyebrows as if he were trying to close his translucent blue eyes by forcing the thick skin down over them. He had no kindness in him; but I sat down on the edge of his bed, patted his hand, which shook, and asked him what the matter was.

“Love,” he said. “All my life, I pursued nothing but love. And look where it’s gotten me.”

He was a rasping old crow, the kind my brother used to shoot at in trees.

“Did you have lunch yet?” I asked. The patients could become irritable if they hadn’t eaten.

“I will not eat this raw sewage you call food.”

“You can have roast beef, if you want. And pie.”

“I will not eat.”

He closed his eyes. I figured he was about to go to sleep so I began to get up off the bed.

“Bring me the box under the bed,” he whispered.

I did as he asked.

I drew out a cheap strongbox that could be bought in a dime store. When I set it beside him, he reached under the blankets to retrieve a small key.

“Open it for me.” He passed the key over to me.

I put the key in the hole, turned it and brought the lid up.

The box was filled with sand.

“Reach in,” he said.

I stuck my hands down deep and felt what seemed to be a stick or perhaps a quill. I took it out.

It was a dried flower with only a few petals remaining.

“Do you know about love?” he asked me.

I grinned. “Sure.”

“You’re too young,” he said, shaking his head.

He took the dried flower from my hand and brought it up to his nose. Dust from the petals fell across his upper lip.

“You think love is about kindness and dedication and caring. But it is not. It is about tearing flesh with hot pincers.”

I wondered if he was sane; many of the patients were not.

“This is the most rare flower that has ever existed,” he said. “It is more than sixty years old. It is the most valuable thing I own. I am going to die soon, boy. Smell it. Smell it.”

He pressed the withered blossom into the palm of my hand, and cupped his shaking fingers under mine. “Smell it.”

I lifted it up to my nose.

For just a second, I imagined the scent of a distant sea, and island breezes of blossoming fruit trees and perfumes. Then, nothing but the rubbing alcohol and urine of the nursing floor.

“I will give this to you,” he said. “to keep, if you promise to take care of it.”

Without thinking, I said, “It’s dead.”

He shook his head, a rage flaring behind his eyes, a life in him I wouldn’t have expected. “You don’t know about love,” he grabbed my arm, and his grip was hard as stone, “and you’ll live just like I did, boy, unless you listen good, and life will give you its own whipping so that one day you’ll end up in this bed smelling like this and crying out to the god of death just for escape from this idiot skin so that the pain of memory will stop.”

To calm him, because now I knew he was crazy, I said, “Okay. Tell me.”

“Love,” he said, “is the darkest gift. It takes all that you are, and it destroys you.”

And he told me about the flower of his youth.

His name was Gus, and he was a gardener at a house that overlooked the Hudson River.

The year was 1925, and his employer was an invalid in his fifties, with a young wife. The wife’s name was Jo, and she was from a poor family, but she had made a good marriage, for the house and grounds occupied a hundred acres. As head gardener, Gus had a staff of six beneath him. Jo would come out in the mornings, bringing coffee to the workers. She was from a family of laborers, so she understood their needs, and she encouraged their familiarity. Her husband barely noticed her, and if he did, he wouldn’t approve of her mixing with the staff.

One morning she came down to Gus where he stood in the maze of roses, with the dew barely settled upon them, and she kissed him lightly on the cheek. He wasn’t sure how to take this. She was wearing her robe, as she always did when she brought the coffee out to the men, although it revealed nothing of her figure. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, with thick dark hair, worn long and out of fashion, a throwback to the long Victorian tresses of his mother’s generation. She had almond-shaped eyes, and skin like olives soaked in brandy.

He had never seen a woman this exotic in his hometown of Wappingers Falls.

She smelled of oil and rosewater, and she did not greet him, ever, without something sweet on her lips, so that her breath was a pleasure to feel against his skin. She drew back from him, and with her heavy accent, said, “Gus, my handsome boy of flowers, what will you find for me today?”

Gus had had girls before, since he was fourteen, but they had been lust pursuits, for none of the girls of the Falls, or of Poughkeepsie, or even the college girl he had touched in Connecticut, stirred in him what he felt with Jo. He called her, to his men, “my Jo,” for he felt that, if things were different, she would not be with this wealthy man with his palsied body, but with him. Gus and Jo—he wrote it on the oak tree down near the river, he carved it into a stone he had placed in the center of the rose garden.

When she kissed him on the cheek, he waited a minute, then grabbed her in his arms, for he could no longer contain himself, and they made love there, in the morning, before the sun was far up in the sky.

He knew that she loved him, so he went that day to find her the most beautiful flower that could be had. It was a passion of hers, to have the most beautiful things, for she had lived most of her life with only the ugly and the dull. He wished he were wealthy so that he might fly to China, or to the south of France, or to the stars, to bring back the rarest of blooms. But, having four bits on him, he took the train into New York City, and eventually came to a neighborhood that sold nothing but flowers, stall upon stall. But it was midsummer, and all the flowers available were the same that he could grow along the river.

As he was about to leave, not knowing how he could return to his Jo without something very special, a woman near one of the stalls said, “You don’t like these, do you?”

Gus turned, and there was a woman of about twenty-two. Very plain, although pretty in the way that he thought all women basically pretty. She was small and pale, and she wore no makeup, but her eyes were large and lovely. “I’ve been watching you,” she said.

“You have?”

“Yes. Do you think that’s rude? To watch someone?”

“It depends.”

“I think it’s rude. But then,” she said, smiling like a mischievous child, “I’ve never been ashamed of my own behavior, only the behavior of others. I’m ashamed of yours. Here I’ve watched you for fifteen minutes, and you barely took your eyes off the flowers. How rude do you think that is? Very. You like flowers, don’t you?”

“I’m a gardener. I take care of them.”

“Lovely,” she said wistfully. “Imagine a life of caring for beautiful things. Imagine when you’re very old, and look back on it. What lovely memories you’ll have.”

Although she seemed forthright, the way he knew city people were, there was something fitful in the way she spoke, almost hesitant somewhere in the flow of words, as if all this snappy talk was a cover for extreme shyness. And yet, he knew, city women were rarely shy.

He had not come all the way to the city to flirt with shop girls. “I’m looking for something out of the ordinary.”

She offered a curious smile, tilting her head back. She was a shade beautiful in the thin shaft of daylight that pressed between the stalls. She was no Jo, but she would make some young man fall in love with her, he knew that much. Some city boy who worked in the local grocer’s, or ran a bakery. Or, perhaps, even a junior bondsman. She would eventually live in one of the boxcar apartments in Brooklyn, and be the most wonderful and ordinary bride. She would have four children, and grow old without fear. Not like Jo, who was destined for romance and passion and tragedy and great redemption, not Italian Jo of olive skin and rose water. The woman said, “I know a place where you can find very unusual flowers.”

“I want a beauty,” he said.

“For a lady?”

Because Gus knew how women could be, and because he detected that he might get further along with this girl if he feigned interest in her, he lied. “No. Just for me. I appreciate beautiful flowers.”

He felt bad then, a little, because now he knew that he was leading her on, but she seemed to know where the interesting flowers were, and all he could think of was Jo and how she loved flowers. Gus was considered handsome in his day, and women often showed him special attention, so he was used to handling them, charming them. “I need a beauty,” he repeated.

“I’m not saying beautiful,” she cautioned him, and began walking between the stalls, through an alley, leading him, “but unusual. Sometimes unusual is better than beautiful.”

She wore a kind of apron, he noticed, the long kind that covered her dress, and he wondered if she was the local butcher’s daughter, or if she was a cook.

The alley was steamy; there was some sort of kitchen down one end of it, a laundry, too. He heard someone shouting somewhere in a foreign language.

The woman came to an open pit, with a thin metal staircase leading down to a room, and she hiked her apron up a bit, and held her hand out for him to steady her as she descended.

“My balance isn’t too good,” she told him. “I have a heart problem—nothing serious—but it makes me light-headed sometimes on stairs.”

“There’re flowers down there?” he asked as he went down the steps slowly.

“It’s one of my father’s storage rooms. He has a flower shop on Seventh Avenue, but there’s an icehouse above us, and we get shavings for free. They stay colder down here,” she said, and turned a light up just as he had reached the last step. “There’s another room three doors down, beneath the laundry. We keep some there, too.”

The room was all of redbrick, and it was chilly, like winter. “We’re right underneath the storage part of the icehouse.”

As the feeble light grew strong, he saw that they were surrounded by flowers, some of them brilliant vermillion sprays, others deep purples and blacks, still more of pile upon pile of dappled yellows on reds on greens.

“These are all fresh cut,” she said, “you can have any you want. My father grows them underneath the laundry, and when he cuts them, we keep them on ice until we ship them. Here,” she said, reaching into a bowl that seemed to be carved out of ice. She brought up tiny red and blue blossoms, like snowballs, but in miniature. She brought them up to his face, and the aroma was incredible; it reminded him of Jo’s skin when he pressed his face against her breasts and tasted the brightness of morning.

The woman kissed him, and he responded, but it was not like his kiss with Jo. This woman seemed colder, and he knew he was kissing her just because he wanted the blossoms. He remembered the cold kiss all the way to the big house, as he carried the gift to his beloved.

Jo was shocked by the tiny, perfect flowers.

He’d left them for her in a crystal bowl of water on the dining room table so that she would see them first when she came to have breakfast. He heard her cry out, sweetly, and then she came to the kitchen window to search the back garden for him. She tried to open it, but it had rained the night before and all that morning, so it was stuck. She rushed around to the back door, ran barefoot into the garden and grabbed his hand.

“Sweetest, precious, blessed,” she gasped. “Where did you find them? Their smell—so lovely.”

He had saved one small blossom in his hand. He crushed it against her neck, softly. He kissed her as if he owned her, and he told her how much he loved her.

She drew back from him then, and he saw something change in her eyes.

“No,” she said.

When those flowers died, he ventured back into the city, down the alley, but the entrance to the pit was closed.

He rapped on the metal doors several times, but there was no response. He went around to the entrance to the icehouse and asked the manager there about the flowers, but he seemed to not know much about it other than the fact that the storage room was closed for the day.

Gus was desperate, had brought his month’s pay in order to buy armloads of the flowers, but instead, ended up in an Irish bar on Horace Street drinking away most of it. Jo didn’t love him, he knew that now. How could he be such a fool, anyway? Jo could never leave her husband, never in a thousand years.

Oh, but for another moment in her arms, another moment of that sweet mystery of her breath against his neck!

He stayed in the city overnight, sleeping in a flophouse, and was up early, and this time went to directly to the laundry. The man who ran it took him to the back room, where the steam thickened. Gus heard the sounds of machines being pushed and pressed and clanked and rapped, as a dozen or more people worked in the hot fog of the shop.

The owner took him farther back, until they came to a stairway.

“Down,” the man said, nodding, and then disappeared into the fog.

Gus descended the steps, never sure when he would touch bottom, for the steam was still heavy. Once in the depths, he noticed a sickly yellow light a ways off. He went towards it, brushing against what he assumed were flowers growing in their pots.

Then someone touched his arm.

“Gus.” It was the woman from the week before. “It’s me. Moira.”

“I didn’t know your name,” he told her. “I didn’t know how to find you.”

“How long did the flowers last?”

“Six days.”

“How sad,” she said, and leaned against him. He kissed her, but the way he would kiss his sister, because he didn’t really want to lead her on.

The mist from the laundry enveloped the outline of her face, causing her skin to shine a yellow-white like candles in luminaria, revealing years that he had not anticipated—he had thought she might be a girl in her early twenties, but in this steam she appeared older, ashes shining under her skin.

“I loved the flowers.”

“What else do you love, Gus?”

He didn’t answer. He pulled away from her, and felt the edges of thick-lipped petals.

She said, “We keep the exotics here. There’s an orchid from the Fiji Islands—it’s not properly an orchid, but it has the look of one. It’s tiny, but very rare. In its natural state, it’s a parasite on fruit trees, but here, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”

“I never paid you for the last one.”

“Gus,” she said, and reached up to cup the side of his face in the palm of her hand, “whatever is mine, is yours.”

She retreated into the mist, and in a few moments laid in the palm of his hand a flower so small that he could barely see it. She set another of its kind into a jewelry box and said, “This is more precious than any jewel I know of. But if I give it to you, I want you to tell me one thing.”

He waited to hear her request.

“I want you to tell me—no, promise me—you will take care of this better than those last ones. This should live, if cared for, for over a month. You do love flowers, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, and, because he wanted this tiny flower so much for his Jo, he brought Moira close to him and pressed his lips against hers, and kissed around her glowing face, tasting the steam from the laundry. He wanted it so badly, he knew this flower would somehow win his Jo. Somehow, she would manage to leave her husband, and they would run away together, maybe even to the Fiji Islands to live off mango and to braid beautiful Jo’s hair with the island parasite flowers.

Yet there was something about Moira that he liked, too. She wasn’t Jo, but she was different from any woman he knew. When he drew his face back from hers, her face was radiant and shining, and not the middle-aged woman he had thought just a minute before. She was a young girl, after all, barely out of her teens, with all the enthusiasm of fresh, new life. He wondered what his life would be like with a girl like this, what living in the city with her would feel like, what it would be like to live surrounded by the frozen and burning flowers.

There were tears in Moira’s eyes when she left him, and he sensed that she knew why he wanted the beautiful flowers.

And still, she gave him the rare and exquisite ruby blossom.

The tiny flower died fourteen days after.

Gus could not return to the city for more than six weeks.

A drought held the valley in its grip and he had to take special pains to make sure that the gardens didn’t die. Jo didn’t come and see him, but he knew that it was for the best. She was married, he was merely the gardener, and no matter how many gorgeous flowers he brought to her, she would never be his. He thought of Moira, and her sweetness and mystery; her generosity was something he had never experienced before in a woman, for the ones he had known were often selfish and arrogant in their beauty. He also knew that the old man must suspect his overfamiliarity with Jo, and so his days would be numbered in the Hudson River house.

One afternoon he took off again for the city, but it took several hours, as there was an automobile stuck on the tracks just before coming into Grand Central Station. He got there in the evening, and went to the laundry, but both it and the icehouse were closed for the day.

He remembered that Moira had mentioned her father’s shop, and so he went into the flower district and scoured each one, asking after her. Finally, he came to the shop on Seventh Avenue and there she was, sitting behind a counter arranging iris in a crystal vase.

She turned to see him, and in the light of early evening she was the simple girl he had seen the first day they had met.

How the mist and the ice could change her features, but in the daylight world, she was who she was!

“Gus,” she said, “I thought you weren’t coming back. Ever.”

“I had to,” he said, not able to help his grin, or the sweat of fear that evaporated along his forehead, fear that he would not find her. It was like in the moving pictures, when the lover and his beloved were reunited at the end. He ran around the counter and grabbed her up in his arms.

“Oh, Moira, Moira,” he buried his face in her neck, and she was laughing freely, happily.

She closed the shop and pulled down the shade.

“Gus, I want you to know, I love you. I know you might not love me, but I love you.”

Here he was, a gardener, and she, a flower shop girl. How could a more perfect pair be created, one for the other?

“There’s something I want to give you,” she said.

“You’ve given me—” he began, but she didn’t let him finish.

“Something I want to give you,” she began unbuttoning the top of her blouse.

When she was completely naked, he saw what was different about her. “I could never give my heart freely … knowing I was … different … like this …”

He stepped back, away from her.

“Who did this to you?” he asked, his voice trembling.

She looked at him with those wide, perfect eyes, and said, “I was born this way.”

The threads.

There, in the whiteness of her thighs.

He was horrified, and fascinated, for he had never seen this before.

Her genitals had been sewn together, you see, with some thread that was strong, yet silken and impossibly slender, like a spider’s web. She brought his hand there, to the center of her being, and she asked him to be careful with her. “As careful as you are with the flowers.”

“It’s monstrous,” he said, trying to hide the revulsion in his voice, trying to draw back his fingers.

“Break the threads,” she said, “and I will show you the most beautiful flower that has ever been created.”

“I can’t.” He shivered.

Tears welled in her eyes. “I love you with all my being,” she said, “and I want to give you this … this … even if it means …” Her voice trailed off.

He found himself plucking at the threads, then pulling at them, until finally he got down on his hands and knees and placed his mouth there, and bit into the threads to open her.

There must have been some pain, but she only cried out once, then was silent.

The skin beneath his fingers curled, blossoming, and there was a smell, no, a scent, like a spice wind across a tropical shore. Her pelvis opened, prolapsed like a flower blooming suddenly, in one night, and her skin folded backward on itself, with streaks of red and yellow and white bursting forth from the wound, from the pollen that spread golden, and the wonderful colors that radiated from between her thighs, until there was nothing but flower.

He cupped his hands around it. It was the most exotic flower he had ever seen, in his hands, it was the beauty that had been inside her, and she had allowed him to open her, to hold this rare flower in his hands.

Gus wondered if he had gone insane, or if this indeed was the most precious of all flowers, this gift of love, this sacrifice that she had made for him.

He concealed the bloom in a hatbox and carried it back to the estate with him.

In the morning, he entered the great house without knocking, and his heart pounded as loud as his footsteps as he crossed the grand foyer. He called to the mistress of the house boldly.

“Jo!” he shouted, “Jo! Look what I have brought you!”

He didn’t care if the old man heard him, he didn’t care if he would be without a job, none of it mattered, for he had found the greatest gift for his Jo, the woman who would not now deny him. He knew he loved her now, his Jo, he knew what love was now, what the sacrifice of love meant.

She was already dressed for riding, and she blushed when she saw him. “You shouldn’t come in like this. You have no right.”

He opened the hatbox and retrieved the flower.

“This is for you,” he said, and she ran to him, taking it up in her hands, smelling it, wiping its petals across her lips.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, smiling, clasping his hand, and just as quickly letting go. “Darling,” she called out, turning to the staircase, “darling, look at the lovely flower our Gus has brought us, look,” and like a young girl in love, she ran up the stairs, with the flower, to the bedroom where the old man coughed and wheezed.

Gus stood there, in the hall, feeling as if his heart had stopped.

“It was three days later,” he told me as I sat on the edge of the nursing room bed, “that the flower died, and Jo put it out with the garbage. But I retrieved it, what was left of it, so that I would always remember that love. What love was. What terror it is.”

The old man began weeping, like a baby.

“It’s all right,” I said, “it’s just a bad dream. Just like a bad dream.”

“But it happened, boy,” he said, and he passed me the flower. “I want you to keep this. I’m going to die someday soon. Maybe within a month, who knows?”

“I couldn’t,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s yours.”

“No,” he said, grinning madly. “It never was mine. Have you ever been with a woman, boy?”

I shook my head.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen. Just last month.”

“Ah, seventeen. A special time. What do you think human love is, boy?”

I shrugged. “Caring. Between people. I guess.”

“Oh, no,” a smile blossomed across his face. “It’s not caring, boy, it’s not caring. It’s opening up your skin to someone else, and opening theirs, too. Everything I told you is true, boy. I want you to take this dried flower—”

I held it in my hand. For a moment I believed his story and I found myself feeling sad, too. I thought of her, of Moira, giving herself up like that. “She loved you.”

“Her? She never loved me,” he said. “Never.”

“How can you say that? You just told me—”

His voice deepened. He sounded as evil as I have ever heard a man sound.

“Jo never loved me.”

“Not Jo,” I said as I looked at the dried flower. “Moira.”

He plucked it from my fingers and held the last of its petals in his open palm.

“You thought that was Moira? Oh, no, boy, I buried her beneath the garden. This is Jo. She eventually left her husband for me. And then, when I had her…O, Lord, when I had her, boy, I tore her apart, I made her bloom, and I left her to dry in sand the way she had dried my heart.” He laughed, clinging more tightly to my arm so that I could not get away. “Her flower was not as pretty as Moira’s. Moira. Lovely Moira.” He sniffed the air, as if he could still smell the fragrance of the opening flower. “I made Jo bloom, boy, and then I stepped on her flower, and I kept it in darkness and dust. Now, boy, that’s what love is.” He laughed even while he crushed the dried blossom with his free hand, turning it to dust.

“O, rare and most exquisite!” He shouted after me as I pulled away from him and backed out of that madman’s room. “O, why,” he laughed, “why hast thou forsaken me?”

The Little Mermaid

The beach house was large, and an entire glass wall looked out upon the flat brown sand below the hill, to the brief line of pavement for the boat landing, down where the pelicans and gulls cracked their clams and oysters and crabs.

Alice didn’t see the birds or the beach much. That first year she kept the curtains drawn shut. Sometimes she opened them, standing at the window, smoking a cigarette. The ocean was a haze most of the winter, but that was fine by her. She wasn’t an ocean person. She could not even swim, and she never waded. She considered herself more of an isolationist, and that is precisely what the beach house offered. She drank a lot of her father’s stored wine (a wood bin had been converted into a wine cellar), and left the house only twice a week to go see a therapist in Nag’s Head.

Molly came down for a visit that lasted approximately six hours before the mother-daughter anger got out of hand; Molly still didn’t understand the divorce, and being a mother now herself, and perhaps (Alice surmised) in a bad marriage, Molly was young enough to still believe in staying together for the sake of family.

Alice read a lot of books, particularly long fat ones that took her mind off life and her miserableness at it. When she thought of it, she practiced her own brand of yoga based on having watched a morning television show once. When the hangovers from the red wine became unbearable, she slacked off drinking and became a coffee addict. This prompted her to frenetic activity in the winter; she began jogging on the beach, finally unable to avoid the outdoors and health (which she kept in check by smoking and drinking coffee sometimes into the wee hours), and thus she met the old man who collected shells.

He was, at first, barely a face to her, for while her jogging was slow enough to distinguish features on the few beachcombers who came down her way, she had stopped looking anyone in the face. She noticed his hands, actually, and the cracked, wormholed shells he held in them. His hands were tanned and rough. Then, another day, she noticed his knees: rather knobby, with fat blue veins down the sides of them. Finally, she met him the day she sprained her ankle at a place where the sand sank. She sat on a large piece of driftwood—moving the red kelp to the side—and rubbed her ankle. He walked right up to her. “You okay?”

She nodded. She still could not bring herself to look at his face. She looked at his feet: he was barefoot, as was she, with a particularly nasty looking ingrown toenail on his big toe.

“If you run, you should wear shoes,” he said. “The sand tugs at your heel. It’s very bad for your arches. It’s made for crabs and seaweed, not people, this beach is.”

“I’ll take that into consideration next time,” she said testily. She rubbed her foot.

“Here,” he said, dropping to his knees. She could no longer avoid his face. He was probably in his late sixties; old enough to be her father by a hair. He had brown eyes and thin lips. He must’ve been handsome, but it had turned to sand, his skin had, and his nose, the shiny red of a lifelong drinker.

He took her foot in his hands and rubbed.

“Please,” she said, pulling her foot back. It hurt when she did it.

“I’m a doctor,” he said. “Retired now, but I know something about feet. We’ll just massage it a little.”

“Well,” she said noncommittally. No one was around to watch, and it did feel good. He pressed his thumbs into the soft flesh at her ankle; the sensation burned at first, but then, as he continued, it felt warm and pleasant. She had had a headache; it melted.

He watched her. “You need to keep off this for a few days. I can wrap it for you, if you like.”

Because she was financially broke from countless therapy sessions and the divorce itself and would not be able to afford any medical expense if her foot’s condition worsened, she agreed to this. She leaned against his shoulder, and he guided her back to her house.

In the master bathroom, he heated torn rags of old towels in the sink with hot water. Then he squeezed them, and tied them around her ankle and foot. “The heat,” he said, “it helps. They say it’s ice that helps, but not for this. It’ll swell up from the heat, but it needs to.”

Alice, who knew nothing of medicine, nodded as if she did.

“Sometimes we need fluids to collect. They carry away the bad stuff.”

She almost laughed. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, “it’s just that it sounded so undoctorly.”

He grinned. He was a warm man, she decided. Not like her ex. This old man, he was a good country doctor who cared. He was a house call kind of doctor. He said, “I try my best. I find that all that medical jargon gets in the way of patient care. Sometimes nature knows best.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

He continued to massage her foot through the warm wet rags.

“You collect shells?” she asked, not wanting him to stop.

“I’m rather aimless these days. Since my wife died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, we had quite a life together. Life, while it lasts, has its own secrets.”

Alice didn’t quite understand him, but she really didn’t want to get into the dead wife as a topic of conversation any more than she wanted to start prattling on about her husband.

“So I walk the beaches like I’m waiting for a ship to come in or something. Like an old salt. Do you believe in mermaids?” His eyes glistened a bit, as if he practiced this question and its anticipated response.

“No.”

“I used to, when I was a boy.” He grinned dopily. “Do you know that when a man becomes old, he begins to remember what he believed in as a child and it all comes back to him?”

Something sweet in his voice; that boy that was him thousands of years before, that little boy, was still there in his eyes. She smiled. He rubbed.

“I believed that out in that ocean was a lovely mermaid. She and I knew each other, and when I was four, I would go down to the beach early in the morning, before anyone else was up, and stand on the edge of the land and sing mermaid songs to her. I imagined her fins and her tail, how if she were on land I would carry her to a safe place, and how she would tell me all the secrets of the sea. And I, in turn would tell her how much I loved her, how much I wanted to be with her,” he said.

Alice began weeping upon hearing this. She could not control it, and it was not just about the pathetic little four-year-old who sang to the nonexistent mermaids; it was about everything she’d wished for as a child, all within her grasp, gone now, like sand, like seawater, the way memory always left her bereft and longing for innocence. He slid his hands from her feet and placed them on either side of her face. They were comfortingly cold.

“A beautiful woman should never cry,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t say that either. Your tears are like the mermaids’.”

She opened her eyes to him and felt that lustful heat of first love again, just as if he were not old and she were not middle-aged.

He caressed her, and they fell across the bed, her ankle’s throbbing becoming a distant and occasional pinching. They kissed, weeping, both of them, and then he kissed her every arch and turn and curve.

Afterward, she fell asleep.

When she awoke, the pain was excruciating. The room, shrouded in darkness. The curtains were still drawn shut. She gasped; a light came on.

Her doctor-lover stood over her.

The pain was in her foot. She wasn’t thinking clearly because of the pain.

She reached down to touch her foot, anticipating a throbbing ankle.

But her hand, sliding down her leg, ended at a stump.

She touched the air where her foot should’ve been.

He said, “I had to operate, Alice.” He knew her name now, even though she didn’t know his.

His words seemed meaningless, until on the third try to find her foot where it should’ve been, she suddenly understood.

Her screaming might’ve been heard had the night surf not boomed, had the winter not brought with it a tree-bending wind.

The operation was not completed for six days; it was a blur to Alice, for he kept her drunk and on painkillers.

When she awoke, clearheaded, she felt nothing but a constant stinging all up and down her spine, as if her skin had been scraped and she’d been rolled in salt.

There was dried blood on the sheets. Several hypodermic needles lay carelessly beside her. Fish scales, too, spread out in a vermillion and blue desert, piled high, as if every fish in the ocean had been skinned and thrown about. The smell was intolerable: oily and fishy. And the flies! Everywhere, the blue and green flies.

She tried to sit up, but her back hurt too much. She fought this, but then parts of her body, including her arms, felt paralyzed. She wondered what drugs he’d been administering to her—strangely, she felt euphoric, and fought this feeling.

She lay back down, closed her eyes, willing this dream to depart.

She awoke again when he came back into the room.

“One last thing,” he said, holding the serrated knife up to her neck. “One last thing.”

The blade had been warmed with the fire on the gas stove. She felt no pain as he took the knife and scored several slits just below her chin.

Afterward, she could not even speak or scream, but could only open her mouth and emit a bleating noise.

He lifted her up into his arms, kissing her nipples as if they were sacred, and carried her out to the beach. “I will take you out to your city, my love, and set you free,” he said as he laid her down in the bottom of a small boat. She could only stare at him. She felt resigned to death, which would be better than the results of the torture he had put her through.

Out to sea, he rolled her over the edge of the boat.

At first she wanted to drown, but something within her fought against it. She managed to grasp hold of some rocks out beyond the breakwater. She held on to them for over an hour as the freezing salt water smashed against the back of her head.

She grasped at the edge of a rock; it cut at her hands, but she held on.

If I just hang on for another minute, she thought. Just another ten seconds and I’ll be fine. God will rescue me. Or someone will see me. Will see what he’s done to me, this madman. I haven’t lived all my life to come to this. I know something will happen. Something will pull me out of this.

The waves crashed around her, like glass shattering against her face.

Please, God, someone, help me.

All she could taste was the stinging salt. Something animal within her was clinging to all that she knew of life now, not her marriage or her family or her career, but this serrated rock and this icy sea.

From the shore she heard him, even at the distance. His boat already docked. The old man stood there, singing.

Alice held on to the rock for as long as she could.

Then she let go.

The old man stayed on the shore for hours, his voice faltering only when dark arrived. He had a great and lovely baritone, and he sang of all the secrets of the sea.

A couple, walking along the beach that evening, held each other more tightly. His song sparked within them a memory of love and regret, and such beautiful and heartrending longing.

They watched from a distance as the old man raised his hands up, his songs batting against the wind, against the crash of the surf, against all that life had to offer.

The Rendering Man

1

“We’re gonna die someday,” Thalia said, “all of us. Mama and Daddy, and then you and then me. I wonder if anyone’s gonna care enough to think about Thalia Inez Canty, or if I’ll just be dust under their feet.”

She stood in the doorway, still holding the ladle that dripped with potato chowder.

Her brother was raking dried grass over the manure in the yard. “What the heck kind of thing’s that supposed to mean?”

“Something died last night.” Thalia sniffed the air. “I can smell it. Out in the sty. Smelt it all night long, whatever it is. Always me that’s first to smell the dead. ‘Member the cat, the one by the thresher? I know when things’s dead. I can smell something new that’s dead, just like that. Made me think of how everything ends.”

“We’ll check your stink out later. All you need to think about right now is getting your little bottom back inside that house to stir the soup so’s we’ll have something decent come suppertime.” Her brother returned to his work, and she to hers. She hoped that one day she would have a real job and be able to get away from this corner of low sky and dead land.

The year was 1934, and there weren’t too many jobs in Moncure County, when Thalia Canty was eleven, so her father went off to Dowery, eighty miles to the northeast, to work in an accountant’s office, and her mother kept the books at the Bowend Motel on Fourth Street, night shift. Daddy was home on weekends, and Mama slept through the day, got up at noon, was out the door by four, and back in bed come three a.m. It was up to Thalia’s brother, Lucius, to run the house, and make sure the two of them fed the pigs and chickens, and kept the doors bolted so the winds—they’d come up suddenly in March—didn’t pull them off their hinges. There was school, too, but it seemed a tiny part of the day, at least to Thalia, for the work of the house seemed to slow the hours down until the gray Oklahoma sky was like an hourglass that never emptied of sand. Lucius was a hard worker, and since he was fifteen, he did most of the heavy moving, but she was always with him, cleaning, tossing feed to the chickens, picking persimmons from the neighbor’s yard (out back by the stable where no one could see) to bake in a pie. And it was on the occasion of going to check on the old sow that Thalia and her brother eventually came face-to-face with the Rendering Man.

The pig was dead, and already drawing flies. Evening was coming on strong and windy, a southern wind which meant the smell of the animal would come right in through the cracks in the walls. Lucius said, “She been dead a good long time. Look at her snout.”

“Toldja I smelled her last night.” Thalia peeked around him, scrunched back, wanting to hide in his lengthening shadow. The snout had been torn at— blood caked around the mouth. “Musta been them yaller dogs,” she said, imitating her father’s strong southern accent, “cain’t even leave her alone when she’s dead.”

The pig was enormous, and although Lucius thrust planks beneath her to try and move her a ways, she wouldn’t budge. “Won’t be taking her to the butcher, I reckon,” he said.

Thalia smirked. “Worthless yaller dogs.”

“Didn’t like bacon, anyways.”

“Me, too. Or ham.”

“Or sausage with biscuits and grease.”

“Chitlins. Hated chitlins. Hated knuckles. Couldn’t chaw a knuckle to save my life.”

“Ribs. Made me sick, thought a ribs all drownin’ in molasses and chili, drippin’ over the barbecue pit,” Lucius said, and then drew his hat down, practically making the sign of the cross on his chest. “Oh, Lord, what I wouldn’t give for some of her.”

Thalia whispered, “Just a piece of skin fried up in the skillet.”

“All hairy and crisp, greasy and smelly.”

“Yes.” Thalia sighed. “Praise the Lord, yes. Like to melt in my mouth right now. I’d even eat her all rotten like that. Maybe not.”

The old sow lay there, flies making halos around her face.

Thalia felt the familiar hunger come on; it wasn’t that they didn’t have food regularly, it was that they rarely ate the meat they raised—they’d sold the cows off, and the pigs were always for the butcher and the local price so that they could afford other things. Usually they had beans and rice or eggs and griddle cakes. The only meat they ever seemed to eat was chicken, and Thalia could smell chicken in her dreams sometimes, and didn’t think she’d ever get the sour taste out of her throat.

She wanted to eat that pig. Cut it up, hocks, head, ribs, all of it. She would’ve liked to take a chaw on the knuckle.

“She ain’t worth a nickel now,” Thalia said, then, brightening, “You sure we can’t eat her?”

Lucius shook his head. “For all we know, she’s been out here six, seven hours. Look at those flies. Already laid eggs in her ears. Even the dogs didn’t go much into her—look, see? They left off. Somethin’ was wrong.” He shuffled over to his sister and dropped his arm around her shoulder. She pressed her head into the warmth of his side. Sometimes he was like a mama and daddy, both, to her.

“She was old. I guess. Even pigs die when they get old.” Thalia didn’t want to believe that Death, which had come for Granny three years before, could possibly want a pig unless it had been properly slaughtered and divvied up.

“Maybe it died natural. Or maybe,” and her brother looked down the road to the Leavon place. There was a wind that came down from the sloping hillside sometimes, and coughed dust across the road between their place and the old widow’s. “Could be she was poisoned.”

Thalia glanced down to the old gray house with its flag in front, still out from Armistice Day, year before last. A witch lived in that house, they called her the Grass Widow because she entertained men like she was running a roadhouse; she lived alone, though, with her eighteen cats as company. Thalia knew that the Grass Widow had wanted to buy the old sow for the past two years, but her parents had refused because she wasn’t offering enough money and the Cantys were raising her to be the biggest, most expensive hog in the county. And now, what was the purpose? The sow was fly-ridden and rotting. Worthless. Didn’t matter if the Grass Widow killed it or not. It recalled for her a saying her daddy often said in moments like this:

“How the mighty are fallen.” Even among the kingdom of pigs.

Lucius pulled her closer to him and leaned down a bit to whisper in her ear. “I ain’t sayin’ anything, Thay, but the Widow wanted that sow and she knew Daddy wasn’t never gonna sell it to her. I heard she hexed the Horleichs’ cows so they dried up.”

“Ain’t no witches,” Thalia said, disturbed by her brother’s suspicions. “Just fairy tales, that’s what Mama says.”

“And the Bible says there is. And since the Bible’s the only book ever written with truth in it, you better believe there’s witches, and they’re just like her, mean and vengeful and working hexes on anything they covet.” Lucius put his hand across his sister’s shoulder and hugged her in close to him again. He kissed her gently on her forehead, right above her small red birthmark. “Don’t you be scared of her, though, Thay, we’re God-fearin’ people, and she can’t hurt us ‘less we shut out our lights under bushels.”

Thalia knew her brother well enough to know he never lied. So the old Grass Widow was a witch. She looked at her brother, then back to the pig. “We gonna bury her?”

“The sow? Naw, too much work. Let’s get it in the wheelbarrow and take it around near the coops. Stinks so bad, nobody’s gonna notice a dead pig, and then when Mama gets home in the mornin’, I’ll take the truck. We can drive the sow out to the Renderin’ Man.” This seemed a good plan, because Thalia knew that the Rendering Man could give them something in exchange for the carcass—if not money, then some other service or work. The Rendering Man had come by some time back for the old horse, Dinah, sick on her feet and worthless. He took Dinah into his factory, and gave Thalia’s father three dollars and two smoked hams. She was aware that the Rendering Man had a great love for animals, both dead and alive, for he paid money for them regardless. He was a tall, thin man with a potbelly, and a grin like walrus’s, two teeth thrusting down on either side of his lip. He always had red cheeks, like Santa Claus, and told her he knew magic. She had asked him (when she was younger), “What kind of magic?”

He had said, “The kind where you give me something, and I turn it into something else.” Then he showed her his wallet. She felt it. He’d said, “It used to be a snake.” She drew her hand back; looked at the wallet; at the Rendering Man; at the wallet; at her hand. She’d been only six or seven then, but she knew that the Rendering Man was someone powerful.

If anyone could help with the dead sow, he could.

The next morning was cool and the sky was fretted with strips of clouds. Thalia had to tear off her apron as she raced from the house to climb up beside Lucius in the truck. “I didn’t know you’s gonna take off so quick,” she panted, slamming the truck door shut beside her. “I barely got the dishes done.”

“Got to get the old sow to the Rendering Man, or we may as well just open a bottleneck fly circus out back.” Thalia glanced in the back; the sow lay there peacefully, so different from its brutal, nasty dumb animal life when it would attack anything that came in its pen. It was much nicer dead. “What’s it, anyways?” she asked.

“Thay, honey?”

“Renderin’.”

“Oh,” Lucius laughed, turning down the Post Road, “it’s taking animals and things and turning them into something else.”

“Witchcraft’s like that”

“Naw, not like that. This is natural. You take the pig, say, and you put it in a big pot of boiling water, and the bones, see, they go over here, and the skin goes over there, and then, over there’s the fat. Why you think they call a football a pigskin?”

Thalia’s eyes widened. “Oh my goodness.”

“And hog bristle brushes—they get those from renderin’. And what else? Maybe the fat can be used for greasing something, maybe…”

“Goodness’ sakes,” Thalia said, imitating her mother’s voice. “I had no idea. And he pays good money for this, does he?”

“Any money on a dead sow’s been eaten by maggots’s good money, Thay.”

It struck her, what happened to the old horse. “He kill Dinah, too? Dinah got turned into fat and bones and skin and guts even whilst she was alive? Somebody use her fat to grease up their wheels?”

Lucius said nothing; he whistled faintly.

She felt tears threatening to bust out of her eyes. She held them back. She had loved that old horse, had seen it as a friend. Her father had lied to her about what happened to Dinah; he had said that she just went to retire in greener pastures out behind the Rendering Man’s place.

She took a swallow of air. “I wished somebody’d told me, so I coulda said a proper goodbye.”

“My strong, brave little sister,” Lucius said, and brought the truck to an abrupt stop. “Here we are.” Then he turned to her, cupping her chin in his hand the way her father did whenever she needed talking to. “Death ain’t bad for those that die, remember, it’s only bad for the rest of us. We got to suffer and carry on. The Dead, they get to be at peace in the arms of the Lord. Don’t ever cry for the Dead, Thay, better let them cry for us.” He brought his hand back down to his side. “See, the Rendering Man’s just sort of a part of Nature. He takes all God’s creatures and makes sure their suffering is over, but makes them useful, even so.”

“I don’t care about the sow,” she said. “Rendering Man can do what he likes with it. I just wish we coulda et it.” She tried to hide her tears, sniffed them back; it wasn’t just her horse Dinah, or the sow, but something about her own flesh that bothered her, as if she and the sow could be in the same spot one day, rendered, and she didn’t like that idea.

The Rendering Man’s place was made of stone, and was like a fruit crate turned upside down—flat on top, with slits for windows. There were two big smokestacks rising up from behind it like insect feelers; yellow-black smoke rose up from one of them, discoloring the sky and making a stink in the general vicinity. Somebody’s old mule was tied to a skinny tree in the front yard. Soon to be rendered, Thalia thought. Poor thing. She got out of the truck and walked around to pet it. The mule was old; its face was almost white, and made her think of her granny, all white of hair and skin at the end of her life.

The Rendering Man had a wife with yellow hair like summer wheat; she stood in the front doorway with a large apron that had once been white, now filthy, covering her enormous German thighs tight as skin across a drum. “Guten Tag,’’ the lady said, and she came out and scooped Thalia into her arms like she was a tin angel, smothered her scalp with kisses. “Ach, mein Liebchen. You are grown so tall. Last I saw you, you was barely over with the cradle.”

Just guessing as to what might be smeared on the woman’s apron made Thalia slip through her arms again so that no dead animal bits would touch her. “Hello, ma’am,” she said in her most formal voice.

The lady looked at her brother. “Herr Lucius, you are very grown. How is your Mutter?”

“Just fine, ma’am,” Lucius said, “we got the old sow in the back.” He rapped on the side of the truck. “Just went last night. No good eating. Thought you might be interested.”

“Ach, da, yes, of naturally we are,” she said, “come in, come in, children, Father is still at the table mit breakfast. You will have some ham? Fresh milk and butter, too. Little Thalia, you are so thin, we must put some fat on those bones,” and the Rendering Man’s wife led them down the narrow hall to the kitchen. The kitchen table was small, which made its crowded plates seem all the more enormous: fried eggs on one, on another long fat sausages tied with ribbon at the end, then there were dishes of bread and jam and butter. Thalia’s eyes were about to burst just taking it all in—slices of fat-laced ham, jewels of sweets in a brightly painted plate, and two pitchers, one full of thick milk, and the other, orange juice.

The Rendering Man sat in a chair, a napkin tucked into his collar. He had a scar on the left side of his face, as if an animal had scratched him deeply there. Grease had dripped down his chin and along his neck. He had his usual grin and sparkle to his eyes. “Well, my young friends. You’ve brought me something, have you?”

His wife put her hand over her left breast as if she was about to faint, her eyes rolling to the back of her head. “Ach, a great pig, Schatze. They will want more than just the usual payment for that one.”

Thalia asked, “Can I have a piece of ham, please?” The Rendering Man patted the place beside him. “Sit with me, both of you, yes, Eva, bring another chair. We will talk business over a good meal, won’t we, Lucius? And you, sweet little bird, you must try my wife’s elegant pastries. She learned how to make them in her home country, they are so light and delicate, like the sundried skin of a dove, but I scare you, my little bird, it is not a dove, it is bread and sugar and butter!”

After she’d eaten her fill, ignoring the conversation between her brother and the Rendering Man, Thalia asked, “How come you pay good money for dead animals, Mister?”

He drank from a large mug of coffee, wiped his lips, glanced at her brother, then at her. “Even dead, we are worth something, little bird.”

“I know that. Lucius told me about the fat and bones and whiskers. But folks’d dump those animals for free. Why you pay money for them?”

The Rendering Man looked at his wife, and they both laughed. “Maybe I’m a terrible businessman,” he said, shaking his head. “But,” he calmed, “you see, my pet, I can sell these things for more money than I pay. I am not the only man capable of rendering. There is competition in this world. If I pay you two dollars today for your dead pig, and send you home with sweets, you will bring me more business later on, am I right?”

“I s’pose.”

“So, by paying you, I keep you coming to me. And I get more skins and fat and bones to sell to places that make soap and dog food and other things. I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that I make more money off your pig than you do. But it is a service, little bird.”

“I see.” Thalia nodded, finishing off the last of the bacon. “It seems like a terrible thing to do.”

“Thay, now, apologize for that.” Lucius reached over and pinched her shoulder.

She shrugged him off.

The Rendering Man said, ‘it is most terrible. But this is part of how we all must live our lives. Someone must do the rendering. If not, everything would go to waste and we would have dead pigs rotting with flies on the side of the road, and the smell.”

“But you’re like a buzzard or something.”

The man held his index finger up and shook it like a teacher about to give a lesson. “If I saw myself as a buzzard or jackal I could not look in the mirror. But others have said this to my face, little bird, and it never hurts to hear it. I see myself as a man who takes the weak and weary and useless empty shells of our animal brethren and breathes new life into them, makes them go on in some other fashion. I see it as a noble profession. It is only a pity that we do not render ourselves, for what a tragedy it is to be buried and left for useless, for worm fodder, when we could be brushing a beautiful woman’s hair, or adorning her purse, or even, perhaps, providing shade from the glare of a lamp so that she might read her book and not harm her eyes. It is a way to soften the blow of death, you see, for it brings forth new life. And one other thing, sweet,” he brought his face closer to hers until she could smell his breath of sausage and ham, “we each have a purpose in life, and our destiny is to seek it out, whatever the cost, and make ourselves one with it. It is like brown eyes or blond hair or short and tall, it is there in us, and will come out no matter how much we try to hide it. I did not choose this life; it chose me. I think you understand, little bird, yes. You and I know.”

Thalia thought about what he’d said all the way home. She tried not to imagine the old sow being tossed in a vat and stirred up in the boiling water until it started to separate into its different parts. Lucius scolded her for trying to take the Rendering Man to task, but she ignored him. She felt like a whole new world had been opened to her, a way of seeing things that she had not thought of before, and when she stepped out of the truck, at her home, she heard the crunch of the grass beneath her feet differently, the chirping of crickets, too, a lovely song, and a flock of starlings shot from the side of the barn just as she tramped across the muddy expanse that led to the chicken coops—the starlings were her sign from the world that there was no end to life, for they flew in a pattern, which seemed to her to approximate the scar on the left-hand side of the Rendering Man’s face.

It was like destiny.

She climbed up on the fence post and looked down the road. A dust wind was blowing across to the Grass Widow’s house, and she heard the cats, all of them, yowling as if in heat, and she wondered if that old witch had really poisoned the pig.

2

Thalia was almost twenty-nine, and on a train in Europe, when she thought she recognized the man sitting across from her.

She was now calling herself just Lia, and had not lived in Oklahoma since she left for New York in 1939 to work as a secretary—she’d taught herself shorthand and typing at the motel where her mother had worked.

Then, during the war, Lucius died fighting in France, and her mother and father, whom she’d never developed much of a relationship with, called her back to the old farm.

Instead, she took up with a rich and spoiled playboy who had managed to get out of serving in the military and went to live with him at his house overlooking the Hudson River.

She went through a period of grief for the loss of her brother, after which she married the playboy in question.

Then, whether out of guilt or general self-destruction, her husband managed to get involved in the war, ended up in a labor camp and had died there not two weeks before liberation.

She had inherited quite a bit of money after an initial fight with one of her husband’s illegitimate children.

It was 1952, and she wanted to see Germany now, to see what had happened, and where her husband of just a few months had died. She had been to Paris already to see the hotel where her brother supposedly breathed his last, suffering at the hands of the Nazis but dying a patriot, unwilling to divulge top secret information.

She was fascinated by the whole thing: the war, Paris, labor camps, and Nazis.

She had grown lovely over the years. She was tall, as her father and brother had been but had her mother’s eyes and had learned, somewhere between Oklahoma and New York, to project great beauty without having inherited much.

The man across from her, on the train, had a scar on the left-hand side of his face.

That face sparked a series of memories for her, like lightning flashing behind her eyes.

The stone house on the Post Road, the smokestacks, the mule in the front yard, an enormous breakfast that still made her feel fat and well-fed whenever she thought of it.

It was the Rendering Man from home.

On this train.

Traveling through Germany from France.

Now, what are the chances, she wondered, of that happening? Particularly after what happened when she was eleven.

Not possible, she thought.

He’s a phantom. I’m hallucinating. Granny hallucinated that she saw her son Toby back from the First World War walking toward her even without his legs.

She closed her eyes; opened them. He was still there. Something so ordinary about him that she knew he was actually sitting there and not just an image conjured from her inner psyche.

He spoke first. “I know you, don’t I?”

She pretended, out of politeness, that he must not be talking to her.

There was a large German woman sitting beside her, with a little boy on the other side. The German woman nodded politely to her but didn’t acknowledge the man across from them. Her little boy had a card trick that he was trying to show his mother, but she paid no attention.

“Miss? Excuse me?” he said.

Then it struck her:

He spoke English perfectly, and yet he looked very German.

He grinned when she glanced back at him. “See? I knew I knew you, when I saw you in the station. I said to myself, you have met that girl somewhere before. Where are you from, if I may ask?”

“New York,” she lied, curious as to whether this really could possibly be the Rendering Man. How could it? He would have to be, what? Over sixty, at least? This man didn’t seem that old, although he was not young by any stretch. “I’m a reporter.”

He wagged his finger at her, like a father scolding his child. “You are not a reporter, miss, I think. I am not saying you are a liar, I am only saying that it is not true. Where is your notebook? Even a pencil? You are American and your accent is New York, but I detect a southern influence. Yes, I think so. I hope you don’t mind my little game. I enjoy guessing about people and their origins.”

She felt uncomfortable, but nodded. “I enjoy games, too, to pass the time.”

She glanced at the German woman who brought out a picnic for her son. Bread and soup, but no meat. There was not a lot of meat to go around even six years after the war.

The man said, “You are a woman of fortune, I think. Lovely jewelry, and your dress is quite expensive, at least here in Europe. And I heard you talking with the conductor—your French is not so good, I think, and your German is worse. You drew out a brand of cigarettes from a gold case, both very expensive. So you are on the Grand Tour of Europe, and like all Americans with time on their hands, you want to see the Monster Germany, the Fallen.”

“Very observant,” she said.

She brought her cigarette case out and offered him one of its contents.

He shook his head. “I think these are bad for the skin and the breathing, don’t you?”

She shrugged. “It all goes someday.”

He grinned. “Yes, it does. The sooner we accept that, the better for the world. And I know your name now, my dear, my little bird, you are the little Thalia Canty from Moncure County, Oklahoma.”

She shivered, took a smoke, coughed, stubbed the cigarette out.

She had white gloves on her hands; she looked at them. She remembered the German wife’s apron, smeared with dark brown stains.

She didn’t look up for a few minutes.

“I would say this is some coincidence, little bird,” the Rendering Man said, “but it is not, not really. The real coincidence happened in the Alsace, when you got off the train for lunch. I was speaking with a butcher who is a friend of mine and I saw you go into the cafe. I wouldn’t have recognized you at all, for I have not seen you since you were a child, but you made a lasting impression on me that morning we had breakfast together. I saw it in you, growing, just as it had grown in me. Once that happens, it is like a halo around you. It’s still there. Perhaps someone might say it is a play of light, the aurora borealis of the flesh. I recognized it. I followed you back to the train, got my ticket and found where you were seated. But still I wasn’t positive it was you, until just a moment ago.

“It was the way you looked at my face. The scar. It was a souvenir from a large cat that gouged me quite deeply. No ordinary cat, of course, but a tiger, sick, from the circus. The tiger haunts me to this day, by way of the scar. Do you believe in haunting?

“Ah, I think not, you are no doubt a good Disciple of Christ and do not believe that a circus cat could haunt a man. Yet I see it sometimes in my dreams: its eyes, and teeth, and the paw reaching up to drag at my flesh. I wake my wife up at night, just so she will stay up with me and make sure there is no tiger there. I know it is dead, but I have learned in life that sometimes these angels, as I call them (yes, dear, even the tiger is an angel, for it had some message for me), do not stay dead too long. Perhaps I am your angel, little bird. You must admit it is strange to meet someone from just around the bend on the other side of the world.”

She looked at him again but tried not to see him in focus, because she felt the pressing need to avoid this man at all costs.

“I’m sorry, sir. You do have me pegged, but I can’t for the life of me place you.”

He smiled, his cheeks red. He wore a dark navy coat, and beneath it, a gray shirt. When he spoke again, it was as if he had paid no attention to her denial.

“My wife, Eva, she is in Cologne, where we live. And where I should be going now. We came to Germany in 1935 because Eva’s parents were ill and because, well, you must remember the unfortunate circumstance. I was only too glad to leave Oklahoma, since I didn’t seem to get along with too many people there, and Germany seemed to be a place I could settle into. I found odd jobs, as well as established a successful rendering business again. And then, well …”

He spread his hands out as if it were enough to excuse what happened to Germany.

“But I knew you and I would meet again, little bird. It was there on your face. Your fascination and repulsion—is that not what magnets do to each other? Pull and push? Yet they are meant to be together. Destiny. You see, I saw your brother before he died. I told him what was to come.”

She dropped all pretense now. “What kind of game are you playing?”

“No game, Thalia Canty.”

“Lia Fallon. Thalia Canty died in Oklahoma in the thirties.”

“Names change through the years. Even faces. But you are the little bird.”

“And you are the Rendering Man.”

He gasped with pleasure. “Yes, that would be how you know me. Tell me, did you run because of what you did?”

She didn’t answer. “What about Lucius?”

The Rendering Man looked out the dark window as a town flew by. Rain sprinkled across the glass. “First, you must tell me.”

“All right. I forgave myself for that a long time ago. I was only eleven, and you were partly responsible.”

“Did I use the knife?”

She squinted her eyes. Wished she were not sitting there. “I didn’t know what I was doing. Not really.”

“Seventeen cats must’ve put up quite a howl.”

“I told you. I didn’t know what I was really doing.”

“Yes. You did. How long after before you ran?”

“I ran away four times before I turned seventeen. Only made it as far as St. Louis most of the time.”

“That’s a long way from home for a little girl.”

“I had an aunt there. She let me stay a month at a time. She understood.”

“But not your mama and daddy,” he said with some contempt in his voice. “A woman’s murdered, we all called her the Grass Widow. Remember? Those small minds all thought she was a witch. She was sad and lonely, that was all. Then she was dead. She and her cats, chopped up and boiled.”

“Rendered,” she said.

“Rendered. So they come for me. Thank God I was able to get my wife out of the house safely before the whole town burned it down.”

“How was I to know they’d come after you?”

He was silent, but glaring.

“I didn’t mean for you to get in trouble.”

“Do you know what they did to me?” he asked.

She nodded.

“I still have a limp,” he said. “That’s my way of joking. They broke no bones. Bruises and cuts, my hearing was not good until 1937. I lost the good vision in my right eye. It’s just shadows and light on that side.

“But remembering pain brings few spasms to the flesh. It is the past. Little bird, but you think I am only angry at you. All those years, you are terrified you will run into me, so when you can, you get out for good. I was sure that little town was going to make another Bruno Hauptmann out of me. Killing a sad widow and her pets and boiling them for bones and fat. But even so, I was not upset with you, not too much. Not really. Because I knew you had it in you, I saw it that day, that we were cut from the same cloth, only you had not had the angel cross your path and tell you of your calling. It is not evil or dark, my sweet, it is the one calling that gives meaning to our short, idiotic lives; we are the gardeners of the infinite, you and I.”

“Tell me about my brother,” she pleaded softly.

The German woman next to her seemed to sense the strangeness of the conversation and took her son by the hand and led him out of the cabin.

“He did not die bravely,” the Rendering Man said. “If that’s what you’re after. He was hit in the leg, and when I found him, he had been in a hotel with some French girl, and was a scandal for bleeding on the sheets. I was called in by my commander, and went about my business.”

“You worked with the French?”

He shook his head. “I told you, I continued my successful rendering business in Germany, and expanded to a factory just outside of Paris in ’43. Usually the men were dead, but sometimes, as was the case with your brother, little bird, I had to stop their hearts. Your brother did not recognize me, and I only recognized him when I saw his identification. As he died, do you know what he told me? He told me that he was paying for the sins that his sister had committed in her lifetime. He cried like a little baby. It was most embarrassing. To think, I once paid him two dollars and a good sausage for a dead pig.”

Lia stood up. “You are dreadful,” she said. “You are the most dreadful human being who has ever existed upon the face of the earth.”

“I am, if you insist. But I am your tiger, your angel,” the Rendering Man said. He reached deep into the pocket of his coat and withdrew something small. He handed it to her.

She didn’t want to take it, but grabbed it anyway.

“It is his. He would’ve wanted you to have it.”

She thought, at first, it was a joke, because the small leather coin purse didn’t seem to be the kind of thing Lucius would have.

When she realized what it was, she left the cabin.

Lia walked down the slender hall, all the way to the end of the train.

She wanted to throw herself off, but instead stood and shivered in the cold wet rain of Germany, and did not return to the cabin again.

She could not get over the feeling that the part of the coin purse that drew shut resembled wrinkled human lips.

3

“He’s here,” the old woman said.

She heard the squeaking wheels of the orderly’s cart down the corridor.

“He’s here. I know he’s here. Oh, dear God, he’s here.”

“Will you shut up, lady?” the old man in the wheelchair said.

An orderly came by and moved the man’s chair on down the hall.

The old woman could not sit up well in bed. She looked at the green ceiling. The window was open. She felt a breeze. It was spring. It always seemed to be Spring.

A newspaper lay across her stomach.

She lifted it up.

Had she just been reading it? Where were her glasses?

Oh, there. She put them on. Looked at the newspaper.

It was the New York Times. The date of the paper was March 24, 1994.

She called out for help, and soon an orderly (the handsome one with the bright smile) was there, like a genie summoned from a lamp.

“I thought I saw a man in this room,” she said.

“Mrs. Ehrlich, nobody’s in here.”

“I want you to check that closet. I think he’s there.”

The orderly stepped over to the closet. He opened the door, and moved some of the clothes around. He turned to smile at her.

“I’m sure I saw him there. Waiting. Crouching,” she said. “But he may have slipped beneath the bed.”

Again, a check beneath the bed.

The orderly sat down in the chair beside the bed. “He’s not here.”

“How old am I? I’m not very old, really, I’m not losing my wits yet, am I? Dear God in heaven, am I?”

“No, Mrs. Ehrlich. You’re as spry as an eleven-year-old.”

“Why’d you say that?”

“What?”

“Going on eleven. Why eleven? Is there a conspiracy here?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You know him, don’t you? You know him and you’re just not saying.”

“Are you missing Mr. Ehrlich again?”

“Mr. Ehrlich, Mr. Vanik, Mr. Fallon, one husband after another, young man, nobody can miss them because nobody can remember them. Are you sure I haven’t had an unannounced visitor?”

The orderly shook his head.

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, the orderly was gone. It had grown dark. Where is my mind? She thought. Where has it gone? Why am I here at seventy-one when all my friends are still out in the world living; why, my granny was eighty-eight before senility befell her, how dare life play with me so unfairly.

She reached for her glass of water and took a sip.

Still, she thought she sensed his presence in the room with her, and could not sleep the rest of the night. Before dawn, she became convinced that the Rendering Man was somewhere nearby lurking; she tried to dress, but the illness had taken over her arms to such a great extent that she could not even get her bra on.

She sat up, half-naked, on her bed, the light from the hallway like a spotlight for the throbbing in her skull.

“I have led a wicked life,” Thalia whispered to the morning. She found the strength at five-thirty to get her dressing gown around her shoulders and to walk down the hall, sure that she would see him at every step.

The door to Minnie Cheever’s door was open, which was odd, and she stepped into it.

“Minnie?”

Her friend, nearly ninety-three, was not in her bed. Thalia looked around, and finally found Minnie lying on the floor near the bathroom.

Thalia checked her friend’s pulse; she was alive, but barely. Thalia’s limbs hurt, but she used Minnie’s wheelchair to get Minnie down the hallway, onto the elevator and down to the basement where the endless kitchen began.

They found her there, two cooks and one orderly, like that, caught at last.

Thalia Canty, chopping Minnie Cheever up into small pieces and dropping each piece into one of several large pots, boiling with water, on the stove.

She turned when she heard their footsteps, and smiled. “I knew you were here. We’re like destiny, you and me, Mister Rendering Man, but you’ll never have me, will you?” She held her arms out for them to see. “I scraped off all the fat and skin I could, Mister Rendering Man, you can have all these others, but you ain’t never gonna get my hide and fat and bones to keep useful in this damned world. You hear me? You ain’t never gonna render Thalia, and this I swear!”

She tried to laugh, but it sounded like a saw scraping metal. The joke was on the Rendering Man, after all, for she would never, ever render herself up to him.

It took two men to hold her down.

In a short time, her heart gave out.

When her body was taken to the morgue, it was discovered that she’d been scraping herself raw, to within an eighth of an inch of her internal organs.

It was a young girl, a candy striper named Nancy, going through Thalia’s closet to help clean it out, who found the dried skins beneath a pile of filthy clothing.

The skins were presumably from Thalia’s own body, sewn together, crudely representing a man. Thalia had drawn eyes and lips and a nose on the face — and a scar.

Those who found Thalia Canty as well as the candy striper who fainted at the sight of the skin, later thought they saw her sometimes, in their bedrooms, or in traffic, or just over their shoulders, clutching her rendering knife.

She would live in their hearts forever.

An angel.

A tiger.

The Fruit of Her Womb

1

I woke up one morning, after a nightmare, and turned to my wife. “I feel like there’s no hope left in the world,” I said. I felt all my sixty years seeping through in that one sentence.

Her voice was calm, and she held me. “Old man,” she said, her sweet mocking, “you need to get your joy back. That’s what you need.”

After several such mornings, she and I had to make some decisions. We had some savings, and the leftovers of my inheritance, and I felt it was time to retire to the country. When my first pension check came, I told Jackie it was time for the move while we were still fairly young and able, and she went along with it because she always adapted herself to whatever was available. The truth was, I had lost my love for life, and I needed a plot of earth; I just didn’t know where or when I would need to be buried in it. I wanted a small town, with woods, with groves, with jays bickering at the window and the sound of locusts in the summer evening—and then, when I turned seventy or so, I wanted to die. These were my projections, and having been an actuary, I knew that given my height, weight, and predilection for tobacco, that death by stroke might come in the next decade.

And we found all the birds and gardens and quiet in Groveton, not two hours out of Los Angeles, and more, we found a house and I found a reason to wake up in the morning.

The house was beautiful on the outside, a mess within. It had a name: Tierraroja, because one of the owners (there had been nine) was named Redlander, and decided to Spanish it up a bit in keeping with the looks of the place. An adobe, built in the forties, it had been a featured spread in Sunset, The Magazine of Western Living, in 1947, as “typifying the California blend of Spanish and Midwestern influences.” Its rooms were few, considering its length: three bedrooms, living room, kitchen, but enormous boxcar corridors connecting each chamber around a courtyard full of bird of paradise, trumpet-flower vine, and bougainvillea. Beyond the adobe wall to the north, crisscrossed thatches of blackberry vines, dried and mangled by incompetent gardeners, providing natural nests for foxes and opossums. Beyond this, a vast field, empty except for a few rows of orange trees, the last of its grove—ownership unknown, the field separated the property from a neighbor who lived a good four acres away.

We loved it, and the price was reasonable, as we’d just moved out of a house in the city that was smaller and more expensive. Jackie had a carpenter in to redo the kitchen cabinets the same day escrow closed. I asked the realtor about the empty field, and he reassured me that the owner, who was a very private person, had no wish to sell the vacant lot. We would have the kind of house we had dreamed of, where I could relax in my relatively early retirement (at sixty), and where Jackie could put in the art studio she’d dreamed of since she’d been twenty.

It was on the third day of our occupation of the place that we found the urn. It was ugly, misshapen from too much tossing about, a bit of faux Victoriana, dull green nymphs against a dark green background. Jackie found it at the back of the linen closet, behind some old Christmas wrapping papers that had been left behind, presumably by a previous resident. The urn was topped with a lid that looked as if it were an ashtray put to a new use, and sealed with wax.

My wife shook it. “Something inside.”

“Here,” I said, and she passed it to me. I gave it a couple of good shakes. “Rocks,” I said. I sniff everything before I let it get too close to me; this is an odd habit at best, annoying at worst, and applies to clothes, my wife, the dog, and especially socks—a habit acquired in childhood from observing my father doing the same, and feeling a certain pride in a heightened nasal sense as if it were an inherited trait. So I put the urn to my nose. “Stinks. Like cat vomit.” I looked at the pictures. Not just nymphs, but three nymphs dancing with ribbons between them. On closer inspection, I saw that the nymphs had rather nasty expressions on their faces. In one’s hand was a spindle of thread, another held the thread out, and the last held a pair of scissors. “It’s the Fates in some young aspect,” I told my wife, remembering from my sketchy education in the Mediterranean myth pool. “See, this one spins the thread of life, this one measures it out, and this one cuts it. Or something like that.”

Jackie didn’t bother looking. She smiled and said, sarcastically, “You’re such a classicist.”

“It’s pretty ugly,” I said. I was ready to take it out to the trash barrel, but Jackie signaled for me to pass it to her.

“I want to keep it,” she said, “I can use it for holding paintbrushes or something.” Jackie was one of those people who hated to waste things; she would turn every old coffee can into something like a pencil holder or a planter, and once even tried to make broken glasses into some unusual sculpture.

My wife turned the garage into her studio. The garage door opened on both sides, so that while she painted, she could have an open air environment; the fumes would come up at me, in the bedroom, where I stayed up nights reading, waiting for her to come to bed. But she loved her studio, loved the painting, the fumes, the oils, the ability to look out into the night and find her inspiration. I played with my computer some nights, called some buddies now and again from the old job, and read every book I could on the history of the small California town to which we had come to enjoy the good life. I was even going to have a servant, of sorts: a gardener, named Stu, highly recommended by our realtor, to tend the courtyard and to keep the blackberry bushes, ever encroaching, in check, and to bring in ripe plums in August from the two small trees in the back. I was happy about this arrangement, because I knew nothing about dirt and digging and weeding, beyond the basics. And I didn’t intend to spend my retirement doing something that I seemed incapable of. Stu and I got on, barely—he was not a man of many words, and, although only ten years or so younger than I, we seemed to have no common ground to even begin a conversation. He liked his plants and bushes, and I liked my books and solitude.

Within weeks of being settled, I knew I had nothing to do with my time. I found myself going into town on small, useless errands, to get paper clips, or to see if I could find The New York Times at some newsstand within a fifteen mile radius. The town, while not worth describing, was less planned than it was spontaneous; it had been a citrus boomtown before the Second World War, and after, it was a town for people to find cute places in, but to not do much else. From the freeway, it looked like stucco and smog, but from within, it was pretty, quaint, quiet, and even charming on a cool October afternoon. The library captivated my interests, since I had been a history teacher and was an avid reader. It was full of documents about the town and its architecture, fairly unique to southern California, because most of its buildings were a hundred years old rather than built since 1966.

I found our house, Tierraroja, had at least one story about it. This I learned, briefly, at first, from a local newspaper account from 1952. It seemed the Redlander family had left suddenly, and the house was empty; no one could discover the mystery of their whereabouts. When I went to the librarian, a man named Ed Laughlin, he asked me why I was so interested in the house.

“I live there,” I said.

He smiled. “Yeah, right.”

“No, really. My wife and I moved in the middle of September.”

He chuckled. “Who’s your realtor?”

I told him the name.

Again he laughed. “Should’ve known. She’s been trying to unload that place for two years.”

“Are there ghosts?” I asked, hoping that there might be just for something different.

He shook his head. “Nothing that unbelievable. Just that old Joe Redlander chopped up his wife and kids one night. Nobody knew it until about a year after they were gone. The new owners found body parts all over the place, hidden in secret places. They found Joe eventually up in Mojave, but he claimed he didn’t do it. He’d found them like that, he said, but the police weren’t buying because first off he ran and second off his prints were all over the ax. Heard he blew his brains out up in Atascadero or someplace like it.”

2

I parked in front of my wife’s studio; the doors were open, letting in the last of October sun, almost a light blue sunlight, through her canvases and jars, making her brown-gray hair seem almost cool and icy. I went up to her, kissed her, and looked at the painting she was doing. It was from memory, of the pond that had been behind her mother’s house back in Connecticut. She had just put the light on the water; and it wasn’t New England light, but sprays of California light. I waved to Stu, our gardener, who was trimming back what had in midsummer been a blossoming trumpet vine, but which was becoming, as winter approached, a tangle of gray sticks.

“He’s so dedicated,” Jackie said, “I think I’m going to ask him to sit for a portrait. His face—it has those wonderful crags in it. He’s just about our age, but he looks younger, and then, those lines. And the way he holds the flowers sometimes.” She shook her head in subtle awe, and I wondered if my wife was in the throes of a schoolgirl crush on our gardener.

“We had some murders in our house,” I told her, figuring it was the best way to make her think of something other than Stu.

She grinned, shaking her head at me as if I’d been a bad boy. “Good God, you’d think you’d have better things to do than make up stories just to frighten me.”

“No, really. I was down at the library. The guy who named our house killed his family. You’re not afraid, are you?”

She gave me what I had come, through the years, to call her Look Of False Brain Damage. Then she set the large flat board she used as a palette down on the cement floor, and began dipping her brushes in turpentine.

“Well, I’m finished for the day,” she said. “You making dinner, or me?”

I shrugged. “I guess I can. Spaghetti or chicken?”

“Spaghetti’s fine,” she said, and then, bending over, picked something up. It was the urn. “I still can’t get this lid off. I’ve been prying and prying. Think my Mister Strongman can do it?”

She passed it to me. I made a brave attempt, but could not get the old ashtray off the urn.

“You tried melting the wax?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. You’re so smart and strong,” mocking me, “I’m sure you can get it open for me.”

I gave the urn a good shake, and heard that thing inside it again. Hard. Like a large rock. “You know,” I said, “this guy Redlander chopped his wife and kids up—there were three—and then put their body parts in weird places in the house. Maybe they didn’t find all of them. Maybe one of them’s in here. Maybe it’s the missing hand of little Katy Redlander.”

Jackie made a face. “Don’t you dare try and scare me.”

“Maybe,” I said, “it’s Mrs. Redlander’s left breast, all hardened around the mummified nipple.”

I didn’t bother trying to open the urn until after dinner. Jackie went into the living room to watch TV, and I stayed in the kitchen. I turned on the gas stove and put the edge of the urn’s top near it. Wax began dripping down into the flame, making blue hisses. When the wax seemed to be loosening enough, I pulled on the ashtray, and it made a sucking sound. Then I twisted it, and it came off. I wondered if, in fact, little Katy Redlander’s missing hand might not be inside the urn. I sniffed at it, and it smelled of tobacco. I held the urn up and tipped it, and out dropped a smoking pipe.

I picked it up off the floor, setting the urn on the edge of the counter. I sniffed the pipe. Smelled like cherry tobacco. A very uninteresting find, although the pipe was quite beautifully carved in rich red wood, a satyr’s face. A satyr, I thought, to chase the nymphs of fate on the outside of the urn. Carved clumsily, as if by a child, into the base of the satyr’s bearded chin, were the initials “J. R.”

Joe Redlander.

“So that’s why it’s covered with an ashtray,” my wife said when I showed her. “Somebody was trying to quit smoking.”

“So he seals his pipe up and hides it.”

“Or has someone else hide it for him.”

“Joe Redlander,” I said.

“Who?”

“The guy—you know, the guy I told you about.”

“Oh, right. The Lizzie Borden of Groveton, California.”

I paced about the room, holding the pipe in one hand, the urn in the other. Jackie kept shooing me around so she could watch TV in peace, but I kept crossing in front of her. “His wife wants him to quit smoking the pipe. But he wants it. So she seals it up and hides it. He begs her for it. He begs the kids, maybe even bribes them, to show him where Mommy put it. But the kids know better, or else they don’t have a clue. And then, when it gets to be too much, he gets the ax he’s chopped up all the wood with that afternoon, and he says, ‘Dolores.’”

Jackie interrupted. “Dolores?”

“Whatever,” I said. “Joe says, ‘Nancy, if you don’t tell me where my pipe is, I’m taking you and the kids out.’ And she thinks he’s joking, so she laughs, and he,” and here I mimed whacking my invisible wife with the pipe.

As if she had a moment of supreme victory, Jackie said, “Ah, just like you and your pistachio ice cream?”

“I never chopped you up for that, did I?”

“You would’ve liked to. You were going to become a blimp the way you ate it. I did you a favor by throwing it out. The way you whined for days after that, you’d think I took away your soul.”

I made a Three Stooges eye-poking gesture at her and an appropriate noise. “Okay, anyway, so then he goes to the kids, and they’re screaming, so he does them, too. And to think, if he’d only looked behind the old wrapping paper…”

“The paper was old,” Jackie said, “but I don’t think it was from the fifties. And that pipe could’ve belonged to anybody. Jesus, Jim, you need a hobby.”

“Look at the initials,” I said to prove my case, passing the pipe over to her.

She looked at the pipe, its carved face, and then squinted at the satyr’s beard.

“J. R.,” I said, “Joe Redlander. The man who killed his family.”

“Your initials, too, Mister Smartypants. Could be James Richter,” she reminded me, “maybe the pipe’s meant for you.”

Later, I put some tobacco in the pipe (for I was an inveterate smoker) and lit up, as if this would give me some inspiration.

3

I found the old crime, and the pipe and urn, occupying my thoughts after that. The wrapping paper wasn’t from the fifties, I discovered, but a kind that was sold by Girl Rangers in the mid-seventies.

So, I figured, someone else had found the urn, too, and had hidden it.

Maybe someone else knew of its secret. I went to the linen closet and looked back at the cubbyhole where the urn had been secreted; I reached back to it and found that by pushing one of the shelves aside, there was another hiding area. I moved the towels around and brought the shelf out.

I leaned forward and reached back into this newfound hole, and came up with only a wadded scrap of notebook paper. It was wrapped in a spider web, which I dusted off, and then unfolded the paper.

It was yellowed, and the kind that had large gaps between the thin red lines—the kind of paper children use before they’ve become adept at rocker curves and the like.

In scraggly block letters in ink, it had several figures written across it. It actually looked like a pictographic language, until I realized that it was not some ancient tongue recorded, but the doodlings of perhaps a six-year-old.

At the bottom, an initial: “K.”

I folded it neatly and put it in my pocket. I would ignore it, perhaps throw it out. I didn’t even tell Jackie about finding it, because I didn’t want her to know the extent to which I was fascinated by the story of the Redlander family.

I went back and read the obituaries of the old local newspaper, The Groveton Daily. For 1952, March 17, it listed Virginia Redlander and her children, Eric, eleven, May Lynne, nine, and Katherine, seven. So there was a Katy Redlander after all, I thought, how clairvoyant of me to have guessed it, considering I couldn’t predict weather or my own wife’s mood with anything greater than five percent accuracy.

So little Katy had written what looked like a highly stylized hieroglyphics and had put it back in her secret place, not far from the urn.

“Or maybe you’re just bored to death,” Jackie said when I finally showed her the wrinkled piece of paper that had occupied my mind for three nights in a row.

We were in bed, and she was feeling amorous, while I was being indifferent to sex.

“These diagrams,” I said, pointing to the one that looked as if it had an eye in the middle of it, with some kind of strange animal (a unicorn?) in its iris, “you think a second-grader really did this?”

“My exact question to you,” my wife said, turning over finally. “I think, Jim, maybe you need to go back into teaching at least part-time or as a substitute, because you’re driving yourself and me crazy with all this weirdness.”

I hadn’t even noticed how weird I had become in the past few nights. I looked around my side of the king-size bed, and there were books on Egyptology, and runes, and Greek mythology. I had checked out half the local library’s classical section, because those diagrams of Katy’s resembled a mix of mythic images, and I wondered if there were some key to it all.

But I was being weird. I leaned into my wife, kissing her neck.

“I love you,” I said.

“I was sure you were enamored of Katy Redlander’s ghost.”

“I’ll throw those things out tomorrow,” I whispered, and she turned her face so I could kiss her.

We made love that night, but it was not like it had been when I’d felt more vital. I knew, at my age, I was still fairly young, but I did not believe it, and as my wife and I held each other, afterward, I wondered why it was not as interesting as when I was twenty, or thirty, or even forty, why sex and even food were pleasures that were losing their taste for me; and I wondered why life had to slip like that, why, I thought, looking out the window at the few deciduous trees in the yard, their leaves having turned the pale yellow of California autumn, why can’t we be like leaves, more beautiful when we are closer to the ends of our lives?

I thought I saw something there, as I looked at the trees, something dark against the floodlights, not quite human, trotting away from the window as if it had just watched us.

4

In the morning I went to check the window, as if I would see footprints, but there were none. Jackie skipped her painting that day, and was going to drive into Los Angeles to visit with a friend, so I took to wandering. The empty field that bordered us beckoned me with its orange trees, for they held small but juicy yellow-green fruit, and I decided it was high time to pick an orange right from the tree. The grass in the field was just turning green again because of a recent rain, and I waded through it, mindful of snakes and fire ants. When I approached the fat orange trees, I glanced back at my house: It seemed tiny, like a house on the edge of a toy train track. The trees were powerfully aromatic, for some tiny white blossoms still clung to the branches; most of the oranges were wrinkled and inedible, but there were a few, at the highest branches, that were plump and only just mature. I got a stick and knocked on the uppermost branches until I managed to bat one down. It rolled into the rich earth that was dark and grassless between the several trees, and I went to retrieve it.

There, on the ground, someone had drawn, with a stick, one of the same diagrams I had seen on Katy’s paper.

The eye with the unicorn.

I looked around the other trees, and by each of them, another drawing or diagram. A sketch of a dog? Or a pig? And then several lines with forked endings—snakes?

But something else, too, there, in the dirt, beneath one of the orange trees: an animal, torn up beyond recognition, the size of a small dog.

Dressed as if for a celebration with dozens of tiny orange blossoms stitched with a gay red thread through its mouth and around its eyes, and sutured along its guts.

5

It was a pig, as best I could determine, because in spite of its mutilations, its corkscrew tail was intact, and rather than stink of slaughter, it smelled fragrant with orange and just the scent of mint and sweet pepper—both of which grew wild in any direction across the field.

Children, I thought, and then: Katy Redlander.

The conflicting thought: but she’s dead.

Then: a playmate.

Some friend of hers from 1952, who giggled over arcane rituals they’d found in—a book? The Golden Bough? Or Jasper’s The Birth of Mythology!

Some friend who grew up—would be, what? Forty-nine or so now? And still believed in ritual sacrifice in a sacred grove?

I had read reports of Satanic cults in surrounding towns, and of fringe fundamentalist groups that held snakes and drank poison—how far from that was this?

I left the animal there and went to spend the rest of the day in the library. I looked up pigs in both the Frazer and Jasper texts. In Frazer, pigs were associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries, the rites of Demeter, and the loss of Persephone for half the year—a resurrection cult. But it was in Jasper’s Birth of Mythology that I struck gold. In the fifth chapter, on mystery cults, Jasper writes:

“What 20th century man fails to realize about these so-called ‘cults’ is that these rites brought the god or goddess closer to man, so that man, in his ignorance, would be inducted into the mystery of creation. The virgin would be buried with the other offerings for a moon, during which time the participants would dance and sing themselves into a frenzy, and fast, and often commit heinous acts as a way of unleashing the chaos of the human and divine soul, intermingled—all in the name of keeping the world spinning the correct way, of keeping it all in balance. Thus, when the virgin was buried alive, it was not an act of cruelty, but of unbound love for the child and for the very breath of life, for the virgin represented the eternal daughter, who died, was buried, and then resurrected into the arms of the Great Mother after a time in Hell. This is not so different from the rites of crucifixion, and burial of Christ, after all? And in this act, the young woman who was sacrificed mated with the God, and returned to impart wisdom to the other participants in the Mysteries…”

Beneath this were the diagrams I had found in the wadded paper.

On the following page, a color plate showing the urn, of which mine was an obvious replica, of what I had thought were the Three Fates, dancing.

The caption beneath it read: “The furies in disguise, dancing to lure youths into their circle, so that they might torment them into eternity.”

I remembered a quote from somewhere: “Those whom the gods would punish, they first make mad.” And the story of Orestes, who had brought tragedy and dishonor down upon his House, tormented by the Furies in their most horrible aspect.

Joe Redlander with an ax in his hand, holding down little Katy’s neck while he went chop-chop-chop.

I could picture the house in disarray, the walls splattered with red, the boy trying to crawl away even while his father slammed the ax into his skull; and the mother, dead, cradling her other daughter, as if both were sleeping on the small rug in the hallway.

I closed my eyes, almost weeping; when I opened them, I was still in the armchair of the reference room of the library. Ed Laughlin, the librarian I’d spoken with before, stood near me. He wore a pale suit that hid most of his paunch; his hair was slick and white, drawn back from the bald spot on top of his head. He squinted to read the cover of the book I had in my hands.

“You feeling okay?” he asked, then, before I could answer, he said, “Ah, the ancient world. Fascinating. Coincidentally, I hope you noticed who donated most of our reference works on mythology, particularly fertility cults.”

He gestured for the book, and I handed it to him. He flipped it closed, then opened it to the inside cover. He passed it back to me.

I was not surprised.

The bookplate read: “From the Library of Joseph and Virginia Redlander.”

“He kills his family and then donates books?” I asked.

Ed didn’t smile. “Believe it or not, Joe was a smart man, well-read, quiet, but strong. Admired, here in town, too. When a man cracks, you never know where the light’s gonna show through. I guess with Joe it just showed through a bit strong.”

“Did you know them well?”

He shook his head. “Barely. I was involved in the library here, but also the County museum over in Berdoo. Joe was always nice. Careful with books, too. That’s about how well I knew him. A hello-goodbye-nice weather kind of thing. It bothers you too, though, huh?”

I assumed he meant living in the house, knowing about the murders. “Not too much. I find it more fascinating than frightening.”

“Well, always got to be some mystery in life, anyway, stirs the blood up a little, but it seems strange to me she never showed.”

I asked, “Who?”

“The oldest one. Kim. She was sweet and pretty. Fifteen. Some say she ran about a year before the killings—she may have had a boyfriend here, met on the sly because her folks were real strict about that kind of thing. Maybe she ran off with him. Maybe she did the killings, gossip was. But I don’t think so—she was fifteen and sweet and small, like a little bird. Me, I think she got killed, too, only Joe, he did it somewhere else. I hope I’m wrong; I hope that pretty little girl is all grown up and living across the world and putting it all behind her best she can.”

6

My wife was sitting at her canvas, painting, and I arrived swearing, as I went through the area packed with art supplies that surrounded her. “Damn it all,” I said, “this is the only garage in creation without garage things.”

“Damn right,” she responded, “now take your damn language and get the hell out of here.” All of this in a calm, carefully modulated voice.

I gave a false laugh and slapped the inside wall with my hand. “Now, where in hell would a shovel be when I need one?”

Jackie pointed with her paintbrush to the courtyard. “He’d know, Mister Brainiac.” She looked more beautiful now, with the late afternoon light on her hair, her face seeming unlined, like she always had, to me, and it amazed me, that moment, how love did that between two people: how it takes you out of time, and makes you virtually untouchable.

I turned in the direction of her pointing—it was to Stu, our gardener, kneeling beside the bird of paradise, trimming back the dying stems that thrust from between the enormous, stiff leaves. I went out into the yard. “You have a shovel I can borrow?”

He didn’t hear me at first.

He was humming. When he noticed my shadow, he turned toward me.

He’d begun to look older than his age. Not on the surface of his skin (except in laugh and smile lines), but in something I’d seen mainly in cities: a hard life. Not difficult, for all lives are difficult to varying degrees and some people suffer with more relish than others; but hard, as if the lessons learned were not pleasant ones. I had always thought the gardening life would be a fairly serene one.

“I need a shovel,” I repeated.

“No problem,” he said, and stood. He led me out to his truck and reached in the back of it, withdrawing a hoe and a shovel. “I assume,” he said, “You’re planting.”

“Just digging,” I said.

He nodded, handed me the shovel, and set the hoe back down.

“You’ve done a good job around here,” I said.

He almost smiled with pride, but another kind of pride seemed to hold him back. “It’s my life,” he said simply, then returned to work.

I watched him go, his overalls muddy, the muscles in his back and shoulders so pronounced that he seemed to ripple like something dropped into still water. Then I turned. I didn’t know if I was going to bury a dead animal, or to dig something up, something that had been in the ground for four decades. I used the shovel to press my way through the blackberry bush fence that had become thin with autumn, and headed into the field.

The stink of the dead pig came back to me, along with the scent of its orange blossom garlands. There was a wind from downfield, and it brought with it these, and other smells: of car exhaust, of pies baking, of rotting oranges and other fruit ripening. It almost made bearable the task I was about. When I got to the brief clutch of orange trees, I saw the flies had devoured much of the dead animal, but, oddly, the local coyotes had left it alone.

Behind me, a man’s voice: “You planning on burying it?”

I turned; it was Stu, the gardener. He shrugged. “Decided to follow you out here. Figured you could use some help.”

He reached up to a branch of one of the trees and plucked off a small blossom. He brought it to his nose, inhaled, and then to his lips. It seemed to me that he kissed the blossom before letting it fall.

“Do you know anything about this?” I asked, indicating the pig. “Local kids?”

Stu shook his head. He had kind but weary eyes, as if he’d been on the longest journey and had seen much, but now wanted only sleep. “You won’t be burying the pig, will you, Mr. Richter?”

“No,” I said.

“What the hell,” he said. “I know you know about it.”

“What’s that?”

“I hear her sometimes,” he said, “when I touch the leaves.”

“Who?”

He looked dead at me, almost angrily. “I don’t have nothing to hide. I didn’t put her there.” He pointed to the ground beneath the dead pig.

“The dead girl.”

He whispered, “Not dead.” His eyes seemed to grow smaller, lids pressing down hard, like pressing grapes for wine, tears. “I don’t believe it.”

“You were her friend,” I said.

“I love her. I always will love her.” Stu wiped at his eyes. “Look around. This field used to be nothing. Dirt. Nothing would grow. No orange trees. And your house, dead all around, a desert. But she’s done this.” He spread his arms out wide, as if measuring the distance of the earth.

“Did you do it?” I asked, even though I didn’t want to.

“I killed the pig, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s an offering.”

“To whom? To Kim Redlander?” I glanced at the ground, wondering how deep she had been buried; buried alive for a mystery more ancient than what was written down in a book.

“To the goddess,” he said.

We went out into the field, as two farmers might after a long day of work, and spoke of the past.

He said, “I have faith in this. I have faith. It wasn’t strong at first. He told me he and her mother went all crazy and it was their festival time or something, and what he did to the other kid — and to Kim — was because she didn’t come up that spring. He went wild, Joe did. I read all the books, later, and I came to a kind of understanding. I spoke to Joe before he killed himself. He lost his faith, you know? He didn’t believe anymore. But I had nothing but faith. I know she’s there. Look.” He showed me the palm of his dirt-smeared hand. “She’s in the earth, I can see her, there.”

Joe Redlander and his family buried their daughter alive, I thought.

For the Mother of Creation, buried her in the earth, Persephone going to the underworld to be with her sworn consort, and they must have expected her to return in the spring. A family of religious nuts, and one teenage boy, hopelessly in love with a girl.

In love forever.

“It never happened,” Stu said, “that’s what her dad told me. They waited in the spring, and she didn’t return. But I knew she was still here. I know she’ll come back, one fine spring day. Till then, gardening seems to bring me closer to her.”

“She’s dead, Stu. I know you weren’t responsible. But she’s dead. It’s been over forty years.” I was shivering a little, because I sensed the truth in his story.

He looked across the land, back to the orange trees. “She’s in everything here, everything. You may not believe, but I do. I’ve known things. I’ve seen things. She’s down there, fifteen, beautiful, her hands touching the roots of the trees. She’s going to come up one day. I absolutely know it.”

As we both stood there, I knew that I was going to have to fire Stu, because there was something unbalanced in his story, in his fervor. I didn’t think I could bear to look out the windows and see him gardening, thinking of love and loss as he tended flowers.

I knew I would lose sleep for many nights to come, looking out at that field, wondering.

7

Then, one night the following April, someone set fire to the field, and in spite of the best efforts of the local firemen, my wife and I awoke the next morning and found we were living next door to a blackened wasteland. I got my morning coffee and went to the edge of the field, near the road. The orange trees were standing, but had been turned to crouching embers. I walked across dirt, stepping around the bits of twig that continued to give off breaths of fugitive smoke.

Where the girl had been buried: a deep gouge in the earth.

I watched the field after that but saw nothing special. In a month new grass was growing, and by summer, only through the dark bald patches could anyone tell that there’d been a fire at all.

And today, while my wife painted a picture of the courtyard, I went into the garage and found an old tool, a scythe. I took it up and went out into the field to mow. This action was not taken because of some fear or knowledge, for the Mystery remained—I didn’t know if some animal had been digging at the hole where Kim Redlander was offered to the world, or if Stu himself had dug her up days before, moving rotting bones to another resting place. I didn’t go to the field with any knowledge. I went singing into the field, cutting the hair of the earth, propelled by an urge that seemed older than any other.

Some have called this instinct the Mystery, but the simpler term is Stu’s:

Faith.

I swiped the scythe across the fruit of her womb, then gave thanks and praise to the Mother all that day, for I could feel Her now, walking among her children; I spilled my own blood in the moistened dirt for Her.

My wife called to me, waving from the yard, and I turned, holding fast to the bloodied scythe, while I heard a young girl whisper in my ear that faith demands sacrifice.

Life was precious, for that moment, full of meaning, and wonder.

I walked wearily but gladly across the field, and when I reached my wife, her face brightened.

“You’ve found it,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Your joy,” and she seemed truly happy for me.

“I have.”

I thought of Joe Redlander, and Stu, and Kim, the believers who brought me to this place.

The scythe seemed to shine like a crescent moon in my hand as I brought it across my wife’s neck.

The Night Before Alec Got Married

1

You can never be too sure or too stupid, but you can be too horny—Alec DelBanco, he was smart, but men are never very smart in that one area, and it got him right where you don’t want to be got, not if you’re twenty-four and on the run because something’s after you, only it doesn’t have a name and maybe it doesn’t even have a face but you can see it sometimes in their faces looking out at you like it’s some kind of tourist on a world cruise and you’re one of the Wonders of the World to It.

You call it an It because you don’t know if It’s been noticed by anyone else, and you can’t really talk about It, because if you did, maybe that’s when It would get you.

It got Alec that night, and he didn’t even have to say one word about it. Boy, was he smart, he was practically Phi-Fucking-Beta Kappa from Stanford, and then the job with Kelleher-Darden with an eighty-thousand-a-year salary for a twenty-two-year-old asshole you used to get drunk with—well, everybody figured Alec had just grabbed the golden ring and had not let go.

And handsome! He’d been a stud since the age of twelve, if you remembered far back enough when every girl you’d ever had a crush on seemed to only want to get near you so they could get within breathing distance of your friend. Still, Alec Delbanco never forgot a friend, and you got some fringe benefits from knowing him all those years, beautiful girls who wouldn’t normally give you the time of day all around you—you couldn’t touch them, of course, not in the light of day, not with them in the room, that is, but, oh! when the lights were out and you were alone in bed with your hand and a little imagination—you had them all every which way but loose!

You loved Alec, though, really loved him.

Like a brother, I mean, because you’d practically grown up with him since you could remember. He was better than a brother, too, because your own brothers were kind of missing something in the compassion department.

I wouldn’t fuck a guy, no way, but if I had to fuck a guy—I mean, like the Nazis had me in this torture rack and told me I’d have to fuck a guy or get it cut off, well, I couldn’t fuck just anyone—it would have to be Alec, and not just ’cause he was pretty, but because I have feelings for him—but not like you think.

Once, in the showers after gym, he was leaning around to get his towel, and I swear to God this is true, I thought he was a girl, from the back, he’s all lean and muscular, but I thought he looked like, you know, one of those Olympic women swimmers, taut and strong but kind of attractive, too. So, yeah, if pressed into it, I guess you could say I’d do him.

But this isn’t about me or what I would do if the Fourth Reich came along—and it just might if you read the papers—it’s about Alec and the night before he got married. His girl, Luce, was out with a whole gaggle down at the Marina getting toasted on margaritas and opening cute little presents, while you and me were over on Sunset trying to find just the right pro to come in and do a little dance over Alec’s face when he least suspected it. I didn’t like Luce too much—she was always kind of a bitch to me, almost like she thought I wanted Alec more than she did. I’ve got to be honest here, I would’ve preferred Alec to marry a hooker and at least be happy rather than wed Lucille C. St. Gerard, a fifth generation Californian from Sacramento who debuted at every second-rate cotillion north of Bakersfield.

So we cruise Sunset, all the way from, say, La Cienega up to Raleigh Heights, and it’s getting close to nine—you’d think every working girl in the world would be out by that time—Saturday night, party night, but we only see a bunch of tired old dogs pounding the pavement. You and me, we’re doing St. Pauli Girl, but keeping the bottles low so the cops don’t notice, when I see what I think is just about the most beautiful piece of work this side of the Pacific and I slam on the brakes and cross a lane to park.

“Look at her, holy mother of fuck, look at her,” I say, and barely remember to put on the parking brake. I leap out of the Mustang—it’s a convertible—and practically dive right over to her. She’s got everything, and packed tight: a nice rack of tits, thin waist, and child-bearing hips.

“Hey, little boy,” she says, “you want some sugar in your coffee tonight?”

I’ve never picked up a whore, so I feel real tongue-tied.

“You want a date?” She’s got teeth all the way down her throat, it seems, big white flashy teeth with a couple of gold caps in the way back. She’s practically steaming there like an oyster out of the fish market, and I start to feel like a twelve-year-old of rage hormones and dripping wick.

“Listen,” I say, “I got this friend. Alec.”

She looks at you in the car. “That him? He’s cute.”

“No, no, that’s not him. We’re throwing a bachelor party tonight. We need a stripper.”

“I can do that. I can do all of you boys.”

“Well, more than a stripper,” I say.

She shrugs. “I can do that, too.”

“We want you to get him alone and, you know…” I say.

She smiles. “A dance and a fuck? It’ll cost you.”

“Not just a dance and not just a fuck, okay? We want the Dance of Seven Veils, like Salome did, we want you to really get him to want you, and then it’s got to be more than fireworks, more than an explosion, it’s got to be the Big O.”

“The Big O?”

“You know, the Orgasm at the End of the Universe. The Big One. The kind that guys dream about in their sleep, the kind that most of us never get.”

She looks at me sideways, like maybe I’m some kind of creep with diarrhea of the mouth. “You just talking, ain’t you? You don’t really want the Big O, nothin' like that, do you?”

I shake my head. “Every trick you got. Think you can do it?”

She has a look in her eyes like she’s thinking, but cagily—she has a few secrets, I guess, and she guards them. Her eyes are muddy brown, and when she looks back at me, they look like tiny little pebbles, hard and round.

“Baby,” she says, “I think I can do anything. You pay, I’m gonna make sure it happens.” She glances down the street. There’s a big fat guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt. “My manager,” she says. “You need to talk with him, I think. I ain’t too good at the business side of things.”

Because I don’t want to talk to him, I get you to do it, and the whole thing’s arranged, even though it’s going to cost us four hundred bucks, plus whatever she makes in her dance and if it goes over two hours, another four hundred. Two hundred in advance, so I pay the pimp and we give him the address, tell him to be there at eleven and then we head on back to the party.

Now, this is the part where I’m really stupid, I guess, but you can’t have a stripper come to the party without giving somebody an address.

But I guess this pimp looks at the money and figures there’s more where that came from—so he must’ve gotten this idea—and I’m only assuming.

You and me, we look like nice preppie kind of guys, shit, we practically have ties on from work, and I’m wearing five hundred dollar Italian shoes.

So he decides that when he takes his girl over, he better pack something, because you never know how much cash you can get out of rich, scared, drunk guys at a bachelor party. I don’t know a thing about guns, but this pimp probably had the automatic kind, and I figure that’s how you got two of your fingers shot off before midnight.

2

But I’m getting ahead of myself—it’s easy to do when you’re spilling your guts and you can’t always remember the sequence of events; especially if you’re trying to second-guess everyone around you. The thing with your fingers, it didn’t happen until about eleven fifty-five, and the thing with Luce, that happened just before ten, after we’d gotten back, hoisted a few more St. Pauli Girls and watched Long Jean Silver and her amazing stump-screwing of another woman in one of the six videos you rented from that scuzzy video store down in Long Beach. But something happened before even that, and that was when we stopped for more beer at 7-Eleven and I bought a bunch of multicolored rubbers, all fancy, and then pricked them full of holes and you and I laughed our heads off thinking about Alec and Luce on their honeymoon, thinking they were doing some family planning by wearing the rubbers. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard.

So I stuff the rubbers in my jacket pocket. As I’m pulling out of the 7-Eleven, a car almost hits the Mustang, then swerves and crashes into a wall; the front half is all crushed, but the driver seems okay. “Should we call for help?” you ask, and I say, “Oh, right, like the cops are gonna love the beer in the car and all.” So we pass this woman in the car, and she looks at us for a second, and I got to tell you, I will never, as long as I live, forget that look. Women are like this swamp or something, all dark and mysterious, but still you got to explore ’em, it’s a guy thing. You know, I always say that if you were to put some fur around a garbage disposal, we’d all still take turns at it, even if it was turned on. But women, they have this power, that woman in the car, it was like she’d cursed us, you and me both. But we drive on, get to the house, ring the doorbell like twenty times before you remember you’ve got a key, and we get up to the party just in time to hear one of Ben Winter’s dumb blonde jokes. Billy Bucknell had been throwing up since about eight o’clock, and the bastard is still drinking. MoJo keeps stuffing his fat face with Cheetos, every now and then burping or farting; three guys I don’t know are there, too, not that into the flicks, more into the poker game and cigars; Alec’s little brother Pasco is sneaking peeks at the TV screen, but pretending to be more into a bowl of pretzels. And Alec—where the hell is he? Back in the can, ralphing his guts out—he’s not too good at mixing the finer liquors with the baser variety, but our motto through college had always been that if you boot then you can keep on drinking. Alec was going to become a severe alcoholic, by the look of things, because within ten minutes of coming out of the bathroom, he’s already mixing Zombies with Todd Ramey (“from Wisconsin,” he kept telling everybody who gave a fuck). So Alec is battered and sloshed from the twin bombs of imminent marriage and bad booze, but he still has the classic smile and his dark hair still parts perfectly to one floppy side. “Hey, you,” he flags me down with an overflowing plastic cup, “get it over here, man,” he says, putting his arm out for a big hug. “Dude, you should’ve seen the mud getting flung at dinner, her sister’s a major twat.”

When I get close to him, his breath is like unto a toilet bowl; I pull back a little to let a breeze from the ocean beyond the open window protect me. You keep looking at your watch; you’re nervous, I guess, about the whore. I say. “So, Lec, I saw Pasco. Getting tall these days, that boy is.”

This brings a tear to Alec’s eye. “My baby brother. Gettin’ older. Already he’s climbed into more panties than me. HEY!” shouting across the room, “PASQUALE!”

His brother glances over, shakes his head, maybe even rolls his eyes, and looks away.

“He’s pissed ‘cause he’s taking her side in this.” Alec makes some obscure but definitely obscene gesture toward his brother.

“Whose side?”

“Luce’s. She and that sister—Jesus, is all I can say. Just Jesus. Hey, you wanna get stoned? C’mon, please? Wanna get stoned?”

I shake my head, but I can tell that you want to get stoned ‘cause you’re all shivering, and I’m afraid you’re about to blow it and tell him this whore’s coming from the city, the kind with a pimp. But you don’t blow it; you go over to get another drink, and I think that’s a good idea. “What’s up with Luce?”

“Ah, that bitch. Thinks she owns me. God, this is a good party, all my friends.” Alec begins crying; he was always verging on the sentimental, ever since I’d first met him. It was some Italian thing, I guess (he always said it was), about not needing to keep a tight rein on emotions, all the stuff. I kind of liked him for it, because I’ve never been a good one with the tears and open with anger. So, anyway, he tells me all about this thing with Luce, how she heard some story from her sister about Alec and this girl at a party from about a week back and suddenly she’s claiming that he’s doing everything that walks the earth. “She has this trust thing, it’s something I don’t understand,” he says. “I mean, I trust her, hell, I’d trust her even if she was jawing some guy right in the backseat while I was driving, why the hell doesn’t she trust me? It’s not like I was unfaithful to her or anything, I was just, well, pursuing a little.”

“Women.” I shake my head, amazed that yet another woman failed to understand a man so completely. “And it’s not like you were even married.”

We both crack up at this, drunk as we are. “She even called me an asshole,” he says, and we laugh some more.

“Of course,” I say, coming down from the laughing high just like those kids in Mary Poppins when they came down from Uncle Albert’s ceiling. “It’s true. I mean, we’re all assholes. Basically. All men are assholes.”

“Basically,” he concurs, and we crack up again.

As if this were the greatest cue in the world, the French doors open—we’re at your folks’ house at Redondo, with the cliff and the balcony and the moonswept Pacific just out there—out there—and it’s the door to the balcony, so whoever it is has to have climbed up the trellis or something to get to the second floor, and who do you think’s standing there with a tight green dress and a big old ribbon tied around her waist looking like Malibu Barbie on a date, but Luce, more Nautilized and Jazzercised than when I’d last seen her, and she just keeps coming like a barracuda right toward Alec and spits in his face.

He’s still laughing from the joke, too, so now he’s all shiny and laughing and hiccupping like he might start throwing up again.

Luce looks at me. “When he sobers up, tell him there won’t be a wedding, tell him I know all about it, and tell him he can go to hell.”

Then she turns and sort of flounces out of the room, down the hall stairs, presumably to go out the front door now.

“What,” Alec says, shaking his head, “she fly up here on her broom?”

“Must’ve,” I say, “so, wedding’s off?”

“Jesus, if I listened to her, the wedding would’ve been off for the past six months. Trust me, man, she’s gonna be there tomorrow, it’s costing her dad too much and her ego way too much—she’d rather wait and get divorced later on, I know her, I know my Luce.” And it was true about Luce—she’d rather worry about divorce in a couple of years than NOT GETTING MARRIED. She attached a lot of status to Alec—his family was rich, he was rich, and they were going to live in Palos Fucking Verde Estates and have a house big enough for the two of them and any lovers that snuck in the back door.

But with love, who knows? Could be once that ring was on his finger, he’d be the most faithful little lapdog the world has ever known. Could be she would be, too, and then they’d sink into the marriage trap where sex is an outmoded idea, and lust gets swept between the rug and the floor.

But not the night of his Bachelor Party.

You keep drinking those Zombies, and I say to Alec, my arm around him, his arm around me, “We got this girl, Alec, oh, Christ is she a girl. She’s got a nice rack of tits.”

He giggles, and then dissolves into weeping again. “You’re my best friend, you know that? You are my fucking-A best friend in the whole snatch-eating world.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, and the doorbell rings—I don’t quite hear it, but you do, and you go to the door downstairs—I see you bounding down the stairs like a kid on Christmas. I decide to check out the poker game, but I can tell Alec’s all hot for this stripper, and he watches the stairs expectantly.

You come up a few minutes later, the pimp and stripper in tow, and there’s like dead silence—even the music stops, like the Bruce Springsteen CD knew when to end.

The stripper’s changed clothes—she’s in a kind of party outfit, something that Luce herself would wear, in fact, at a casual, by-the-sea kind of affair: it says glitz and glamour, but it also says throw me in the pool. Alec calls that kind of dress a French maid’s outfit, a short skirt to show off legs, and lots of poofy ruffles, and those, kind of fluffy short sleeves like the Good Witch had in The Wizard of Oz—in fact, she looks a little like the Good Witch, but with a very short dress and a nice rack of tits. But she’s changed more than her clothes. I could swear her eyes had been brown when I’d spoken with her on the street, only now, they’re blue, and her skin seems sort of peaches and creamy, instead of the tanned and beat look she had before. But I know a good contact lens can do a lot, and maybe with makeup—I mean, women are so into changing their faces with paints and brushes, like they’re all afraid we won’t want to see their true faces (and I’ve seen a couple of chicks without their mascara and gloss and stuff, and let me tell you, it gets pretty scary when you’re prettier than your date at four a.m.). Alec, he looked more fetching than Luce when she didn’t wear a lot of makeup—I don’t think I’m more into guys or anything, but give me Luce without makeup or Alee, and I’d rather see Alec’s baby face down on my bone any day.

So the whore looks almost completely different than she had on the street. She looks like she could fit right in with the house and all of us, and I was thinking, boy, you did this right, you got the right girl.

I look over at you, and you wink at me, because we know that even if this girl costs us a thousand bucks or more, it’s all worth it for Alec’s last night before his doom.

Her pimp, who’s still dressed like one of the Beach Boys on acid, is casing the place in a fairly obvious way, and I realize at this point that you and I have made a colossal mistake. We should’ve just got a stripper out of the phone book, but stupid me, I wanted a girl who would, for a little extra, take Alec into one of the empty bedrooms and sit on his face. The pimp sees me, comes over, grabs my drink out of my hand, and drinks it. Fairly turns my stomach. “Nice place,” he says, his voice half gravel and half belch. “Name’s Lucky. You boys gonna have a good time tonight?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, wishing we’d wiped him off on the doormat out front.

Then he whispered, “You be careful with her, now, boy, ‘cause she’s one of a kind, and I don’t want nothing funny to happen to her. If there’s gonna be sex, it’s got to only be head or hand, no tail, you got me? It ain’t safe for my girl to do tail, not with everything going around.”

It dawns on me, drunk as I’m getting, that in some sewer rat way, he cares for this girl. “We will, don’t worry, man. Get yourself a drink, sit down, enjoy!”

“Naw,” he says, “it’s time to let the games begin.”

I notice he’s packing something under his flappy shirt—just the glimpse of some kind of revolver. I think, well, he’s in a rough business, but I know he’s got to protect himself. He sees me see the gun, and we stare at each other, but he says nothing. He’s got eyes like a snake, all perverted looking and squinty—sometimes I think people with squinty eyes have squinty brains, and this pimp, if anyone has one, hell, he’s got the most squinty-ass brain on the planet. I’m thinking of maybe turning the revolver into a joke, by saying, “So’s that a gun in your pants or are you just happy to see me,” but I know people with squinty brains aren’t going to chuckle at that old standby. I keep my mouth shut.

And then the girl punches up a CD of Rod Stewart’s song “Hot Legs” or whatever it’s called, and she started a routine.

But you don’t want to hear about how she writhed and spun, how she took everything imaginable off, lifted one leg above her head, how Alec played the Golden Shower game with her, drinking Molson Golden Ale from her pubes; how she squatted on my face and took a rolled-up fifty from between my lips just using her snatch—those are all the basics of a good party stripper.

What you want to hear about is how your fingers got on the floor in the bathroom, with you screaming bloody murder, and how she screamed even louder, right?

That’s what you want to hear.

3

I guess I’m going to digress a little here, but only for clarity’s sake—the night before Alec got married was one of those nights where you have to piece a few things together later on. Like Pasco, Alec’s little bro, giggling and blushing when the girl sat on his lap naked and beat his pretty face silly with her tits; or when MoJo got pissed off because she wouldn’t sit on his face for a lousy ten bucks; he said, whining, “Doesn’t she know any cheaper games?”—see, the girl was so hot and we were so loaded, that we were dropping hundreds and fifties on her like she was a bank. Cigar smoke was the only veil she had around her, in the end, just that stagnant smoke that stinks and sits in the air like it doesn’t have anywhere to go, and all of us, through its mist, looking like ghosts. That’s what I thought at the time: we were enshrouded by the gray smoke, and we looked like ghosts, or maybe old men with wrinkly skin, testicular skin, pale and blurry of feature. Horny bastards all, MoJo licking his lips like he was trying to taste her from three feet away, and Billy Bucknell grabbing his crotch without even knowing he was doing it. She really had us going, that girl did. You even kept trying to get your hand up her, and she kept pushing you away, until her pimp had to come over and tell you to knock it off, that nobody, but nobody touches her kitty. That’s what he called it, her kitty. Might as well have called it her flesh purse, since she was making so much money out of opening it up. The pimp and I had a nice convo about how prostitution was a victimless crime and all that; his name was Lucky Murphy, a nice Irish boy as it turned out, from Boston, who had once been a fisherman off Dana Point, and as he spoke I could practically hear someone’s Irish mother singing “Danny Boy,” until I looked him in the eye and knew he was a fucking liar through and through, that he was Hollywood scum and if he could, he would’ve been peddling all our preppie asses for the twenty bucks per corn hole he could make.

And we keep looking at her kitty, too, all our eyes drawn back to the unholies of unholy, “little pouty petals,” you called it. You were pretty adamant about getting your fingers up there, weren’t you, you horny son of a bitch? It was almost like a Portuguese man-of-war turned on its back.

And finally, when it was over, all her dances, she took the party boy into the bedroom, and all I can say is, he didn’t come out for over an hour.

In fact, by eleven-fifteen, he hadn’t come out at all, and that’s when you and I decided to storm the room.

4

Now, I had seen this room once before—it was your folks’ master bedroom, and it was a good size, with kind of a faggy bed, you were to ask me, lots of silk and brass; a nightstand that looked like it was out of Versailles; green-gold wallpaper, shiny and clean like they’d just had it put up the day before; a wall that was nothing but mirrors; and two walk-in closets, the sizes of my apartment in Westwood; a bathroom, all gold-plated fixtures, something I always thought was tacky about your folks—and I told you this a few times, too—with a big round Jacuzzi bath and a window so you could take a bath and watch your neighbors at the same time.

The door is locked, of course, but you know how to take a dime and very simply unlock it. So we get in, and the bed is perfectly made; no sign of hooker or trick. You go into the bathroom to look for them, giggling as always, because we think we’re going to find the two of them with her ass bent over a sink and his schlong pumping in like an oil drill; I check out the walk-in closets, but there’s nothing but tons of Armani and Valentino and the smell of Red and L’Air du Temps.

As I’m about to go into the second closet, the pimp comes running in, out of breath because it’s quite a hike up those stairs in your folks’ house. “What you boys doin’?”

I cackle—sometimes, when I’m really bombed and in a party mood, I do this laugh that’s like “snort-cackle-pop,” and it sounds like I hurt myself or something.

Then I notice he’s got his revolver out.

Oh, shit, I’m thinking. I sober up real fast. “Looking for the party boy.”

He just stares at me with the gun drawn, and that’s when I hear the girl in the bathroom, kind of moaning, and you, too, still giggling, and that wet sound like rubber and lubricant.

And another sound, while the Irish pimp from hell is staring at me, a sound in the walk-in closet.

My hand is on the door.

But someone else’s hand is on the other side of the door.

“Alec?” I ask the door.

The sound that comes back isn’t entirely human, but it’s human enough. It sounds like the noises Alec used to make when he was doing like a feeb imitation: like his tongue got cut out and his lips are shredded. So I think maybe it’s some kind of setup and joke on me, so I give the door a good pull, and it opens.

Dresses and coats, hanging, rustling, in a dark closet.

The sound of slow dripping.

I can smell the pimp’s breath: He’s real close to me.

I can tell he’s a little scared, too, and he still has the gun out.

He’s pointing it at the dresses, hanging.

Something clear and dripping from the corner of a full length mink coat.

I switch on the closet light, but the pimp very quickly switches it off again.

But in that one second of light, I see something in the corner.

Something that left a trail of slime and human waste in its path.

Its ribs quivering.

Open, and quivering, like the skeleton of a boat, a slaughterhouse boat with the flesh and innards of animals dripping from its deck.

It’s always through the eyes that you know someone. I once took care of a friend’s dog when I was eight; and then, when I was nineteen, and had long before moved away from that friend, I was in New York, in Central Park, and I saw in the eyes of a dog an old friend, and sure enough, it was the dog I had known when I was eight, and in Orange County. It’s always there in the eyes, the person, the animal, the creature, not in the skin or voice or the movements: It’s in the eyes.

So I had seen in the brief light, his eyes, Alec’s eyes, left in their sockets long after the skin had been torn from bone and skull to make the rest of him resemble a skinned possum.

And when it registers on my brain that it’s Alec, that this girl did something to Alec, something inhuman, I hear your scream from the bathroom, and I turn and the pimp turns, and the girl screams, too, and there's the sound of breaking glass.

The pimp gets to the bathroom first, before me, and I hear him fire two shots; I’m just behind him, and when I see you clutching your hand with all that blood coming out, I figure the pimp shot your fingers off. For just a second, I see her, too, not as she was, pretty and tall and sexy, but some small tentacled thing, like a sea urchin, dropped from between her legs, released from its empty and ragged socket, with a cut umbilical cord attached, loping on its wormlike feelers across the bathtub rim, out the broken window, into the night.

The pimp yells, “Goddamn it, that fucking bitch,” then drops his gun, grabs me by the collar, “You bastards, you asked for it, you ain’t supposed to get her down there, that’s what she wants, you sons of bitches, you’re supposed to get head or a hand job, didn’t she tell you? She tricked you, and she was the best, you sons of whores!” He’s weeping, and I’m thinking, Christ, he’s in love with … that thing.

“Is that a fucking alien?” I’m screaming. “You brought some fucking outer space—”

But he cuts me off, spitting a wad of slime on my face. “I fished her out of the sea, asshole, down at Santa Monica pier, she got caught on my hook and she does things to you, she gets boys like you, but not like this, it’s up to you, your buddies wanting to put it there, but I told you that ain’t allowed! She’s the best, but you can’t touch her there, it’s so hard to trap her, and now, look what you done!”

But you, you start screaming again and turning blue, so the pimp lets me go and goes running out of there in search of his escaped sea creature. That’s when I figure it’s time to call an ambulance.

5

So now I know it wasn’t the pimp shooting at you, but at that thing, that thing that you stuck your fingers up into.

It was hell cleaning up the mess in the bathroom, getting rid of her skin.

Funny thing about her skin and guts—they looked like they’d been spun with a fine silk, but they were all sticky.

You were lucky to lose only your fingers.

Think of what Alec lost, the night before he got married.

Well, not that he ever did get married.

He’s sort of a vegetable now, living off of machines at his folks’ house, and Luce got married to Billy Bucknell last year, that scheming son of a gun.

You and me, we’re rooming together these days. My new nickname for you is Fingers.

In the morning, when you bring me coffee, it’s kind of nice, just the two of us.

We get by.

I tried to do it with a girl again, after that, but what if she’s up inside there, what if that girl's just spun out of her silk, what if she’s waiting to take me to the Big O and rip my skin right off my back and end up like Alec Delbanco with wires and tubes all over him and his eyes all weird and sad, like he had it, that orgasm at the end of the universe, like maybe it was worth it, what she did to him, but I got to tell you, Fingers, I got to tell you:

I’m never getting close to one of those things again as long as we both shall live.

I keep seeing it in their faces, their eyes, the It that was the whore’s core, the creature in the flesh purse, and I feel like It’s coming for both of us, maybe to finish off the job. Alec, too, maybe even Billy Bucknell, and MoJo, and Pasco, and Ben Winter.

Sometimes at night, when I can’t sleep, I hear Its sloppy wiping at the windows, and I pull the covers up over the two of us just to feel safe.

You and me, we’ll take care of each other, we don’t have to go out much, at least not till we get evicted, and then we can hide under the sewers or in the alleys.

If we see her, if we still got legs, we can run, you and I.

I will not abandon you to It, and I promise, for better or worse, good buddy.

In sickness and in health.

Only Connect

1

Watch the scenery awhile. It’ll take your mind off the pain. I’ll tell you all about him, if you’ll just listen. You must never breathe a word of this to anyone, but I can tell you’re an understanding sort. You won’t betray me.

His name was Jim, and he worked at the train station taking tickets. He grew up in Hartford, but moved to Deerwich-On-Sparrow, called Deerwich by most, on the Connecticut coast—in his early twenties, the job had seemed good. He’d begun his career riding the rails taking tickets and cleaning the cars, but he’d moved up so that at twenty nine he could sit behind the glass and say, “Roundtrip to Boston leaves at 9:15. That’ll be $49.50.” His head often pounded when it rained, and he was prone to popping aspirin as if it were hard candy and just sucking on it until the headache went away. The sound of the train as it arrived in the station aggravated his condition, but Jim had begun to think of the headaches as normal. He’d long forgotten that they had never existed before he began working with the railroad.

It was the train wreck that had begun his journey toward discovery. One night, fairly late for the train— which had been due in before midnight—there was an awful screeching, from some great distance along the track. The old timers knew what this meant, and they all ran out to see the spectacle. All except for Jim, who stayed back.

He went to grab another bottle of aspirin from beneath his perch. He felt around, but all his fingers found was a completely empty bottle. He stood from his stool, stretching, yawning. Outside, he heard the scraping of metal—the train, he would later learn, went over an embankment, into the river, and some child somewhere would be blamed for playing quarters on the tracks—the shouts of onlookers as the train tossed like a restless sleeper from its bed—but Jim took the opportunity to walk across the street to the drugstore for aspirin.

Inside the store, the fluorescent lights flickered. The old man who worked the pharmacy stood up on his platform behind the white counter, measuring his nostrums and philters. Jim walked the aisles, glancing briefly at the magazine covers and the greeting card displays. Finally, he turned the last aisle and saw the large bottles of aspirin.

The fluorescent light above his head flickered in a dark way, as if it were just about to go out. As Jim reached for the aspirin bottle, he watched as his hand seemed to go through water and touch—not a bottle of aspirin, but a green tile on a bathroom wall. As the light flickered again, he sensed that he was no longer in a drugstore down near the train station in Old Deerwich, but in a small bathroom with lime green tiles and a large mirror above the toilet. He glanced in the mirror and for a moment thought he saw the aisles of the drugstore behind his reflection, but this faded, and all was green tile.

He almost said something, as if someone stood near him, but he was most definitely alone.

He turned about, facing a door. He pushed at the door, and it opened out onto a room that was all green and white and smelled of rubbing alcohol with an undersmell of urine. Flowers on the windowsill. The window looked out on a courtyard and garden, and there, as he went to look out it, were half a dozen or more patients. He knew they were patients by their bathrobes and by the nurses that pushed some of the wheelchairs, or stood beside a patient who used a walker or cane to get around. Across the courtyard, a silver metal building, probably precisely like the one he occupied at the moment.

“Mrs. Earnshaw,” someone said at the door. British accent. He knew he was in a British hospital.

Jim turned, sensing others’ presence in the room.

The fluorescent lamp flickered a liquid green.

Jim glanced up at the light overhead—a large brown water blotch spread like the profile of a face next to the ice tray lamps.

“It’s terrible,” someone said as he glanced down again.

He was in the drugstore, holding a bottle of aspirin in his hand. A woman looked up at him queerly.

“I can’t imagine anyone survived.”

Jim had to squint a moment to focus on his new environment. His head throbbed now. He calmed himself with the thought that the pain in his head had caused the brief and vivid hallucination of the hospital room.

The little old woman, half bent over, reached for a box of arthritis pain reliever. “Did you see it?”

“No,” Jim said. Then, “See what?”

“The crash. I was in my car and driving down Water Street, and I heard it. It was terrible. It’s so unsafe.”

“Yes.” Jim nodded.

“Travel is always dangerous. To get there from here, one must risk one’s life these days,” she said, nodding as if they’d understood each other.

Jim stood there a moment. Then, feverishly, he opened the jar of pills and grabbed three, tossing them down his throat.

When he paid for the bottle, the pharmacist said, “Finally found what you wanted.”

“Excuse me?”

“The aspirin. I saw you standing there reading labels for nearly half an hour.”

“Half an hour?”

“Bad headache, huh? You probably drink too much caffeine.”

Jim walked out into the rain, feeling as if he still vibrated with his hallucination. He remembered his brief romance with peyote in college, and began to worry that this might be the flashback from that. He forgot about it for days—the hospital—and buried himself in work.

The photographs in the local papers showed all angles of the train crash. It had fallen on its side, plunging seventy nine people into the river, all of whom died. Another two hundred and fifteen people were injured.

What struck Jim most about the pictures of the fallen train was that it looked—if you squinted at the photos—like a sleeping person made entirely of metal, lying on a gray blanket.

The flashes began a week or two later.

The first time, when he tried to unlock his car, a small Honda Civic, and found that the lock was jammed. He twisted the key so hard that it broke off in his hand. Again, the headache kicked in, and he saw the aspirin bottle on the passenger seat inside the car. He felt angry suddenly—angry at the car for not opening, angry at his job for its dullness, angry at his parents for not really preparing him for the world in the way he’d wished.

Then the flash—he thought it was heat lightning. In the same moment, he was in the hospital again. This time, he sat in a wheelchair in the courtyard as a light rain fell.

“You all right, now?”

“Yes,” he said, adapting quickly to his new environment. “It’s only a little rain.”

“A little rain.” The pretty nurse beside him smiled. “Yes, that’s all it is. But all the others have gone inside.”

He looked about the path through the garden with its iris and hibiscus, and saw that they were indeed alone. The silver of the buildings dulled in the gray rain, but he liked the fresh smell of it.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Nora,” she said, glancing up from her magazine. “Your reading’s going to get soaked,” he said, nodding.

“I don’t mind. It’s only a little rain, after all.” She had a warm smile, and her eyes were a toasty brown. “Been feeling good today, then, have we?”

“Very,” Jim said. “The pains are gone.”

“A few days is what they said.”

“Yes, and they were right,” Jim said.

Then he bit his tongue slightly. “Where am I?”

“Holyrood,” she said.

“What town?”

“Oh, you.” Nora laughed. “More tricks. Is this like that dream you told me about? The one where you’re a railroad man taking tickets in some little town in—where was it?”

“Connecticut.”

“That’s right Connecticut. The effects should’ve worn off by now,” Nora said, glancing at her watch. “You were only on the IV for two hours before ten. It’s nearly three.” Then she reached over, patting Jim’s hand. “All of this for just a little information. It does seem daft, doesn’t it? You holding up? No more weeping at midnight?”

“No,” Jim said, feeling more lost and yet extremely comfortable. “Was it the aspirin?”

“Or lack thereof,” Nora said. “Do you ever read these?” She held the magazine up. It was the London Telltale magazine. “All these royals and celebs knocking each other up. You’d think they’d have other things to occupy them, don’t you?”

“What town are we in?” he asked.

“Why,” Nora shook her head, glancing at the magazine, “just look at what the Prince is up to today.” Then, “What dear? Town? Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to tell too much. You know that more than anyone, Mrs. Earnshaw.”

Jim felt a warm salty taste in the back of his throat. He glanced down at the hand that she had just finished patting. It was the hand of a middle-aged woman, and the hospital bracelet he wore read, “Catherine Earnshaw.”

When the lightning flashed overhead and the rain began coming down in earnest, Nora said, “Oh, dear, let’s get the two of us in out of this nasty weather, shall we?” But then there was no Nora, and she faded, and all that was there was the Honda and the rain and his headache and a man who was not sure why he was going mad at the age of twenty-nine.

2

You didn’t think he was married? Well, of course Jim was married—they’d tied the knot at twenty-four, almost got divorced at twenty-seven, but managed for a couple of more years because their jobs put them at opposite shifts so that every weekend was a honeymoon. Her name was Alice, and she worked at the sandwich shop on Bank Street. When she got off work at five, she went first to the library, since she was an avid reader, and then to the video shop. Her evenings, while Jim worked late, were mainly spent with the cat and a good book and a mediocre movie nine times out of ten. She’d slip into bed around midnight, fall asleep with a glass of wine, and then feel him next to her just before she got fully awake at seven in the morning. She’d cuddle with him, unbeknownst to Jim, and then get up to make a pot of coffee and begin the day again.

The movie that night was to be an old musical, and the novel, a light romance to take her mind off her worries. She slipped into the tub at about seven-fifteen, and while she dried herself off, the bathroom door opened. At first Alice was frightened, but she saw quickly it was her husband.

“Jim? What are you doing home?”

“Called in sick,” he said. “I’ve been napping since six.”

“Migraine? Poor baby.”

“It’s not that.” But he nodded anyway.

“Come here,” Alice said, reaching her hand out. Jim approached her, his head down. She touched the back of his neck, squeezing lightly. “You’re tense.”

“Baby, I think I’m going nuts,” he said.

“You’ve been nuts a long time.”

“I mean it,” he said, and his tone was so serious it almost shocked her.

Later, by the fire, she held him and told him it would be all right, and he wept.

Then he told her.

At first she had a hard time not laughing.

But when he told her the woman’s name, she cackled.

He looked hurt.

“Oh, honey, that’s a name from a book. Catherine Earnshaw. It’s from Wuthering Heights. You must have seen the movie.”

He shook his head. “Was she in a hospital?”

Alice grinned. Her grin was not as warm as Nora’s, but it was familiar. “No, no. It must be some kind of dream brought on by those headaches. Let’s get you into the doctor’s for a checkup.”

“A head exam?”

“So you’re an invalid woman in a British hospital with silver buildings and your name is Catherine Earnshaw. What an imagination,” Alice said, kissing his forehead. “My big baby. It’s your job. It’s getting to you. I told you, you needed to finish your degree and maybe get into computers or something.”

Jim glanced at the fire as the flames curled and flickered. He closed his eyes, his head beginning to pound, but he was going to fight it off, the pain, the throbbing, the near blindness that the headaches brought with them when at their worst.

When he opened his eyes, he was sitting in a large white room with no windows. In an uncomfortably hard chair. In a circle, with others. Some men, a few women—nine in all. The nurses stood toward the back, sitting on chairs, crossing and uncrossing their legs, looking at their watches now and then, seeming to reach into their breast pockets for cigarettes or mints or something they needed desperately but were unwilling to give themselves.

A man sitting across from Jim chattered away, and gradually Jim began to understand what he was saying.

“It’s not as if we all aren’t going through the same thing. What did they call it? Adjustment?”

A woman laughed. “Mine told me to get used to it.”

Someone else chuckled at this. “I was told it was a period of containment.”

“Well, it’s been working for me to some small extent,” the man continued, his voice slight and nervous as if he were afraid of being overheard or of making a mistake in what he said. “At least in the mornings. The mornings are good. It’s only about now.”

“Yes,” another man said, just to the left of Jim. “At about three every day. Sometimes as late as four. These flashes.”

“Flashes of insight,” a woman said.

“Hot flashes,” another woman said, and they all had a good laugh. “Not that you can’t have those, Norman.”

Norman, the man who had originally been talking, blushed. He was handsome, mid-forties, and reminded Jim a bit of his father. Actually, the more he spoke, the more Jim was becoming convinced that Norman was related to him in some way. The thin tall frame, the thick black hair, the nose a bit beaky and the chin a bit strong and the teeth a bit much.

“Well,” Norman said, “since we’re all in this together, and since they,” and he nodded backward, to the row of nurses behind him, “seem to want us to get it all out in these groups, I think we should tell everything we know.”

“Not everything,” another man said. “I couldn’t. It’d be too much.”

“All right, then,” Norman said. “Whatever we feel comfortable with.”

“You’ll have to begin, then, Norman. Mine is rather embarrassing,” the laughing woman said. “It involves me and another man, and I can’t tell you what we seem to do all day long.”

More laughter.

“Mine isn’t that…invigorating.” Norman smiled. “I’m just a little boy of ten, perhaps eleven. I live in a small village in Morocco.”

“Sounds quaint,” the woman said. “Unless you’re employed in some house of thieves.”

Norman lost his smile. “Nothing like that. I help bring water to the house, feed some animals, and run errands. I’m constantly hungry, and I can’t seem to talk with others there, even though I understand them.”

“Oh!” the woman gasped. “So interesting compared to mine. I’m the wife to a man who hallucinates.”

Listening to all this, Jim almost laughed; something in him told him to laugh a bit. He glanced down at his hands and saw the wedding ring on the left hand. He drew it carefully off his finger as the woman told her story.

He looked inside the ring. “Cathy and Cliff Forever.”

“Yes, and while he’s at work in his dull job, I go have mad affairs up and down Main Street,” the woman continued, “only … it’s not called Main Street. I find this entertaining, if disconcerting. My husband really is a fool. He surprised me a bit today, however.”

Jim reached up and felt his neck. It was slender. He drew his fingers across his throat and up around his chin—a small slightly round chin—up to his fullish lips, his small nose, around his eyelashes, which seemed long and feathery.

“Dear,” someone whispered behind him, “you’ll smudge your makeup.”

He recognized the voice; it was Nora.

He put his hands down.

“You should listen to the stories,” Nora whispered. “It might help your condition.”

Jim nodded, glancing over to the woman who was just finishing up her tale.

“He hasn’t a clue,” she said. “He lies constantly himself. It’s easy to fool a liar.” She looked over at Jim. “Mrs. Earnshaw, you haven’t told yours, have you?”

The woman seemed to look at Jim with a special knowledge. He’d nearly forgotten he was Mrs. Earnshaw to all of them. He began to feel his skin crawl a bit. A coldness seeped into his voice as he spoke.

“There’s not much to tell, really. To be honest, I think I’m more there than here.” Laughter across the room. “This feels less me than the other. I know so much about him.”

“Him?” The woman laughed. “Oh, Lord, you got to change sex. Do you play with it much?”

“Juliet!” Norman exclaimed. “What a filthy mind you have.”

Jim felt slightly offended, particularly for Mrs. Earnshaw, whom he imagined to be a very circumspect and polite woman of fifty-two.

“Really,” he said. He reached down, smoothing the lines of the bathrobe. “Even now, sitting among you, I feel more him than me.

“Tell us about him,” Norman said.

“Yes,” another chimed in.

“Perhaps I will.” Jim paused a moment, wondering where to begin. “He’s a nice young man in his late twenties who works for the rails in a little New England town. He is happily married, drives some kind of Japanese car, an older model, and likes rock and roll music from the 1950s. He has terrible headaches …”

After a moment, Jim continued. “Actually, I’m more convinced that I’m him than I’m sure that I am, well, me.”

Norman’s eyes lit up as he nodded. “That’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it? They said you get a gleam at first.”

“A glimmer,” the woman named Juliet said. The smile on her face grew impossibly wide. “They called it a glimmer. It feels like … like …”

“A warm rain,” another said.

“Yes, and then,” Norman nodded as if feeling a religious transformation, “the warmth spreads over you.”

“Like you’ve been rewired,” another said.

The woman next to him said, “Well, Mrs. Earnshaw’s certainly been rewired if she’s a man now.”

“He’s not just a man,” Jim said, and for the first time noticed that he spoke with Mrs. Earnshaw’s voice. “He’s a special young man. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s very special.”

Behind him, Nora touched his shoulder. She whispered, “I knew you’d be the first, Mrs. Earnshaw.”

Jim leaned his head back slightly. “The first to what, dear?”

“The first to cross the bridge,” the nurse said.

3

When Jim next recollected anything, he was in bed with his wife, in their small apartment on Hop Street, the peppermint smell of the nearby toothpaste factory assaulting his senses.

Alice snored lightly, and as Jim glanced around in the scrim darkness, moonlight and the summer steam pouring in through the open window, he saw evidence of sexual abandon—the packet of condoms, open, on the dressing table, the clothes strewn about the floor in a trail, the half-empty glasses of red wine, one spilled on the carpet. Had they been animals? He wished he could remember. Because of their schedules, they didn’t make love all that often, and now he had been in some kind of dream support group in a British hospital rather than in his Alice.

Then a disturbing thought occurred to him: was someone else occupying his own body while he occupied Mrs. Earnshaw’s? Did Mrs. Earnshaw herself enter his skin and make love to Alice and drink his wine?

He sat up most of the night, just watching Alice as she slept.

Sweet Alice, lost in some dream world. She stirred, her fingers curled, once, her hand went to her throat, once, she seemed to weep but it was like a puppy sound—a puppy at the door to a room that she wanted to be set free from.

She awoke in the early morning, her eyes opening wide. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just watching you.”

“Why?” She wiped her face with her hands as if washing away a mask of sleep. “You scared me for a second.”

“What was it like?”

“What?”

“What we did last night.”

“Weren’t you there?” She grinned, giggling.

“I’m not sure.”

“Oh stop it. It’s too early for jokes.” She looked across the bed to the clock. “It’s only five-thirty. I can sleep some more. That is,” she arched an eyebrow, “if you’d quit staring.”

She turned over, facing the window. The sunlight had crept up.

“Can you close the curtains?” she said. “I need some dark.”

4

Jim wandered downtown, walked along the river, along the railroad tracks, alongside the boat slips and the chemical factory—miles of walking at dawn, when the town seemed to wake like a baby, from a gasp to a full cry. When the sun was fully up, he got a cup of coffee from the doughnut shop and walked out to the pier, watching the ferry as it crossed to Newburyport.

The 7:15 blew its whistle, coming into the station, and he turned to watch it—remembering the train crash of a few weeks earlier, and the first time he remembered being in the silver British hospital as Mrs. Earnshaw.

Then it came to him. That had not been the first time. That had been the first time he’d remembered it so vividly. Closing his eyes, he recalled an incident when he’d been four or five, and he’d been in a hospital—was it the same one? Only, it was not in England. It had been in Massachusetts, when he’d been taken to visit Grammy Evans, her drinking out of control—the white and green rooms, the silver flask she hid even there to take a nip now and then when the nurses weren’t looking.

“Hold this,” she’d said, passing him the silver flask. “Don’t let them see it.”

So he’d hidden it in his shorts, feeling the cold metal against his thighs. Then he’d wandered the halls of the hospital while the grown-ups talked and did not notice him missing. He began playing “Spy” and decided that the doctors were Secret Agents. When he came across one, he’d run up some stairs and down some others, and through double doors and hallways with words written in bright red and yellow along them. And then he’d come to a room where four men in green masks stood about a table.

On the table, a naked old woman who was probably dead.

Jim had kept himself hidden away, and he watched as the four doctors injected something terrible into the old woman so that she sat up screaming.

It had made Jim scream, too, and one of the four men turned and saw him, and before he could get out the door, someone else grabbed him.

“What in God’s name is this kid doing in here? Where the hell is security?” a man said.

The woman screamed again, and then began coughing.

Jim, sitting on the pier, sipped his coffee, trying to remember more, but that had been all.

What he knew without a doubt was that the woman on the table had been Mrs. Earnshaw, and that she was dead when he was a little boy and that somehow this was all a hallucination caused by a traumatic incident.

The coffee grew cold as he closed his eyes.

He decided to go into Mrs. Earnshaw in the hospital.

He willed a headache to come on, he tried to simulate the pain that arrived, and the flickering lights.

After an hour, he gave up.

Several days later, while he was sitting on the toilet, he arrived into Mrs. Earnshaw again.

She sat in the garden with Nora. Nora was reading one of her magazines, and Jim was doing a little needlepoint.

“Nora. Tell me about myself,” he said.

The nurse glanced up.

“All right. I suppose this is good.”

“It seems I’m losing bits of me,” Jim said, nodding as if to the will of the universe. “I’m not sure where I fit in with all this.”

“Well, that was the issue, after all,” Nora said. She set her magazine aside and crossed her leg. “Mind if I light up?”

“Go right ahead, dear.”

Nora drew a cigarette from her breast pocket and struck a match along the edge of the low brick wall she leaned against.

After the first puff, she said, “You’re a psychiatrist from Bristol who worked with NASA and spent a good deal of time in Belize working on the Arc Project.”

“What’s that?”

Nora shrugged. “I wish I knew.” She said this warmly and without a trace of deception. “All I know is my end of this.”

“The Arc Project doesn’t even sound familiar to me.”

“All of you were involved with it. That’s all any of us knows.” Another long drag on the cigarette. “You have the mind link to this man named Jim, as do the others, to various people. And you’re dying.”

“I had no idea,” Jim said, setting his needlepoint on his lap. “Why am I called Catherine Earnshaw? That’s obviously not my real name.”

“You picked it. All of you picked names from books and movies. You liked the name Cathy.”

“Do you know who I am, really?”

Nora closed her eyes for a minute. Smoked. Scratched a place just above her eyebrows. Opened her eyes. “Not really.”

“Doesn’t all of this seem inhuman?”

Nora sighed. “We have to trust that this is saving something important for us.”

“Saving from what?”

Nora dropped her cigarette to the ground, stubbing it out with the toe of her white shoe. “From loss. The information has to be retained, and it’s not like you’re a computer that can just be downloaded.”

“I wish I could remember the information you’re talking about, but really, I can’t. There seem to be great gaps in my memory.”

“It’s just the connection,” Nora said.

She stepped over to the wheelchair and crouched down before it. She placed her hands over Jim’s and looked up into his eyes. “I know that Mrs. Earnshaw is leaving us. I know that you’re this other person, this Jim. I can see you when you come into her.”

Jim trembled, and felt sweat break out along his neck. “Really?”

Nora nodded. She glanced about, slightly nervous. “I have to tell you something, Jim. There’s someone here, an intruder from the Arc Project. I’m not sure who it is, but Mrs. Earnshaw is in danger.”

Jim shivered. “What’s this all about? Am I crazy?”

Nora grinned. Then she grew serious again. “Maybe. I never would’ve thought I’d be involved in this too. None of us really thought it would work. But someone is after you, Jim, not here, in this hospital. But the intruder’s already trying to track you down.”

“I don’t understand. This whole ‘intruder’ thing.”

An old man in a white jacket walked up beside them.

“Dr. Morgan,” Nora said.

“Here, the rain’s coming again,” the doctor said. “Let’s get Mrs. Earnshaw inside for another series of shots, shall we?”

As Nora wheeled Jim across the path toward the door, as the first drops of rain fell, Jim whispered, “She’s already dead, isn’t she? Mrs. Earnshaw?”

Nora put her hand on his shoulder, squeezing slightly. She waited until they were in the corridor before she said yes.

5

And that was the last of it for Jim.

He returned to work the following day, sitting behind the glass, selling tickets for the train. He tried to induce the headaches, but they seemed to be gone for good. His aspirin bottle stayed full, and he had a feeling of well-being that he almost despised. Occasionally, when he didn’t even realize he was doing it, he glanced at his hands, half expecting to see Mrs. Earnshaw’s in their place, her wedding ring on her slightly wrinkled finger.

A woman said, “Two, plus a child, for Penn Station.”

“One hundred fifty-two,” he said, typing the information into the computer.

She passed him the money, he counted it out. As he passed her three tickets, he said, “Boarding on the river side. Train’s delayed by ten minutes. Arrive Penn Station at 7:30.”

“I wanted to get there by seven.”

He looked at her. She was forty, trim, brown hair cut short in wisps.

“Sorry, ma’am. It won’t happen.”

“It has to happen.”

“You could try the airport.”

She shook her head.

“Damn it,” she muttered. She reached for the tickets, grabbing them. Her husband and little girl stood back, near the benches. She turned away, then faced him again. “Is this the same Deerwich where the train crashed once?”

Jim chuckled. “Everyone asks that. Yep, it is. Just to the north, when it crossed the bridge over the river.”

The woman frowned. “It’s dangerous to cross bridges. I hope there aren’t too many bridges between here and Manhattan. I never fly, and I don’t like to cross a bridge that’s already had a crash on it. Bad luck.”

She and her family went to wait for the train, but Jim sat there with his mouth open. She’d said it and it felt like a secret code. It’s dangerous to cross bridges. I don’t like to cross a bridge that’s already had a crash on it. Bad luck.

On his break at 9:30, he took a walk out along the tracks, trying to remember the night of the train crash when he’d first had the experience. He followed the track up to the bridge over the Sparrow River. He saw the place where it had been repaired; where the train had cut loose and gone off.

The investigation was ongoing. Maybe they’d never know what had malfunctioned about the train on the tracks.

He stood there, staring at the tracks, thinking about the woman complaining about the danger of travel, and remembering Nora’s words:

The first to cross the bridge.

And then he knew, even before he found the list of names in the newspaper from several weeks earlier.

It read like a joke list of names from books and movies, the names of the dead:

Juliet Capulet, Norman Bates, Paul Bunyan, Zazu Pitts, Ramon Navarro, Silas Marner, Gregor Roche.

The list of the dead included, he believed, everyone he met in that group in the hospital room.

Every single one.

In that list, too, was the name Catherine Earnshaw.

All just happened to be in the one car of the train where all were killed.

Another name, too, that he recognized: Nora Fitch.

He sat down in the library with the newspaper and wept. He drank too much that night and went wandering along the docks and backstreets, as if somehow the answer would reveal itself if he searched hard enough.

Finally, after two a.m., he ambled home.

As he lay down next to his sleeping wife, he wrapped his arms around her, wanting to feel safe from a world he no longer understood, all the mysteries and strange coincidences and dreams-that-seemed-real of another world he’d somehow been thrust into, whether through madness or design.

Alice’s skin was almost too hot to the touch. She seemed burning with fever. She moaned slightly in her dream.

She woke with a start, and said, “What are you doing?”

“Sorry,” he said, his breath a blast of whiskey. “I just needed to touch you.”

She rolled onto her back, staring up at the ceiling.

“You’re drunk.”

“Sure am,” Jim said, wanting to touch his wife so badly, wanting to wrap himself around her and be part of her so he wouldn’t feel so alone in his mind.

“Go to sleep,” she commanded. “In the morning you’ll be sober and we can talk about things.”

“What things?” he asked, ready to fall into the coma of drunken sleep.

“Things about us. Things we should talk about. Things we need to talk about,” Alice said. She sat up. Switched on the bedside lamp. He looked at her naked back, wishing it could be pressed against his chest and stomach.

“I love you,” he whispered hoarsely, unsure whether or not he had really said it aloud or had only wanted to say it.

“I’m not who you think I am,” Alice said, still not facing him. “Not anymore.”

“Yes, you are,” he said. “Of course you are. You’re my wife. You’re Alice.”

But he hadn’t said Alice, had he? As he lay there, the fear washing over him like a warm bath, he knew he had said “You’re Juliet,” because something within him knew it was Juliet, the Mrs. Earnshaw part of him knew, had known, and had been trying to tell him in her own way, had been trying to tell him that this was no longer the woman he loved but a woman who called herself Juliet Capulet and might not even be a woman at all or even a human being as far as he knew.

The Mrs. Earnshaw part of him let him know that this was the intruder in his bed.

He lay there, feeling his heartbeat accelerate as Alice slowly turned in the lamplight, a half-grin on her face. As her smile curled up and her eyes glimmered with a dark onyx that might have been shadow, might have been stone, she said, “We have to have a long talk, you and I, about what really is going on inside that mind of yours.”

“Juliet?” he asked.

She smiled. “I’m Alice. Alice. Remember? Your Alice.”

She sat there, watching him all night; and he stared back at her, too afraid to look away.

In the morning, she rose and went to shower.

Jim lay there, frozen, waiting for what was to come, remembering the woman on the table surrounded by doctors. He realized that in some respects he was still there in that room watching Mrs. Earnshaw—or whoever the body had been—being brought back to life, or some form of life, some kind of intelligence within the skin that had so recently been shed.

And how he had felt a presence in that room when he was four, a presence that was not entirely human, not entirely like a middle-aged woman whose heart had given out and who now was going to have another being within her.

When the water stopped, he heard Alice sing as she toweled off, and then she opened the bathroom door and something that was not entirely Alice moved like silver liquid toward him.

But even as he felt something warm and metallic inject itself into his throat, he had the sense that he was not Jim at all, but something that lived within the skin of a nice lady sitting on a moving train as it headed down the New England coast.

6

You mustn’t pass this on, because I know who you are on the inside, but you haven’t crossed the bridge fully, have you, dear? You’re still only halfway across, feeling the warm rain, the glimmer as it warms you, but it hasn’t burst within you yet.

Mustn’t make this worse than it is. It’s only a train after all, and travel by rail is so safe these days.

Look at that little town we’re coming to now.

Isn’t it lovely?

Across that river.

Across that bridge.

Get ready, dear. Our connection’s coming up shortly.

The Ripening Sweetness of Late Afternoon

1

Sunland City was the last place in the world Jesus was ever going to come looking for Roy Shadiak.

He returned to his hometown in his fortieth year, after he felt he could never again sell Jesus to the rabble.

Something within him had been eating him up for years. His love for life had long before dried up, and then so had his marriage and his bitter understanding of how God operated in the world. He’d gotten off the bus out at the flats, and brushed off the boredom of a long trip down infinite highways.

He stood awhile beside the canals and watched the gators as they lay still as death in the muddy shallows. He’d been wearing his white suit for the trip because it was what his mother liked him to wear, and because it was the only suit of his that still fit him. And it fit Sunland City, with its canals and palmettos and merciless sunshine.

It was a small town, the City was, and they would think him mad to arrive on the noon bus in anything other than creamy white. He would walk down Hispaniola Street and make a detour into The Flamingo for a double shot of vodka.

The boys in there, they'd see him, maybe recognize him, maybe some women might remember him, too, and call him the King.

He’d tell them all about how he was back for good.

He’d tell them that he didn’t care what the hell happened to Susie and the brats and that doctor she took up with. He’d tell them he was going to open a movie theater or manage the A & P or open a boat rental business. He’d tell them that anything you really needed, and all you could depend on in this life, you could find in your own backyard. Didn’t need God. Nobody needed God.

God was like the phone company: You paid your bill, and sometimes you got cut off anyway. Sometimes, if you changed your way of thinking, you just did without a phone. Sometimes you switched companies.

Oh, but he still needed God. Within his secret self, he had to admit it. Roy Shadiak still needed to know that he could save at least one soul in the world. His feet ached in his shoes.

He had only brought one suitcase.

He had just walked out on Susie. It was in his blood to walk. His father had walked, and his grandfather had walked. They probably got tired of Jesus and all the damn charity, too. Even Frankie had walked, as best he could. All leaving before they got left.

Roy had blisters on the bottoms of his feet, but still he walked.

He passed beneath the Lover’s Bridge, and the Bridge of Sighs, with its hanging vines and parrot cages. He walked along the muddy bank of the north canal, knowing that he could close his eyes and still find his way to Hispaniola Street. All the street names were like that: Spanish, or a mix of Indian and Slave, named like Ocala and Gitchie and Corona del Mar.

All the canals were thick with lilies, and snapping turtles lounged across the rock islets. The water was murky and stank, but beautiful pure white swans cut across the calm surface as if to belie the muck of this life.

Roy saw three men, old timers, with their fresh-rolled cigarillos and Panama hats, on a punt. He waved to them, but they didn’t notice him, for they were old and half blind.

After climbing the steep steps up to the street level again, he was surprised to observe the stillness of clay-baked Sunland City.

As a boy, it had always seemed like an Italian water town, not precisely a Venice and something less than a Naples, thrust into the Gulf Coast like a conqueror’s flag.

But now it seemed as ancient as any dying European citadel: It looked as if the conqueror, having pillaged and raped, had left a wake of buildings and archways and space.

It had been a lively seaport once. It was now a vacant conch.

The hurricane that had torn through it the previous year had not touched a building, but it had cleaned the streets of any evidence of life.

When he found The Flamingo, he kissed the first girl he set eyes on, a wench in the first degree with a beer in one hand with which to wipe off that same kiss.

A teenage boy in a letterman’s jacket sat two stools over. The boy turned and stared at him for a good long while before saying anything.

Then, suddenly, as if possessed, the boy shouted, “Holy shit, you’re King!”

“And you, my friend, are too young to be drinking.”

2

The boy stood up—he was tall and gangly, with a mop of curly blond hair, a face of dimming acne, and cheek of tan. He thrust his hand out. “Billy Wright. I swim, too.”

“Oh.”

“But you’re like a legend. The King. King Shadiak.”

“Am I?”

“You beat out every team to Daytona Beach. You beat out fucking Houston.”

“Did I? Well, it was a long time before you were born.”

“You ever see the display they got on you?” Billy pressed his palms flat against the air. “The glass cabinet in the front hall, near the locker room. Seven gold trophies. Seven! Pictures! Your goggles, too. Your fucking goggles, man.”

“If they do all that for you at your high school, you should really be something, shouldn’t you?”

Billy made a thumbs up sign. “Fucking A. You are something, man.”

“I’m nothing,” Roy said, downing his drink and slamming the glass on the bar for another. “No, make that: I’m fucking nothing, man.”

“What you been doin’ all this time, man?” Billy asked, apparently oblivious to anything short of his own cries of adoration.

“Selling Jesus.”

“Who’d you sell him to?”

Roy laughed. “You’re all right, boy. You are all right.”

“Thanks,” Billy said, then glanced at his watch. “I better get going. Curfew soon. Listen, you come by and see me if you got car trouble. I work at night at Jack Thompson’s. You know him? I can fix any problem with any car. I’m not the King of anything like you, but I may be the Prince of Mechanics.”

“Why would anyone care if his car got fixed around here?”

The boy laughed. “That’s a good one.”

When Roy arrived at his mother’s house a half hour later, he was three beers short of a dozen.

“The great King comes home. You had to get drunk before you saw me. And you couldn’t shave for me, could you?” Alice Shadiak said.

His mother wore khaki slacks and a white blouse. She had lost some weight over the past few years, and seemed whiter, as if the sun had bleached her bones right through her skin. A sun visor cap protected her face. She had seen him from the kitchen window, and had come to greet him on the porch.

“I suppose you need a place to stay.”

“I can stay downtown.”

“With your whores?”

“They all missed curfew, apparently.” He attempted a light note. “Must’ve heard I was on my way.”

His mother sighed as if a great weight had just been given her.

“Some man of God you turned out to be. I just wish you’d have called ahead. I’d have had Louise fix up your old room. Lloyd’s in Sherry’s old room. The house is a mess. Don’t act like such a foreigner, Roy, for God’s sakes. Give me a hug, would you?”

She moved forward.

In all his life, he could count the times she’d hugged him. But he knew he needed to change, somehow. He had not hit on precisely how. He would have to listen to his own instincts, then disobey them to find out how he might change.

He held his mother, smelled her saltwater hair.

When he let go, she said, “Susie called. She wants to know when you’re going to forgive her.”

“Never,” Roy said.

“What are you going to do?” Alice asked.

Roy Shadiak said, “Mama, I had a dream. It came to me one night. A voice said—”

His mother interrupted. “Was it Jesus?”

“It was just a voice. It said, ‘Set your place at the table.’ Something’s trying to come through me. I know it. I can feel it. Like a revelation.”

“It was just a dream,” Alice said, sounding troubled. “What could it mean? Oh, Roy, you’re vexing yourself over nothing.”

“This is my table. Sunland City. I have to set my place here,” Roy said. Then he began weeping. His mother held him, but not too close.

“A man as big as you shouldn’t be crying.”

“It’s all I have left,” he said, drying his tears on the cuffs of his shirt. “You live your life and make a few mistakes, but you lose everything anyway. Everything I ever had, it all came from here. Everything I ever was.”

Alice Shadiak took a good hard look at her son and slapped him with the back of her hand. “You did it to yourself, what you are. Who you are. Don’t blame me or your father or anyone else. All this big world talk and wife-leaving and crying. Don’t think just because it’s been twenty two years that you can just walk back in here and pretend none of it ever happened.” She raised her fist, not at him but at the sky, the open sky that was colored the most glorious blue with cloud striations across its curved spine. “No God who takes my boys away from me is welcome in my house.”

“I told you, I don’t work for God anymore,” Roy said. He went past her, into the house. He found the guest bedroom cluttered, but pushed aside his mother’s sewing and the stacks of magazines on the bed.

He wrapped the quilt around his shoulders and fell asleep in his suit.

3

In the morning, he took a milk crate down to the town center. He set it down and stood up on it just as he would in other towns when he had preached the gospel. Folks passed by on their way to work, and barely noticed him. He spread his arms out as if measuring Sunland City and cried out, “I am King Shadiak and I have come here to atone for the murders of my brother Frankie and his friend, Kip Renner!”

A woman turned about as she stepped; a laborer in a broad straw hat glanced up from the curb where he sat with a coffee cup; an old Ford pickup slowed as its owner rolled down the window to listen.

As Roy Shadiak spoke, others gathered around him, the older crowd mostly, the crowd that knew him, the people who had been there when he’d drowned the two boys at the public swimming pool over on Hispaniola Street, down near the Esso station, by the railroad tracks.

“No need, Roy,” one of the men called out. “We don’t need your kind of atonement. We been fine all these years without it”

“That’s right,” several people added, and others nodded without uttering a word.

“No,” Roy said, pressing the flat of his hand against the air in front of him as if it were an invisible wall. “All these years I’ve squandered my life in service to others. I owe Sunland City an atonement.”

“You want us to crucify you, King?” Someone laughed.

Others chuckled more quietly.

“That is exactly what I want,” Roy Shadiak said. “Two atonements, two murders.”

A woman in the crowd shouted, ‘Two atonements for two murders!”

“Two atonements! Two murders!” others began chanting.

“Frankie Shadiak!” Roy shouted. “Kip Renner!”

“Two atonements! Two murders!” The crowd became familiar now. Roy saw Ellen Mawbry from tenth grade, Willy Potter from the corner store, the entire Forster clan, the Rogers family, the Blankenships, the Fowlers. As he chanted and as they chanted as the day loped forward, they all gathered—labor stopped, activity ceased, schools let out for a spontaneous holiday, until the town center of Sunland City was a sea of the familiar and the new. All turned out for the returning hero, their King, who passed among them to offer his life for their suffering.

“Two atonements!” they cried as if their voices would reach beyond that Florida sky.

It was what Roy expected from a town that God had turned his back on twenty three years before.

And then Helen Renner, her hair gone white, stepped out of the crowd toward him. She wiped her hands on her apron, as if she’d just finished baking, and went and stood at the foot of the milk crate.

Roy crouched down and took her face in his hands.

“Don’t do it,” she said. “Roy Shadiak, don’t you do it. Neither one of them was worth it. We all let it happen. We’re all responsible. It may not even fix anything, Roy. There’s no guarantee.”

His kissed her on her forehead. “I’ve got to. It’s something inside of me that needs room to grow, and I’ve been killing it all these years. I’ve been killing every one of you, too. Two atonements,” he repeated, “for two murders.”

4

Joe Fowler was a crackerjack carpenter. He and his assistant, Jasper, were at the Shadiak house within an hour of Roy’s leave-taking of the makeshift podium.

He stood on the porch in paint-spattered overalls, his khaki hat in his hands, looking through the screen door at Roy’s mother.

“We got some railroad ties from out the Yard,” he said. “They got pitch on ’em, but I think they gonna be just fine for the job.” His voice quavered. “We’d like to offer our services, Alice.”

Alice Shadiak stood like stone. “You and your kind can get off my porch. I don’t mean to lose two sons in this lifetime.”

Roy came up behind her, touching her gently on the shoulder. “Mama, it’s got to be done.”

“Where is it written? Where?”

“On my soul,” he said.

“Our kind has no soul,” she said, pulling away from him. “I don’t need God’s forgiveness on my house. I don’t want sweet Jesus’ tears.”

“It’s Jesus that keeps you here.”

“He doesn’t even look on us, Roy,” his mother said. “He doesn’t even come to our churches. What does it matter? Does anyone in Sunland really believe there’s a Jesus waiting to shine his light on us?”

“That’s because of me.”

“It’s because your brother and his sick little friend were unnatural and perverted, and God cared more for them than for decency or nature or for any of us. I don’t mind burning for that, Roy. I don’t mind that sacrifice.”

“I do,” Roy said. “I saw Jesus out in the fields up north, and in the alleys of the fallen. Nobody else did. And you know why? Because Jesus was laughing at me, he was showing me that he was not going to be mine. He was going to belong to every fool who walked this earth.”

Joe Fowler nudged the screen door open and stepped inside. “He’s right, Alice. We ain’t had Jesus or God for all this time, only those…things.” He shivered a little, as if remembering a nightmare. In a softer voice, he said, “I’m getting tired of this life.”

“I would advise you to get out of the light, Joe,” Alice Shadiak said, sounding like the retired schoolteacher that she was. “I heard about your little Nadine.”

All of them were silent for a moment, and Roy thought for a second he heard the cry of some hawk as it located its prey.

“Your boy knows what he’s doing,” Joe said, spreading his hands as if he could convince her with gestures. Still, he glanced briefly up at the empty sky. “We can’t keep on like this.” Then Joe grinned, but Roy could tell he was tense. “I’m prouder of you now, King, than I was when you won all those ribbons at the championship. Why don’t we get on with this business?”

“Yes,” Roy said, feeling an ache in his heart for Susie and the kids, but not wanting to retrace his steps. He glanced out on the porch, and beyond, to Joe’s truck. “That’s a sturdy piece of wood, Joe.”

“From the old Tuskegee route, before tracks got tore up. We’re going to have to balance them good. That’s why I brought Jasper here.” He nodded toward his assistant, who stood, mutely, on the porch. “We can get this going now, you like.”

“Why wait?” Roy shrugged.

His mother retreated into the shadowy parlor. She called to him, but Roy did not respond.

Jasper suddenly pointed to the sky and made a rasping sound in his throat.

Calmly, Joe Fowler said, “Come on in, Jasp, come on, it’s okay, you’ll make it.”

As if too frightened to move, Jasper stood there, sweat shining on his face. He stared up at the sky, pointing and shaking.

“Jasper.” Joe opened the screen porch slightly, beckoning with his hand.

Roy shoved Joe out of the way and ran out to the porch. He grabbed the young man by his waist.

The cry grew louder as the great bird in the sky dropped, blackening out the sun for a moment.

5

The smell was the worst thing, because they got it on their talons sometimes, from an earlier victim, that sweet awful stink that overrode all other senses.

Roy hadn’t slept a night without remembering that smell. He couldn’t get it out of his head for the rest of the afternoon.

“Where do they take them?” Roy asked.

Joe, who was still jittery, helped himself to the vodka. “Down to the shore. There’s at least a hundred out there. And the rotting seaweed, too, and the flies, all the crawling things … it turned my stomach when I had to go down there to try and find Nadine.”

“That’s where it has to be.”

“No, King. No. I won’t go down there, no matter if it’s midnight or midday.”

“But how can you abandon her?”

Joe turned his face toward his glass. “She ain’t her. I saw her. I risked my sanity, and I saw her. It ain’t her. It’s a It, not a little girl. I told her not to go out between two and four. All of us know about the curfew. All of us know to stay inside. And you ,,,” Joe shook his head. He raised his glass as if to toast Roy. “You’re the luckiest son of a bitch alive, you can get out, and instead, you decide to come back. You fucked up once, King, you don’t need to keep on doing it.”

“How many are left?”

“First, have a drink.” Joe pushed the glass across the kitchen table.

Roy picked it up. Downed the remainder. Set the glass down. “How many?”

“Twenty-six, in one piece. The rest in as many as they leave us in. Some morning, you take a walk down there. Only, if any of them calls your name, you just run, you hear? You don’t want to know who it is, believe you me.”

Roy reached across the table and pressed his hand against Joe’s shoulder. “That’s where we need to do it.”

“I ain’t never going down there again.”

“You’d rather all this continued?”

“Than go down there? You’re damned right.”

“I’ll find someone else, then.”

Joe stood up, pushing his chair back. He said nothing. He stomped out of the kitchen and went to sit with Jasper and Alice.

Roy drank some more vodka. He glanced out the bay window. On the roof, two houses over, three of them had a woman pressed against the curved Spanish tile. Their wings had folded against their bodies, and they were digging with their talons into the soft flesh of her stomach.

He was sure that one of them saw him spying, and grinned.

6

That night, he found the teenager working at Jack Thompson’s garage on the south corner of Hattatonquee Plaza.

“Billy?” Roy asked as he stood beneath a streetlamp.

The boy dropped the wrench he was using and bounded out to the sidewalk. “Hey, it’s the King. How you doin’?” He snapped his fingers several times, as if he was nervous.

“I’m doing just fine. And yourself?”

“Hey, any day you get through the afternoon here’s a good day. So I heard you’re going to try something.”

Roy nodded.

“Let’s go for a walk, Billy. Can you get off work?”

“Sure, let me just tell Mr. Thompson, okay?” Several minutes later, they were walking down along Hispaniola Street toward Upper Street. Roy had been doing all the talking, ending with, “And that’s where you come in. Joe’ll give me the ties, but I need someone to help.”

“I don’t know,” Billy said. “You ever see how big those suckers are?”

“Yep. But we won’t be out that late. We can do this at nine or ten in the morning. Hell, if you want, we can probably do it tonight.”

“I heard the beach is really a bad scene. My dad got taken down there. I heard this guy at school say that they’re like cracked eggs or they’re all ripped up, only not quite dead yet. If I think about it too much, I get sick.”

“It must be strange.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you grew up in it. You never knew what the world was like before. You don’t know what the rest of the world is like.”

Billy stopped walking. “I thought it happened everywhere.”

Roy shook his head. “Only here. Because of what I did.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Other places, you can walk around anytime of the day or night and those things don’t attack. Honest. When I was the King here, I used to skip classes at two and take off with my friends to Edgewater to the McDonald’s. Didn’t anyone tell you? Not even your dad?”

Billy shook his head. “Well, if God did this, why didn’t he do it just to you?”

Roy shrugged. “Who knows? It may not even have been God. Maybe there’s just those creatures. The way I figured it, it’s not just because of me killing those boys. It’s because everybody here thought it was okay, no big deal. Nobody made a fuss.”

“You loved your brother?”

“I did, but I didn’t know it then. I wanted him and his friend to go to hell back then. I was the King back then. I thought I was God, I guess.”

They came to the end of the Upper Street, which stopped at the slight dune overlooking the stretch of flat beach.

The full moon shone across the glassy sea. The sand itself glowed an unearthly green from the diatoms that had burst from the waves.

On the sand, the shadow of slow, pained movement as a hundred or more mangled, half-eaten Sunlanders struggled to die in a corner of the earth where there was no death.

7

Billy said, “I saw one of them up close. When they got my dad. She had long hair, and her eyes were silver. She had the fur, and the claws and all, and her wings, like a pterodactyl. But there was something in her face that was almost human. Even when she tore my dad’s throat open, she looked kind of like a girl. Boy,” he shivered, “I’m sure glad I’m up here and not down there. Down there looks like hell.”

Roy said, “From down there, up here looks like hell, too. And it won’t just end by itself.”

Billy seemed to understand. “You swear you’re not lying about what everywhere else is like?”

“I swear.”

“Okay. Let’s go down there. But in the morning. After the sun’s up. I still can’t believe it,” Billy cocked his head to the side, looking from the moon to the sand to the sea to Roy. “I’m standing here with the King.”

“Is that enough for you?”

“I guess. I got laid once, and that was enough. Standing here with you, that’s enough.” Billy pointed out someone, perhaps a woman, trying to stand up by pushing herself against a mass of writhing bodies, but she fell each time she made the attempt. “When I was little, we used to come down here and throw stones at some of them. But it’s kind of sad, ain’t it? Some of the guys I used to throw stones with, they’re down there now. Someday, I’m going to be down there too, and if there are any girls left, they’ll have babies, and they’ll start throwing stones at me too. Where does it end?”

“Now,” Roy said. “In the morning. You and me and a couple of railroad ties.”

“There’s going to be lots of pain, though, huh?”

“There’s always pain. You either get it over with quick, or it takes a lifetime.”

Billy rubbed his hands over his eyes. “I’m not crying or nothing.”

“I know.”

“I just want to get my head straight for this. I mean, we’re both going to hurt, huh?”

“You don’t have to. I do. I can find someone else to help.”

“No. We’ll do it. Then I’ll be a legend too, huh? Maybe that’s enough. We just drag those ties down there and set it up. One way or another, we all end up on that beach anyway, huh?”

8

It was easier said than done, for they had to borrow Joe’s truck to get the railroad ties to the beach, which was the easy part.

Lugging those enormous sticks across the burning sand, sliding them across the bodies, the faces…

It made a mile on a Thursday morning at nine a.m. seem like forty or more.

By the time they’d arrived at a clearing, Billy was too exhausted to speak. When he finally did, he pointed back at Sunland.

“Look.”

Roy, whose body was soaked, his suit sticking to his skin, glanced up.

There, on the edge of Upper Street and Beach Boulevard was the entire town, lined up as if to watch some elegant ocean liner pass by.

The chanting began later.

At first the words were indistinct.

Gradually, the boy and the man could hear them clearly: two murders, two atonements.

“Roy?” Billy asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m scared. I’m really scared.”

“It’s okay. I’m here. I’ll go first.”

“No. I want to go first. I want you to do me first. I might run if I go last. I can’t do it right if I go last—I mean, I’ll fuck it up somehow.”

“All right.” Roy went over and put his arm across Billy’s shoulder. “Don’t be afraid, son. When this is over, it’ll all change again. Atonement works like that.”

“I wasn’t even born when you did it. Why shouldn’t one of them do it with you? Why me?”

“Now, Billy, don’t be afraid. If they could’ve done it before, they would’ve. I think Jesus brought you and me together for this.”

“I don’t even know Jesus.”

“You will. Come on,” Roy lifted up one of the smaller spikes and placed its end against Billy’s wrist “This one’ll fit. See? It’s not so bad. It’s just a nail. And all a nail can do is set something in place. It’s so you won’t fall. You don’t want to fall, do you?”

“Tell me again how you’ll do it?”

“Oh, well, I set this rope up around my hand so I can keep it up like this… and then I press the pointed part of the nail against my hand and pull on the rope. My hand goes back in place, see? Like this, only I have to push a little, too.”

“You won’t leave me, will you?”

“No, I won’t. I’m the King and you’re the Prince, remember? I won’t abandon you. Now, why don’t you just lie down on it like that and your hand, see? It’s going to pinch a little, but just pretend it’s one of those things with the claws. Just pretend you won’t scream, because you know they like it when someone screams. Okay? Billy, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid…”

Roy spoke soothingly as he drove the spikes through Billy’s wrists.

9

By sometime past noon, they’d both gotten used to the pain of the crosses.

Roy tried to turn his head toward Billy to see how he was holding up, but his neck was too stiff and he could not manage the movement.

“When’s it going to happen?” Billy’s voice seemed weak.

“Soon, I guarantee it. I had a dream from God, Billy. Something inside of me knew what to do.”

Billy began weeping. “Just because of a couple of queers. What kind of God is that?”

“It’s the only God.”

“I don’t believe it,” Billy whimpered. “I don’t believe that God would punish everyone just because of what you did. I don’t believe that God would punish the unborn just because of what you did. It’s all a lie. We just did something stupid, building crosses and crucifying ourselves. Look at that, look up.”

Roy tried to look up, but he couldn’t.

What he could see was the endless sea, and the shimmering sky as the sun crisped the edges of the afternoon.

The smell was growing stronger from the bodies.

“I don’t believe in God!” Billy cried. “Somebody! Get me down! Get me down! He’s crazy! Somebody help me! Somebody get me down! Jesus!”

Roy tried to calm him with words, but Billy didn’t stop screaming until an angel dropped from the sky and tore into him.

Roy remained, untouched on the cross, amid the writhing bodies on the shore of the damned.

He waited for some sign of his atonement, but only night came, and then day, and then the long afternoon set in.

Chosen

1

When it was over, he remembered the picture.

Because of living in the big city all his life, his first-hand knowledge of nature had come mostly from television documentaries and whatever he could recall from high school biology class.

But he’d forgotten about the picture all those years.

The caterpillar, its skin green and translucent and wet.

The wasp.

The bumps beneath the caterpillar’s skin.

The caption: “As paralysis sets in, the wasp has proven her superior power.”

He remembered what he thought, too, of the picture: that in some awful way it radiated a beauty beyond conscience.

This was what he kept coming back to, later, when it was over, in his mind. Not his emotional life or his education or even his work, but that picture from a book he’d seen at the public library when he was only nine or ten. How, even in his forties, it could come back to him with so strong a memory.

2

Rob Arlington awoke one morning and thought he felt something on his hand. He brushed at it but saw nothing there. A sensation left over from a dream, perhaps. He took a quick shower, crawled into his suit (he was so tired from being up late the night before), and grabbed his briefcase on his way out the door. It wasn’t that he was late for work, it was just that for the fifteen years of his life that he had lived alone, he hated it. Not life, not work, not his loves and losses, but just the fact of knowing he was alone in the morning, that, at his age (forty), there was no one human being who shared his home with him.

The hallway, when he stepped into it, was hospital green, and smelled of paint. He locked his door, then thought he heard a noise from inside it. As if something were moving around in the kitchen. He looked at his door: to open or not? Could be just an echo from another apartment. Glancing down the hall, he saw, just this side of the fire doors, the super, papers in one hand, a dripping paintbrush in the other.

“Exterminator comes on Thursday,” the super said. He was taping notes to doors; he came up to Rob and slapped a note to his door. The super, with his fat glasses and balding pate with its twin sprays of hair, looked like a large worker ant going about its business. Rob shot him a friendly grin—never hurts to be on good terms with management—and lifted the note off his door. It read: “Exterminator, Thursday, 10 a.m.”

He wadded the noted up.

“I don’t want the exterminator,” Rob said, still vaguely listening for the thing that might be moving around in his kitchen. Was it a rat?

“You don’t got roaches?” The super, his glasses magnifying his small button eyes to enormous disks of glare, thrust out his lower lip in a middle-aged pout that meant disagreement. “Everybody in New York’s got roaches.”

“None that I’ve noticed,” Rob lied. Of course he had roaches, but he also didn’t like the idea of the super and his wife going into his apartment, looking through his things. He already had evidence of their last visit when he’d been on a business trip to California, how they’d gotten in and used his tea kettle. He’d known it was the super, or perhaps Fanny, his wife, because they’d left behind a set of skeleton keys, which Rob returned to them hoping that embarrassment would be enough incentive to keep them from going through their tenants’ homes again. “Look,” Rob told him, “I’ve been fogging.”

“You been what?”

“Fogging the apartment. I buy these foggers—you know—and it kills them. I don’t have roaches. Or spiders, for that matter.”

Then 6C opened her door. She was clunky and large, like an old piano, with hair in her eyes from just washing, and an enormous towel wrapped around her middle, barely keeping her breasts bound up. “I don’t want one either,” she said. “A bug killer. Don’t let him into my place. Let me chance being beloved of the flies, but I don’t want no bug killer coming through my place. I like my privacy.”

The super looked at her, then back at Rob. “Pretty soon, everybody’s gonna tell me they got no roaches. Why in hell’d I call up the exterminator if suddenly nobody’s got no roaches?”

The woman in the doorway glanced at Rob. Her eyes were wide and glassy, like she’d just had great sex and was now a zombie. She was not pretty, but still looked freshly plucked, which, to a man of Rob’s years was just this side of alluring. She was less overweight than stocky, and her skin was pale from staying inside too much. When the super had gone on down the hall, through the fire doors, she said, “Do you really fog?”

She’d been eavesdropping at her door, he figured. “No,” he said, “I just don’t like the nosy couple going into my apartment without me around.”

She let slip a smile and blushed, as if she’d just dropped an edge of her towel. “They do anyway. I’m here all day, and I see them. They go through all our apartments. All except mine. ‘Cause I’m here all the time.”

Then she drew herself back through the doorway, hands clutching the door and frame, as if her legs weren’t quite strong enough. She seemed to drag them with her, one after the other.

On the weekend, Maggie came up. When she and Rob lay after the Great Event, him feeling sticky, and her feeling exhausted, he mentioned meeting the neighbor for the first time. Maggie said, “I’ve talked to her on the elevator. She seems nice. It’s too bad about the accident, but I guess we all get smashed about once or twice before life is up.”

He moved his arm around, because the back of her head seemed to cut into it at an uncomfortable angle. “She get hit by a car or something?” Remembering his neighbor’s legs, how she barely moved them.

“She told me she’s agoraphobic. Stays in all the time. Lives on disability. Sad little thing.”

“Sad hefty thing. How the hell does she afford that apartment on disability?”

“That’s not nice, the hefty part. It’s her grandfather’s old apartment—he had it since the building was built in 1906. He knew the Lonsdale family, in fact, when they were designing the place. And she’s sweet, even if she is strange. She’s only thirty-four—can you believe it? It’s life that’s aged her—in that apartment, all her grandparents’ things around, antiques, and dark windows, and old shiny floors, she just sits there and collects her checks and… well, ages.

“Like a cheese left too long under glass,” he joked. “She claims she’s beloved of flies.”

Maggie was beginning to look stern; she didn’t tolerate disparaging remarks about women. “Oh, stop it. She’s had a terrible life. She worked at a grocer’s, but her back bent or something. And then she finally works up the courage to get out, into the marketplace, as it were. She went out one day, she told me, to see her mother, who’s in Brooklyn, and when she was coming up from the subway, two men took her purse and pushed her down the steps. Twenty steps, she said. She woke up in the hospital, and couldn’t move for three months. She’s only been back in her place maybe two weeks. She said she had terrible nightmares in the hospital. She’s scared of people, I think.”

“No wonder I never see her. You heard all this in the elevator?”

“You’d be amazed how much information she can fit in between the fifth and second floors.” Maggie paused and looked at the wall beside the bed. “You don’t think she can hear us, do you?”

“Not unless she has a glass to the wall. Hey,” Rob said, rapping his knuckles along the wall, “no spying.”

Somewhere beyond the wall, the sound of shattering glass.

Then, after Maggie left at eleven, he took the elevator to the basement, the weekend’s laundry in the machine, and counted quarters out. He thought he heard a noise. Figuring it was a mouse, he ignored it. There were cracks in the lower parts of the walls, right where wall met floor, all along the basement. He had seen fat roaches run into these hidey-holes when he’d flicked the laundry room lights on. Always gave him the creeps; but they’re only bugs, he told himself.

He put his quarters in the machine and switched it on. He leaned against it, listening to the gentle humming as water sprayed down on his clothes. Rob always took a book with him when he did his laundry—and he never left the room while his wash was going, because the one time he did, his clothes had been taken out in mid-cycle and left on the dusty cement floor. At some point in his reading, above the sound of the machine, he heard a series of ticks, like a loud clock ticking. Assuming the laundry had set the machine off balance, he opened it; rearranged the soaked clothing; closed the lid. But the ticking continued. He lifted the machine lid again, and while it turned off, the ticking kept going. He identified the area of ticking as one of the cracks along the wall. Then he thought it might be coming from over by the trash bin, down the hallway—sometimes the noises in the shafts echoed through the basement. He walked down the narrow, dimly lit hall, its greenish light humming as if about to extinguish from unpaid utilities, and looked around the trash.

Something was tapping from inside one of the disposal shafts. Rob hesitated at first wondering if a very large and angry rat might be inside it but the tapping continued, and seemed too steady to be a rat. He went and lifted the hatch up—

Something living, wriggling, wrapped in gauze and surgical tape, dropped. He instinctively caught it because he saw a bit of pink, like a human hand, from an undone section of the gauze and he knew as he caught it that it was a baby.

3

He had the sense to call the police before he unwrapped the gauze, and was spared the sight of the dead infant.

“I think it was alive when I found it,” he said. “I felt movement. Not for very long, though.”

The officer, named Gage, shook his head. “Nope, she wasn’t alive when you found her, Mr. Arlington. She’d been dead at least a half hour.”

“I heard tapping. I think the baby was moving.”

“It wasn’t the baby,” the officer told him.

The next morning, he read about it in the Daily News.

“Must be a slow week,” he told one of his coworkers. In the paper they detailed the story: newborn baby, wrapped in gauze, skin chewed up by roaches, apartments under investigation, related to similar cases of babies left in Dumpsters and thrown down sewer drains, left in parks wrapped in old newspapers, covered with ants or flies or roaches or whatever scavenger insect had lucked into finding the fresh meat. There was his name: Rob Arlington. Advertising man. There was the building: The Lonsdale, Central Park West, where they refused to let the most famous rock stars live, even the ones who could pay the rent. It had another picture, older, of a man in his fifties, in the style of the turn of the century, a stern-looking man with a Rasputin beard and glaring eyes. The caption read: “The Original Lonsdale Scandal of 1917. Horace Grubb and his Theory of Nature.” But nothing in the brief article elaborated on this photograph.

Maggie came by that night with wine and fresh salmon. “I thought you could use some cheering up,” she said, whisking past him in the doorway with her packages. She smelled like gardenia, which he loved, and wore a bustier under a short jacket, a translucent skirt, and boots. He knew she would seduce him so that he would feel better, and he loved her for the thought.

“You heard,” he said.

“Yep. Did you actually talk to the News?”

“What do you think?”

She didn’t answer; he realized that he sounded grouchy. She opened the kitchen drawers in search of the corkscrew.

“It’s in the basket on the fridge,” he said. “My guess is some poor bastard junior reporter is stuck down at the precinct waiting for the dirt on a rape or riot, and he looks at the schedule of events and sees a baby-in-a-dumpster story. My name’s right there. He can’t file the story he’s after ‘cause nothing’s in on it. So he ties this in with all those other dead babies left out to die stories and voila—an urban legend begins. With my name attached to the most recent one. The Man Who Found A Dead Infant In The Laundry Room Of The Famous Lonsdale Apartments Right Off Central Park West.”

“You’re a star,” she said, pouring the Merlot into two glasses.

“I didn’t know about the bugs, about how they’d been… doing that to the baby’s skin,” he said, shivering a little, going over to her, taking the wine, reaching around her back with his free hand, between the jacket and her skin. “You smell good. Like a garden of earthly delights.”

“Yeah, I’ve been gargling with cologne. It’s not too strong?”

“Not at all,” he said, smiling, loving her little insecurities because they made her seem less perfect, more human. He drew back, sipped wine, rotated his head around to relieve tension in his neck. “God, Maggie, a baby. They said it was less than a day old.”

“It’s a rough place, this world,” she said, and drew him to her. “You ever wanted a baby, Robby?”

He almost was going to cry, thinking of the dead thing in his arms, whatever brief and terrible life it had to endure; but he held back. Kissed her with gentleness. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Someday I want a baby, but—don’t get that fearful bachelor look—not yet, and probably not from you, unless you play your cards right.”

After dinner they watched television, and as he lay on the couch with her, he saw a roach on the wall. He picked up his shoe and threw it across the room, but missed it. The shoe made two loud thuds as it hit the wall and then the floor.

A few seconds later, the phone rang. He leaned over her head (“massive hair,” he murmured, “like a scalp jungle”) and lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

“Six D?”

He didn’t recognize the woman’s voice.

“Who’s this?”

“Six C. Your neighbor. I got your number from the super. You all right? I heard a noise.”

“Oh, hello. Yes. I lobbed a shoe at the wall.” She seemed to accept this explanation.

Maggie looked up at him, her eyebrows knitting.

He shrugged and mouthed: Nextdoor neighbor.

The woman on the line said, “It scared me. After all the news.”

“Oh,” he said.

“It was you who found it,” she said.

He felt drained. “Yeah.”

“Were they hurt?”

Rob pulled his ear from the phone and looked at it. What the hell?

“Was what hurt? You mean, the baby?”

But she’d hung up the phone.

“My neighbor lady is spooky indeed,” he said as he rested the phone back in its cradle.

After midnight, he had a craving for frozen yogurt. There was this place down on the corner that made the best cappuccino nonfat yogurt, a favorite spot of his. So, while Maggie slept, naked except for her panties, her breasts creamy and lovely above her small, indented belly, her dark hair obscuring one side of her face, he slipped on his jeans and tucked his cotton shirt in, stepped into his shoes, and tiptoed out of the apartment. He forgot to lock the apartment from the inside; so he stuck the key (three strikes and you’re out, bubba, he thought as he finally got the sucker in the keyhole on the fourth try) into the door on the outside, and turned it so it was locked twice over. Never be too sure, even in a building like the Lonsdale, seventeen hundred a month for a junior one bedroom, even if you’ve been here for ten years, he thought. Babies in the garbage chute, roaches on the wall, anything can happen. He was a little drunk from the wine, and the thought of frozen yogurt, even with the October coolness outside, sobered him a bit; by the time he got to the elevator, he was standing up straight and wiped the grin of requited lust from his face.

He had to stand in line behind six others, all frozen yogurt fiends like himself, and by the time he’d gotten up to make his order, he decided on the largest size possible. He got two plastic spoons, and tasted the treat on the walk back to the apartment. He fiddled with his pockets, because he couldn’t locate the keys. Had he left them upstairs? Damn it. He’d have to wake Maggie up after all. He buzzed the apartment. Three times. The last one, a long sustained buzz. Finally, she picked up the intercom.

Her voice was sleepy. “Rob?”

He giggled, high on Merlot and frozen yogurt. “Hey, sweetie pie, I locked myself out getting some dessert for the one I love and me.”

As if she couldn’t hear him, she asked again, “Rob?” She was still waking up, he could tell. He looked at the small black plastic of the intercom as if he could maybe see her through it if he concentrated. “Is it you?” she asked.

He pressed the button on his side. “Yeah, yeah, I got melting yogurt, Maggie, and I’m starting to feel a draft.”

“Rob?” she asked again, weakly, and it sounded, for just a second, like she wasn’t sleepy at all but about to pass out. About to cry, or something — something almost whimpery and breathless. Not like sleepiness at all.

And then he remembered: He’d left the keys in the door to the apartment.

Don’t panic, he thought.

Pressed the button. “Maggie? You okay? Buzz me in, okay?”

He let go of the button.

Waiting for her buzzer. The intercom finally got pushed, but there was just the ch-ch-ch sound of dead air.

He pressed the button for the super. “It’s Rob Arlington, Six D. I left my keys inside.”

The super, ever vigilant, buzzed him in with no further identification required.

Rob ran to the elevator, and, luckily, it was on the first floor. He got on and pressed Six. The elevator gave its characteristic lurch. He realized that he was clutching the cup of frozen yogurt so tightly that it was all twisted, with dripping cappuccino yogurt spreading down his hand. He dropped it in the elevator. When he reached the sixth floor, he sprinted down the hall, tried the door. No keys. Locked. He rapped on it several times. “Maggie? Maggie! Maggie!”

He heard a noise, and glanced to his right.

The woman in 6C stood there, in a navy blue bathrobe. “She left.”

“What do you mean she left?”

“She knocked on my door about ten minutes ago. She told me she had to go home, and she didn’t know where you went off to. Here,” the woman held her hand out, “she just left a second ago.”

In her hand, his keys.

He looked at her, at the keys. “I just talked with her on the intercom. I came up on the elevator. I would’ve seen her.”

The woman seemed annoyed. “She comes banging on my door at God knows what hour and tells me you left the keys in the door and then we hear the buzzer go off and she goes back to the apartment, and mister, I can’t tell you what else she did, because I came back inside kinda pissed off that I now gotta wait up for you ’cause your girlfriend wants to split. If she takes the stairs or something, it ain’t my business. She’s a nice lady, seems like, but I can’t read her mind. You want these or what?” she asked, finally tossing the keys to him. As she stepped back inside her apartment, he noticed the light blue bruises,like polka dots on her pink legs.

Maggie’s answering machine picked up for three days, and then he stopped calling. He dropped by her place one night with flowers, but she didn’t answer the door. Even though the lights were out in her apartment, he sensed that she was standing behind the door, looking through the peephole.

Then, on Monday morning, she called.

“It’s me.”

“Jesus, Maggie, I’ve been worried sick. What happened to you?”

“What do you mean, what happened to me? What happened to you?”

“I went out for some yogurt. You were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”

Silence on the line.

“Something frightened me.”

“What?”

“Oh, Rob,” she sounded close to tears, “I can’t talk about it. Not like this.”

“Will you meet me somewhere? Cafe Veronese?” He heard her slow breaths, as if she needed to calm down.

She whispered, “Okay. After work. Six.”

When they met, she moved away as he tried to give her a friendly hug. Her eyes were circled with darkness, and bloodshot. Her lips were chapped. Something about her skin was shiny, as if she had a fever. They sat at a booth in the back, and she, uncharacteristically, withdrew a cigarette from her purse and lit it. “I didn’t know where you went. The door was wide open. The lights were off. Someone was inside with me. I knew it wasn’t you.”

He noticed that she kept glancing down at her fingers; and then he knew why. She was afraid to look him in the face.

He said nothing.

“I was just about naked, and scared. I reached for my jacket, but…it…it grabbed my arm.”

“A man,” he said.

She shook her head.

“A woman?”

Maggie laughed once, bitterly. “None of the above. It crawled up my arm.”

He looked at her face, thinking it was a joke. “It was a bug?”

She glanced up, saw his grin. “Fuck you,” she said.

“Sorry. But you got scared by a bug?”

“It wasn’t just a bug, Robert. I knew I couldn’t talk to you.”

He sipped his coffee, she smoked her Camel. Her fingertips were yellow-brown from smoking.

As if suddenly inspired, she rolled the sleeve of her sweater up and thrust her arm under his face.

Dark bruises, in a diamond pattern.

He touched along them and felt thin blisters.

“It attacked me,” she said.

“Jesus,” he gasped, “Maggie, you’ve got to see a doctor. This isn’t just some bug.”

“Exactly,” she said, triumphant. Tears shone like jewels in her eyes. “It’s like a disease. It feels like a disease. It’s taking me with it. Whatever it is. Inside me. It did something. But this,” she nodded toward the diamond bruise, “this was only where it held me. The others…”

“Others?”

Maggie’s expression turned again to stone. “You don’t believe me.”

He said nothing.

She said, “They opened me up.”

4

“She doing okay?”

Rob was checking his mailbox. He glanced around the corner, and there was the woman from 6C. It was eight o’clock, and he had walked Maggie home, put her to bed with a stiff drink, made her promise to see a doctor in the morning, and then walked home. He was hoping to just go to bed early, himself.

The woman said, “Your girl. I heard from the super she got attacked. He said it was a spider from South America or something. He started talking exterminating again—sounded like Adolf Hitler, you ask me.”

“Better,” he said, “she’s doing better. I haven’t talked with her since Monday, though. I think maybe she just needs to be alone for a while.”

“You think she imagined it, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“She seemed nice. I don’t think she’d make it up. I mean, I seen spiders big as birds at the museum. She doesn’t seem like the lying type, your girl.”

“I didn’t say that. Something definitely happened.”

“You was thinking it, though. Hard for guys to deal with things like that, I don’t know why, happens every day in this city—bugs and thugs. You probably don’t believe about the gators in the sewer, but I know two cleaning women who swear by them. Guys, they never believe it till it hits them butt first in the face. But you ain’t like that, right? You half believe her, don’t you?” The woman gave a hopeful smile. “I got attacked in the subway three months ago. My hip still ain’t too good. You give me a choice between getting bit by a spider or jumped by a hoodlum, I choose spiders every time.”

He managed a smile.

“My name’s Celeste. Celeste Pratt. We talk a lot in halls and junk, but we never been introduced.” She extended her beefy arm. She’d dressed all in black, which somehow brightened her face. “I didn’t know she got bit that night. I’m sorry I ragged on you so much. I was tired. Friends?”

He nodded. “Sure.”

“Glad to hear she’s doing better. You think it was a black widow or something?”

“I don’t know. She won’t see a doctor.”

“I don’t like doctors neither,” Celeste said, shaking her head. “I believe in homeopathy and stuff like that. The mind, Rob. The power of the mind. And nature. It’s weird to believe in nature when you live in a city like this, ain’t it? But I always lived here, all my life, and you look for nature where you can find it. The law of nature, way I see it, is we got to sometimes give ourselves up to it, like we’re part of this big system, and your legs—like, say, mine—get bashed, but you just let the pain of healing take over, you let nature run its course. It’s like Grubb’s Nature Theory, about survival and adaptation. Know what I mean? You tell your girlfriend I hope she gets better, okay? Do that for me? She’s always been so nice and friendly to me, I hate to see nice people get hurt, but in this city, you know, it happens every day, but better some spider or something instead of a guy with a butterfly knife, right?”

Rob stared at her as if he could not quite believe she existed. He blinked twice.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, then headed for the elevator. Celeste got on with him and smiled, but didn’t volunteer another river of conversation. On their floor, he let her off first, then got off, stood just on the other side of the elevator door, and watched Celeste go to her apartment.

When she had put her key in the lock and turned it, he said, “Excuse me, Celeste.”

She turned to him, beaming.

“Downstairs, did you mention something about someone named Grubb?”

“Grubb’s Nature Theory. Yes.”

“Is that Horace Grubb?”

She nodded, blushing.

“My grandfather,” she said.

5

Celeste invited him into her apartment to show him her grandfather’s books. Rob accepted out of curiosity, as much to see the large apartment as the texts.

The apartment had three bedrooms, “although it was once this entire floor, a fourteen-room affair, but it was divided up in late ’29, when everyone with anything lost it. My grandmother, she was from New Orleans. She redecorated like crazy,” Celeste pointed out the French touches, “and the apartment, what’s left of it, is pretty much the way she wanted it. She was off the deep end, you ask me. ‘Course, she ruined the floor, the beautiful wood floor, what with her wheelchair scraping along. It’s why I got all these fancy carpets and runners all over the place, to cover up the damage. My mother never wanted to live here ever since she married back in ’48, but Grammy left it to me. Who else? She knew I’d take the right kind of care of it. But I ain’t much of a housekeeper. The bedrooms, you should see, all disaster areas—I do all my crap in them—but, here, come over here, we can have a nice martini at the window.”

She led him to the kitchen, which was dark like the rest of the place; the floors were thick with layers of dust and crumbs, as if she never cleaned up after herself; the windows were painted black, supposedly because her grandmother, at the end of her life, could not handle light because of eye problems. Celeste pressed a small latch to the left of the pane, then pushed open the larger of two windows.

The view was of the nearby park, shrouded in night, and was not blocked by the Cavanaugh Building, as it was from Rob’s small apartment

After making the martinis, Celeste sat down opposite him and raised her glass. He clinked his to hers and sipped. Strong.

He said, “I saw a picture of your grandfather. In the papers.”

She rolled her eyes and flapped her hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Oh, God, my grandfather, twice as nuts as Grammy, and all that business. Grampy’s book was called De Naturis and it basically was nothing but his theory, which always sounds loony-tuney in the light of day. Oh, right, right, you want to know about it, don’t you? It was like something about how man’s role in Nature was to be a farmer. That kind of thing. We ain’t here to control nobody’s nature, he said, but ‘cause we got to do stuff, ease the birth he said, so nature can keep on keeping on, or something like that”

“How’d he get in trouble over that?”

“Different time, you know, back then, nobody liked the message. World War One just started, and it had something to do with soldiers going to France, and some papers Grampy gave out. He got attacked. Terrible. Would’ve killed him, too. Things worked out eventually. But it made the news here for about ten minutes before the war took over. Grammy used to tell the story like he was some kind of saint. Which he most definitely was not. Put the Lonsdale on the map, though.”

“Was he anti-war?”

“Oh, no,” she said, her breath strong and gin-soaked, “not by a long shot. He loved war, he said, ‘cause it meant more human flesh got put in the ground, which was good for crops. Crazy I know. Genius but crazy. He believed the best use of human beings was as compost or incubators. Imagine thinking that. But is sold newspapers. And his book. But that’s really where the trouble was, in his big fat mouth. He thought dead people was the best food nature’s got. He had people, you know, who agreed with him, listened to him and stuff. Wrote a lot of pamphlets. They called themselves Grubbites. He was definitely a class-A weirdo. He wasn’t a cannibal or nothing like that, even though they all thought he was. Got arrested five times, just for causing a ruckus. He was a…what do you call it?”

“Misanthrope?”

“Yeah, in a big-ass way.” She drank down the rest of her martini and went to get another. Her back to him, she said, “Maybe something different, too. He had this whole spiritual side to him, like he believed there was a god in everything alive. Trees. Birds. Even the air.”

“Sort of a pagan transcendentalist then,” Rob said.

She was drinking her martini at the sink, half turned to him, looking out the window.

“Everything. Even unto the smallest,” she whispered.

Rob noticed that a trail of ants running from a crack near the top of the kitchen wall, all the way down beneath the sink. No wonder she leaves crumbs and scraps everywhere.

Celeste was watching the ants, as well, but made no move to kill them. As he followed the trail from its highest point he noticed that the ants went down to the corner of the shelf at the sink and trooped across shiny tile to within an inch of her hand.

6

He lay in bed that night with a reading light on. He thought about Maggie, about her gardenia smell, a garden of earthly delights—and somehow this reminded him of the ants in Celeste’s apartment, for he wondered what kind of urban garden they made their nest in. Finally, he turned out the light and fell asleep.

He awoke sometime in the night hearing the sound of a woman moaning from nearby.

Through the wall.

Celeste. Having a very loud nightmare. The moaning continued, escalating to muffled cries, and he guessed it was not nightmare but a private pleasure. He heard the humming buzz of what could only have been a vibrator, and he thought: good for her.

Strangely, it aroused him, and the more he listened, the less aware he was of his own left hand slipping down beneath the elastic of his Jockey shorts.

Just as he was closing his eyes, dreaming about a faceless but beautiful woman, the moaning from the other side of the wall turned into a scream.

He threw on his bathrobe and dashed to the hall, but by the time he knocked on Celeste’s door, it was silent. The hallway light flickered and buzzed; the bulbs would need replacing. He stood there, looking around at the other apartments, wondering if anyone else had heard the woman’s scream. He started knocking again, and this time he heard her moving around, as if drunk, knocking things over as she made her way to the door. Maybe she’d had another martini or two after he’d left; she’d certainly gulped them down fast enough.

He saw her shadow beneath the space between the floor and the door. She was standing on the other side of the door, looking through the peephole at him.

“Celeste? Are you all right?”

She must’ve been scraping her nails on the door.

“Celeste?”

The shadow beneath the door vanished; he heard noises as she moved back down the corridor.

From within the apartment, the chime, of a clock.

Two a.m.

He turned to go back to his apartment, shaking his head. Had he imagined the scream? Was it a cry of pleasure?

As he climbed back into bed, he thought he heard the buzzing of her vibrator again, just at the wall. A little louder than before. He closed his eyes, wondering if he should investigate further. Maybe she’d just tripped on something and screamed, maybe she was drunk, maybe she didn’t even scream with pain, maybe it was the way she climaxed —who the hell knew?

He was asleep, probably dreaming, but he imagined that an enormous cockroach was riding Celeste’s ass, its feelers stroking the back of her neck, and its face turning slowly to look at Rob as it diddled his neighbor, its face all brown and callused, with flecks of dirt across the broad platform between its eyes, and its eyes looking just like the Rasputin eyes of Horace Grubb.

The phone rang, both in the dream and out of it; in the dream, Rob went running down a long corridor in search of the phone; in reality, he awoke with a groan and reached to the table by the bed.

“Hello?”

He heard static on the line.

Then: “Help me.”

A woman’s voice.

Its very weakness shocked him awake.

“Celeste?”

“Help me,” she said, and then a sound like high-pitched humming, like the Vienna Boys Choir humming one note without taking a single breath. The hum filled the phone, and it felt like a needle thrust in his ear.

He dropped the receiver.

7

The door to 6C was open.

The sun was still not quite up, although the honkings and screechings of morning traffic had already begun outside.

Her apartment was lit with red lights, like a bordello, and he thought of Celeste’s grandmother decorating the place with her New Orleans touches. The furniture seemed bloodied by the light, and it made him queasy as he walked through the front hallway. He had a sense that there was movement all around him, just on the periphery of his vision, but every time he glanced at the red-shrouded furnishings, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

The phone, off its hook, lay in the kitchen.

A smell, too, like clothes that had been sweated in and discarded on a heap to rot for months. The window that had formerly held the view of the park was blackened over with dark cellophane.

Again, he sensed a slithery movement, and scanned the floor, but saw nothing. He glanced down the slim hallway that led to the three bedrooms.

“Celeste?” he asked.

A sudden noise, as of someone rushing to a door and throwing herself against it, sliding down to the floor. Sobbing. Muffled, as if a mouth were taped over.

His first instinct was to walk back to the door, go to his apartment, and call the police.

He took one step back, and stood still when he heard another sound: a repetitive vibrating sound, like monks chanting aum over and over.

But it was a woman; it sounded like a synthesis of a woman and a machine, for the vibration of her voice seemed to increase beyond what a human might be able to, and he felt the vibrations in the floor and walls.

Someone threw herself at the door again.

Door Number Three.

He could not bring himself to turn around and run for cover.

He recognized the voice. It was Maggie’s, humming louder. It made him want to cover his ears.

Then it was as if he were being swept along with a tide, for he found himself moving toward that door, that dark red-stained door, moving smoothly straight forward, moving his feet, not one after another, but together, as if he were in a dream and not in contact with the ground at all. His heart was beating like a vibrating drum; or it was not his heart, but her humming; his mouth had dried up; he swallowed dryness.

When he reached the door, he twisted the knob, opening it.

The room was dark.

The stench came at him in waves of heat; it smelled like a compost pile.

He stepped inside and reached for the light switch.

The switch was low, as if made for someone in a wheelchair (her grandmother had been in a wheelchair, she’d said, and had left tracks all along the floor, he thought as if explaining away what bothered him).

The light came up, also red, from the solitary bulb dangling from its thin chain at the center of the room.

The room itself was small and its floor was covered with dark earth and wet leaves.

Maggie lay in mud just a few feet in front of him.

She was naked.

She stared at him, and he could see the vibrations of her lips as she hummed.

Bruises, too, all along her arms, stomach, breasts, legs.

Her humming increased to a shattering pitch.

There was a twitching, almost, no, a wriggling of skin along her arms and belly, too, and as he leaned forward to touch her…

As the humming seemed to vibrate the entire building …

He felt the edge of an antenna stroke featherlike down the back of his neck.

Celeste whispered in his ear, “Isn’t she beautiful?”

He turned around, and Celeste was dressed in a gown made entirely of wasps, all with wings twitching, diamond heads, their thousand legs clinging to her. “I am their chosen, Rob. For what my grandfather did for them, his many kindnesses, I got chosen as their midwife. They won’t hurt you, Rob, I wouldn’t let that happen, as long as you don’t try to hurt me, you’re gonna be fine.”

The wasps moved along her shoulders, over her breasts, her living clothes shimmering in the light.

He gasped, “What did you do? What in God’s name?”

“Nature is God,” Celeste said, “we only live to serve. People build cities like this, and what, you think it’s all for us? It ain’t. It’s for them. We’re just part of a big-ass colony, Rob. God’s a maggot, turns the flesh to earth. We’re less than maggots, don’t you get it?”

“What about Maggie? What did you do to her?”

Celeste shook her head, clearly disappointed that this was his interest. “It ain’t like she’s in any pain, you know, one of the mothers paralyzes her while they lay their eggs under her skin. I ain’t gonna make anybody go through pain. Not what’s not natural, anyways.”

The scream on the other side of the wall.

Maggie’s scream.

Maybe. Maybe.

Maybe it was Celeste, maybe she was mating with a wasp, maybe the scream was pleasure, maybe it’s her eggs inside Maggie’s body.

It was then that Rob felt his mind leaving his head, as if it were leaking out of his ears and drifting in a cloud of smoke, to dissipate in the hall. Something short-circuited for him; he could not easily remember words or how to make his arms or legs move right; for a moment, he wondered if he knew how to breathe.

Celeste reached out and took his hand in hers. He watched her do this and felt like an infant, unable to make sense out of the world in which he’d found himself. She stroked his hand. “If I want, they’ll choose you, too, to help. I want you to help. I feel like you’re a friend,” she said, drawing his hand to her bosom. “It’s so lonely sometimes, being chosen. It’s so lonely sometimes being the one to do this.”

He watched the wasps travel from her hand to his, then up his arm, sometimes biting, but it didn’t bother him, he didn’t mind, he didn’t mind. He felt them everywhere, all over his skin, and when he listened carefully he began to understand what they were saying, all of them at once, through their vibrations and feelers and bites.

8

The season was a hard one, for the earth needed turning, and there needed to be others; for, once these young came up, the mothers would need to lay more eggs after the mating time.

When it was over, he remembered the picture.

He remembered the picture when he looked at Maggie as they were coming out.

The caterpillar, its skin green and translucent and wet.

The bumps beneath the caterpillar’s skin.

Beauty beyond conscience.

The cruel face of nature.

But as he was watching it happen, Maggie’s eyes on him, her humming at a pitch, he knew it was the most glorious and selfless act that any human being could ever perform, and he wept with the intense and silent beauty as her shiny skin ruptured with conquering life.

Damned If You Do

Calhoun was sweating up a storm, and it was only ten, but this was La Mesa in summer, and he actually found the talk radio soothing while he worked.

He could hear, beyond the chattering radio, the children in the schoolyard across the street, all yelling and pounding the blacktop while they played dodge ball.

He could smell the jaw-aching sweet stink of the fat lemons in the trees that Patsy had planted when they’d first moved into the bungalow ten years before.

The old shepherd, Vix, was chawing on a lemon, which made the dog whine with sour hurt as the juice got into his gums—and still, he wouldn’t let go of a lemon once he got hold of it.

Cal’s beard itched, too, another annoyance on a particularly annoying day, and his shovel struck the flat rock again, or maybe it was a pipe this time—the sewage system ran this way and that across the back of the property, and who the hell knew why since the toilets were always backing up and the garbage disposal ran rusty brown nine times out of ten.

“Mother—” he began, then held his tongue, laughing because Patsy didn’t like strong language or strong drink in her house.

Her house.

It’s my house as well as yours.

He had been digging for twenty minutes—the ground was dry and hard, and there weren’t many places left.

Not that he’d left any markers, but he had a memory like a trap, and once he saw something, he always remembered it.

I remember you, you, and you, he thought, blinking his eyes in the sun, looking from one patch of garden to another, or there, in the mulch pile.

He went back in for a soda pop and one last piece of apple pie—she had baked it the night before, and he had had one too many pieces, but he loved her pies. The radio was louder in the kitchen, echoing, and a man was on it talking about his problems with his wife, and how he wanted to leave but couldn’t because he loved her.

The call-in DJ, who claimed to be a therapist, although she doled out advice about as bad as any Cal had ever heard said, “Love is not just a state of being, but an active, everyday thing, you know—know what I mean? Like you maintain your house and your car, you also have to every day maintain your relationship, like a tune-up…”

Patsy always had that thing blaring, always talk radio, from morning till night till morning.

The Radio Lady jabbering, nattering, bantering.

He wanted to turn it off, but if he did then they’d know.

The neighbors.

They’d know.

Old Fat Broad over the high wall with her arms of beef and face of jug, always leaning over and saying, “Whatcha doin’?”

Or that brat of hers trying to get over to pick lemons, looking in the windows, trying to slide through the casement windows into his wood shop.

Mr. Erickson, whom Patsy called Ear-Ache, complaining about the volume of the radio, wouldn’t he think it strange when the radio went off? Ear-Ache once came over to be neighborly, and asked Cal, “So, you’re retired now, what was your business, anyway?”

And Cal had told the truth, although he sometimes lied because he hated when people pried. “I used to be a principal of a school down in Dauber’s Mill, back before they consolidated. I liked teaching better, more hands-on work, but they needed a principal more than they needed a wood shop teacher, so I had at it for a good fifteen years.”

Ear-Ache and Fat Broad, eyes, ears and mind on him all the time, wondering if they were looking, if they were watching.

He never did his work at midnight or in the wee morning hours, because he had learned in his sixty-three years that you could do anything you wanted in life as long as you did it in broad daylight, when nobody believed what they saw anyway.

He took a bite of pie and a swig of soda, and looked out across the lawn at the shallow trench he had begun.

Maybe I’ll just put her with that pig-tailly girl, in the mulch.

The problem with the mulch pile, or with any mulch pile, is you couldn’t put anything salty in it or you’d ruin it for sure. No bacon drippings, no skin, nothing that had a high salt content. The pig-tailly girl was easy enough to scrape, and even though she still had plenty of salt in her, he just had to bury her deep and hope for the best.

Dead mice you could put on the mulch, and even dead birds, but nothing too much larger or you had a pile of shit that was just a pile of shit.

Cal set the can of soda down, stroked his walrus mustache, scratched his chest through his sweat-stained T-shirt.

Can’t scrape Patsy, though. Can’t do it

Take much too long, and then I’d have to flush too much scrapings. More backup in the toilets, maybe too much, and maybe they’d have to come out and dig up the lawn to check on the sewage pipes, and then what?

“No more woodshop, for sure,” he said aloud.

He whistled for Vix to come inside, then he turned and went down the narrow hallway with its family pictures tattooed on the wall, all the kids they’d had in all those years.

The radio noise got louder, this time just a commercial. He hated the way on TV and radio, how they made the commercials louder than the shows.

They were advertising for Squeaky Kleen, a deodorant. Cal didn’t use deodorants, although he made an excellent natural soap in his wood shop, using an old recipe he’d found in a book from the turn of the century. It was a little bit of lye and a little bit of animal fat, and it got skin so clean it practically took the hair right off, with a fresh smell, like children on their birthdays.

He went into Patsy’s room—they had separate rooms, ever since he’d retired, because she wouldn’t put up with his night fears anymore. So he had the little guest room, what used to be the nursery off the second bathroom, and she kept the master bedroom, which looked out over the backyard. She was simple in her tastes, which is what he always liked about her anyway, and difficult in her emotions.

She had a bed, a table with a reading light, her mother’s rocking chair, and the radio. It was an old one, a big jobbie that she’d had since the fifties, hell, it took four big fat batteries to run it, and like his old Royal typewriter she had it repaired constantly rather than replace it with something newer and easier to use.

On the radio, a woman began crying, and the DJ lady said, ‘It’s all right, it’s good to cry, hey, I’d cry, too, if that happened to me. But you do have a choice, sweetie, you can walk right out that door and get a life! It’s the thing to do, get…a…life. It’s easy. When you do it, you’ll see. You’ll call a friend, or a family member, and see if you can’t stay with them for a while, until you’ve got your feet on the ground, and then you’ll get a life. Sound good?”

The woman on the line said, “I guess. I thought this was my life.”

“What you described is not a life. I know it hurts to hear this, but it’s why you called in, isn’t it? It’s not a life, I repeat. A life is something you participate in and draw some satisfaction from. All right?”

Cal wanted to shut that damn radio off more than anything, but he knew if he did, someone somewhere nearby would think something, would wonder about something, might even look in a window somewhere.

Patsy’s eyes were wide, but the tape had held on her mouth. The wire around her ankles had cut into the flesh, but not too far, and they held well, strung around the frame of the rocker.

She’d exhausted herself all night rocking back and forth, trying to get over to the window; he’d had to pick her up twice between eleven and two when she’d spilled forward and slammed her head into the parquet.

He’d wiped the blood from her nose, and kissed at her tears, and used his heart to try and unscramble a message to her, to help explain what he was doing and why he had to, but she was too busy listening to talk radio.

She never got the messages he sent from his heart, but he always followed his heart and tried to get her to understand the direction it took him.

It was no use talking to her, because she only understood normal everyday problems and emotions, not the kind that made a man do what he had to do, a place beyond words, a territory of pure obligation.

Maybe if she still went to her job downtown, she wouldn’t have even noticed.

But she, too, had retired; the retirement party had taken place at the Sportsman’s Lodge down on Edison and Fourth the previous Friday night. He was going to wait until she went to run some errands—and maybe if she hadn’t given up liquor so suddenly, and gotten religion in one lightning bolt of revelation, maybe she would’ve missed what he did.

What he’d been doing for twenty-five years.

He remembered his mother’s words, so many years back, on her deathbed. Her advice, her comfort. He repeated them, whispering, although Patsy would not hear them, she would hear the radio, radio, nothing but radio. “I know it’s terrible to watch your mother die like this, Cal. But far worse is it for me to go to my glory without knowing that you are taken care of. I want you to be happy, but I know the pain life brings. We’ve all had it visited upon us. Happy is the man who buries his own children, for in his pain, in his burden, is the care and comfort that he laid them to rest before their spirits could be crushed.”

The sunlight burned the windowsill, beneath the translucent shade, and he heard old Vix whining from the kitchen—still chewing that lemon.

Patsy smelled, and her face glowed with sweat.

Nine children in twenty-five years.

Someone was bound to find out, one day, but he never imagined it would be his wife. She had used the soap, she had used the candles, she had blown on the whistle he made out of bone, the whistle with the little sparrow carved into the side, the whistle like ivory.

She had stood by him when he spoke with the police about each one running away, about the troubles boys and girls like that faced, not feeling that their biological parents had claimed them, not feeling at home, not feeling safe.

Not feeling cared for.

On the radio, a teenaged girl giggled and talked about not having her first period until she was sixteen.

He had promised Patsy, too, that he would care for her until death. Perhaps this was Providence stepping in and making sure he was as good as his word, although he didn’t believe in fate or God or karma.

Soon, he’d have to stop old Vix’s breath, too, for what would a dog do if his master were to die?

I’ve been dying for years, Patsy, his heart said, and I’ve cared for my own.

It wasn’t fun, never, he wasn’t one of those who enjoyed doing his duty. It was like being a soldier, shooting his brother, but the weight of his obligation was great.

His mother, too, he had taken care of her in her last moments.

He had no choice back then, when he was sixteen, because she had been the one with the gun in her hand, and it had taken a good half hour to wrestle it from her.

Mother was trying to take care of him, but Cal had known, even then, that it was a man’s job. He knew he was damned, but it was a damned if you do, damned if you don’t sort of proposition when you came into this world.

Patsy’s eyes were bulging, and he never liked to see her worried or in pain, but he had wanted to give her time to think it over and make her peace. Life is meant to work out the way it works itself out, and maybe Patsy, maybe she would die within the next decade anyway, and if something happened to him, who would care for her?

The weight of duty was heavy, for sure.

The Radio Lady said, “We are given free choice when it comes to our own behavior, and we can only change someone else insofar as we can change ourselves, you know?”

He looked around for her needles, the long thick ones.

He didn’t like to prolong pain, and he remembered how peaceful his mother had been, how the gasp from her bosom, and the stench, and the relief in the act itself, were like opening a sewer pipe of flesh to release gas and what was trapped inside the gutter of the body.

It was noon before her heart stopped, and nearly one when he’d taken her down to his wood shop. He laid her across the bench, her neck in a vise because it helped keep the rest of the body stable if the spine held.

Then he went to work, and he cried, as he always did, and he drowned out the sound of talk radio with his instruments.

The sky clouded over by two-thirty. The children were let out of school, and he had to wait until the last yellow bus took off, and the last child had finished walking home, peeking over the wall to taunt Vix into barking, before he could go out and dig some more. He went to the mulch pile, which was still moist and humid with dead grass and sour milk and the fish heads from Tuesday’s supper. Vix lay down beside him and let a lemon roll from his mouth. The old dog looked at the lemon and pawed it. Cal noticed there were ants crawling across it. He bent over, his back hurt, picked it up, was about to toss the rotting, chewed, ant-cursed lemon into Fat Broad’s yard, when he figured, what the hell, and dumped it down beside him. Then he pitched the shovel in deep, trying to keep in mind where he’d buried the pig-tailly girl from two years back. When he felt he had dug down far enough, he went and got several of Patsy’s parcels, and plopped them in, and then checked the wall for a spy, saw no one, and went and got the rest.

Vix sniffed the hole he’d dug, but the dog was more attached to lemons than anything else out in the yard. “Find another one, Vix, this one,” Cal nudged the rotting lemon by his foot, “this one’s all wormy. Good boy.”

He took the radio, too, shut it off, finally, and dropped it in, kicked in the wormy lemon and some fish heads, and covered the whole mess up.

Then he went into the kitchen, sat at the small glass table, and actually missed the sound of talk radio for once in his life. He went and turned on the little radio he’d bought for Patsy, the one she’d never used. He turned it to the talk radio station and kept the volume up.

“I just loved that last call—didn’t you?” the Radio Lady said. “It’s a day brightener to hear something like that in these times. Imagine, rescuing a cat and someone’s grandmother in the same hour. Gosh, sometimes life is difficult, but it’s always fascinating, isn’t it?”

Cal looked at the telephone hanging from the wall.

At the radio.

Wonder if Patsy ever called in.

She wasn’t one for discussing her life.

Miss her, even so.

The Radio Lady announced the number to call in, and Cal went and dialed it.

After seven rings, a man picked up, and Cal hung up quickly.

Then he dialed again, got the man who mentioned he was screening calls, and asked Cal what his problem was.

“It’s about my wife and kids. I have trouble, sometimes, taking care of them.”

The man on the phone told him he’d be on in about two minutes.

Two minutes turned to four, when the Radio Lady came on. Cal had to turn the radio down to hear her. “What can I help you with?”

“Well,” he said, then thought he might hang up.

“Don’t be shy,” she said.

“I’ve been listening to you for a long time. Years.”

“Well, I’ve been here four years so far, so thanks for the compliment.”

“Hmm. I thought it was longer. Well, it’s about my wife and my kids.”

“Is it good or bad?”

“Neither. Just about life. What I’ve learned. I’m sixty-three, you know.”

“Congratulations. Hey, isn’t it great that you people still call in?”

“My wife, I miss her, and the kids. Most of the kids.”

“How many do you have?”

“Nine.”

“Holy cow, nine kids. And you raised them all?”

“I cared for each and every last one of them to the best of my ability.”

“Well, you deserve a pat on the back for that. These days, too many people are abandoning their children.”

“That’s right,” Cal said, “most of my kids were like that. Foster kids. But my wife and I took them in. Loved them. Gave them a home. And I fulfilled my obligation to them, too.”

“I wish I could meet a man like you,” the Radio Lady said. “I’ll bet a lot of women in my audience would. So what are you calling about, you catch?”

Cal paused. “I’m tired of burying them. I miss them.”

The Radio Lady said nothing.

Cal said, “Oh, they live on, in things, in day-to-day objects, when I wash sometimes, I can smell their skin. Fresh. So fresh, the way only a child can smell.”

The Radio Lady said nothing.

And then Cal realized why.

She was crying. “Oh, you poor wonderful man. God bless you, God bless you.”

“Thank you,” Cal said, and hung up.

He went and turned off the radio. He couldn’t cry anymore. Except for taking care of Vix, he had fulfilled his obligations. He just couldn’t take care of Vix, not yet.

In the morning, the roses needed hosing down because he had been hoping it would rain and had left them dry for days. He washed with the sunken-eyed boy soap, and remembered the tight little curl to the child’s fingers (although he couldn’t for the life of him remember names much anymore). Then he went outside, turned the hose on, and sprayed down Vix while he flooded the roses. Ants came out from the soaked earth, and crawled up the garden wall. Fat Broad emerged in her yard wearing a muumuu and barbed-wire curlers with her Yorkshire terrier, getting the ball of stringy fur to yap, yap. Before he could take cover, she’d spotted him and called out, “Your wife—is she all right?”

Cal pretended not to hear.

She thinks I’m ancient, so being deaf isn’t much of a stretch.

Fat Broad and her Yorkie toddled over to the wall, and he smiled and then dropped the smile.

She said, “I don’t hear the radio. The talk shows.”

“Radio broke. Wife won’t listen to any other radio. She’s a peculiar woman. Thirty-five years of marriage.”

“I’m not surprised it broke. Good heavens, she played it night and day. You must be happy it broke.”

He scrunched up his face angrily. “Not at all, woman. I was used to it.”

“Well, it’s nice to have the quiet so I can hear my wind chimes.”

“Doesn’t get too windy,” Cal said, stepping as far from the wall as he could without getting too muddy in the puddles he’d created with the garden hose. Vix put his forepaws up on the wall and began barking at Fat Broad and her Yorkie, so the neighbor retreated.

He went and checked the bougainvillea, which hadn’t been growing well this year, although the trumpet vine was in full bloom, with hummingbirds darting in and out of its blossoms.

I take care of my own. My family, my garden.

My obligations.

Oh, but he missed them, their kisses, their hands, their love.

Even his mother, with that friendship of blood that transcended all others.

It’s over, he thought. It’s done.

Someone, in another yard, somewhere, he thought, just beyond Fat Broad’s, turned up their radio loud as if to fill the void left by Patsy’s blaster.

He could faintly hear the Radio Lady say, “You’re on the air, caller? You’re on the air.” A child’s voice said, “Hi… um… I don’t know if I’m s’posed to call you … but I listen to you all the time.”

The Radio Lady said something, although Cal couldn’t quite hear it.

The boy said, “I ain’t—I mean, I guess, I haven’t ever called in. Not like this.”

Another voice, a girl’s said, “Hello? Wow. This is cool. Hello? Is someone there?”

“You’re talking with the Radio Lady,” the other voice said, and although faint, Cal recognized it. It was Patsy.

He went and called Fat Broad back over to the wall. She came over, shuffling like she was all bound up inside that oversized dress, and curled up her nose at him like he stank.

“You hear that?” he asked her.

“What?”

“Listen.” He held a finger to his lips.

Fat Broad was silent for a moment, cocking her head to the side like she was trying to roll that last marble right out from her eardrum.

Another boy, about six, said, “I scared.”

The girl, the pig-tailly girl, Cal was sure, said, “Don’t be scared. We’re all taken care of. Aren’t we?”

Fat Broad interrupted Cal’s listening. “I don’t hear nothing. Is it a siren or something? If you tell me what I’m listening for, maybe I can hear it.”

Cal was angry that she was talking so much while the talk radio was going on. “No,” he said. “I won’t tell you. If you don’t hear it, I won’t.”

“I hear things sometimes,” Fat Broad said, nodding. “Maybe you’re hearing a ghost.”

Cal looked at her sharply. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“I don’t mean that kind, I mean like on TV when you have a ghost image. Or now that your wife’s radio broke, you’re so used to hearing it that you still think it’s playing.” But the woman saw that Cal was paying no attention to her, so she tramped across her own pansy bed to reprimand her son for leaving his bicycle out in the driveway.

Cal listened, and noticed that Vix, covered with mud in the garden, seemed to be listening, too.

He couldn’t fall asleep. He went to Patsy’s room and rocked back and forth in the chair, smelling her smell. He pulled the curtains aside and looked out at the backyard. The radio had gotten louder, just a bit, but still not to the volume it had been up to when Patsy had been around. He listened to each of his nine children talk with their mother, and he listened to her words of comfort, but he was still very sad.

At least I have one comfort, he thought, at least I can hear them.

And then, around three a.m., just as he was nodding off, he heard a voice on the radio that did not belong to any of his children, nor to his wife.

It was a woman with such an impediment to her speech, it sounded like a toad was sitting beneath her tongue. “Ca-hoo, Ca-hoo, heh-up mee, Ca-hoo.”

He got out of the rocker and went to the window. He rolled the side windows open wider.

“Mother?” he asked, peering out into the dark.

“Cay-uh, cay-uh,” she said, and then was lost in the static of the radio.

She had said “care,” he was sure.

Even though she wasn’t buried in the yard, but in a cemetery twenty-five miles away, she had traveled through the ground waves, through the sewage pipes of the dead, to speak to him.

He knew why her voice was strange, because of what he’d had to do to her mouth.

He wished now he hadn’t. He would like to understand her better, for she was a person of enormous wisdom.

He watched the darkness, listening for her voice again on the radio, but all was silence.

He drank several shots of whiskey, not his style at all, and slept late. He dreamed of the sound of machines roaring and dogs barking, and awoke at nine-thirty when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

He smelled mud and flowers, and looked into the empty eyes of his mother, her face dripping with mud and sewage. She opened her scarred mouth, the one that had burned so well when he stretched the electric cord across her lips, between her teeth, and switched on the juice. The scars took the form of a star pattern, and when she parted her lips, dry leaves and dead grass dropped out.

She took his hand and led him to the wood shop, where the sound of talk radio drowned out the other sounds, the sounds of the care one human being shows for another.

The Hurting Season

1

The wind had a taste to it.

Leona hung out the wash on the rope strung between the willow and the sapling, down by the river, with the smell of shad, dead on the water’s surface from running, and the clean of soap powder and bleach; the Sack was strung up and bounced with each windblow; and Mama was boiling meat in back before the flies would be up to bother her; and it was a rough wind, a March wind even in late April, coming ahead of a storm.

The river was high, threatening flooding if the storms kept up, which they were wont to do, but Theron had done all the clearing, and the chairs and table from the levee were already in the springhouse, the old springhouse that no longer flooded, and he was almost to the shed now, because the horses were kicking at the stall.

The sky was its own secret blue, unnatural, with blue clouds and blue winds and blue sun, all signaling a squall coming down from off-island.

Theron could see the oyster boats rocking across the bay, two miles from the house, just like mosquito larvae wriggling, and he wondered how it was on Tangier, and what about that girl he met at Winter Festival—he was fourteen, and she was nearly seventeen, but he had seen it in her eyes, those flatland island dull eyes, a flicker of what could only have been fire when she had let him touch her the way Daddy touched Mama.

The horses, prophesying storm, kicked the wood, and the shed trembled.

Mama cried out at the noise, surprised, but Leona, in her earthly wisdom, just kept hanging sheets and shirts as if the impending storm mattered not one whit, for it would come and go quickly, a final rinse for the laundry. Theron kept buttoning his shirt; the screen door banged with the wind; the blue sky turned indigo and then gray, with flashes of lightning between. First drops of rain, sweet and cold.

He ran like a horse himself, back to the shed, for he loved the horses and could not bear their distress. The ground was damp but not muddy, and he galloped across it barefoot in spite of the biting chill. He could feel the rain spitting at his back as he got there, to the door, which he drew back. The smells of the horses, the manure, the cats, too, for they roamed among the piles and hay for mice and snakes, strong but not unbearable.

His father was there, at the mast that centered the shed, around which the horses were knocking and frenzied. The mast had a great length of chain hanging from it, and the leather strops of discipline, too, wrapped about its middle. Carved notches marked the days of the season, from Winter Festival to May Day, the days when Daddy did his penance, the hours of his atonement for a sin long ago forgotten. His father wore no shirt; his chest was covered with kudzu hair that sprawled across his shoulders and connected to his belly like inflamed moss; trousers were caked in filth; boots, too, with blood near the toes for they were tight and he would wear them all during the hurting season.

“You got Naomi upset,” Theron said, not meaning to scold, but it was hard to avoid. Naomi was not yet a year, and needed gentleness; the old horse, her sire, Moses, was used to the season, the frantic pain that Daddy put himself through, but Naomi was barely more than a foal.

His father’s eyes were not even upon him, but gazing through him, beyond him, to some richer meaning, listening to the words, but decoding them. The man’s face was yellow jaundice, and the hunger was showing in the sunken cheeks; the thin blond hair, cut short like a monk’s, Theron thought, was slick and shiny, the sweat, pearls of mania. “That’s not good,” his father said, “you take her out, then, take her out, boy.”

Theron nodded, glad, and ran around the mast to grab Naomi’s bit. He tugged at her, but her eyes were still wild. Theron looked around the shed. “It’s the chain, Daddy,” he said, for he knew that a horse, unless tempered to a rope, would take fright at anything that resembled one; the silver chain swung lightly about the thick wood. On its end was a rusty hook, from one of the oyster trawlers that had dry-docked over in Tangier, and there was blood on it. He registered this for a moment, wondering what his father did with the hook that drew blood from him. It was frightening, sometimes, the hurting season, at least to him; he was sure it frightened Mama, too, for she was moody during those months; Leona, older than Daddy or Mama, didn’t seem to notice or care; and Milla, being so young, accepted it the way Theron had up until he’d become aware that it was only his daddy who did it, that when he went to Tangier, nobody else had a mast or the chain and strops, nobody else had a daddy that slept with the horses from February to May.

The boy brought the horse out of the shed, into the slapping rain; the smell of bleach and soap stronger, and he looked up to see the wash swimming in the wind, but their stays holding tight to the rope; Naomi tugged away from him, but he kept his grip, watching for the horse’s teeth. He spoke to her, calmly, and led her over to the springhouse. It would be small for the horse, but she’d be safe and fairly dry, and the darkness of it would calm her.

He tied her to the upturned patio chair and wiped at her forelock and nose with the red bandanna the girl over at the Festival had given him, smoothing down the horse’s mane and then her withers to settle her.

The horse had the thick hair of the island horses—it was said that they could be traced back to the Spanish ships wrecking off the islands, and his father had told him that the harsh winters in the wild had developed the breed to the point of hardiness and hairiness. Something Theron had learned in school, too, a phrase, “survival of the fittest.” That had been the island horses, for they swam every spring around the time of May Day from Tangier over to Chite Island, which was here. Centuries of horses coming to mate on Chite in the spring, and to swim back in October when winter came too harsh here first.

Chite was a small island, although the river that ran through it connected it through the wetlands to the Carolina Isthmus, so it had not been a real island since sometime long before Theron was born. Old Moses, he had been a Chiter, and his dam, a wild horse that had never been tamed on Tangier, had died and left the one foal, Naomi. The horse had a bad fetlock, the back left, and she raised it a little, so he squatted down beside her and massaged it. The wind through the cracks in the old gray wood bit around his ears, but the whistling sound it made seemed to steady his horse. “Good girl,” he said, and wrapped the bandanna around his neck the way the girl had. It smelled of horse now, and perfume, and fish, as all things on Tangier smelled of fish.

Theron waited out the storm in the springhouse, and when it was over, in just a few minutes, he led the horse out to the rockpile road that spanned the wetlands to the west of the house, and took her at a canter.

The horse slowed toward the middle of the rock pile, for it became less smooth here, and there were small gaps in the rocks. The sky cleared, but the sun was still not up in the middle of it, but back in the west, over Tangier. A red-winged blackbird flew up and out from the mesh of yellow reeds and dive-bombed at Theron’s hair.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Didn’t do nothin’ to you!”

He flapped his hands at the descending bird, and dug his heels into Naomi’s side until she galloped some more. His butt was sore from the pounding, for he didn’t have his seat yet, at least not with Naomi, for she was an erratic bounder, but he rose fell rose fell with her, his leg muscles feeling stronger, and he tried to pretend that he and the horse were one animal, just like his daddy had taught him.

The bird left him alone once he was out of its territory, and he guided Naomi down to some fresh water for a drink. He saw their reflection, the horse’s long neck, its thick shaggy mane hanging down, and then his own face in the cold brown water—the red bandanna tied smartly just under his chin, and some whiskers on his upper lip. He smiled at himself; she had liked him, that older girl in Tangier, the pretty one. She was brown eyed just like everybody else on the islands, and brown hair, and freckles. Her hands were like little brushes on his, for they scratched and tingled and smooth when she had slid them across his palms.

“Look,” she’d said after she’d done it, and he had looked at his hands.

At the palms of his hands. All red, the palms, like they were blushing and warm.

“You got skin like water,” she said. “See-through hands. I can see you through your skin, boy. Boy.” She said “boy” like it was a dare, so he had kissed her behind the booth, where nobody could see them.

He had known what the other boys did, the ones in school, even over in the Isthmus, for they bragged about girls in a way that disturbed him. But he had felt lightning in his body, and her lips felt like fire and sensations had gone through him that words could not even describe, for it was his first kiss ever, and she had seen his excitement when she drew back from him. She had whispered, “I guess you like me.”

Embarrassed, he had dropped a hand in front of him and clasped it with the other, “Huh?”

“It’s nature,” she had said, the teacher of his flesh. He leaned forward and kissed her again, but she pushed him away this time and said, “Nuh-uh.” But it led him, this feeling, just like the boys had told him it would, it led him without a thought in the world to anything else.

The horse leaned down, disturbing the water, and Theron’s reflection whirled and broke in the water. She had liked him, that girl, that day. He had changed since then, he knew it.

He was a man now, even if the others called him boy.

The rockpile road ended at the Isthmus Highway, rising out of reeds and swamps and trees like an altar of the true religion. Theron wasn’t supposed to take Naomi up on it, for even though few cars traveled it until summer, when the summer people from the cities came down, and when Daddy blocked the rockpile road to keep them off his property, the highway could be dangerous, for an occasional truck roared through in nothing flat, and a girl’s mother got hit a long time ago trying to push her daughter out of the way and to safety. But Theron, a man now, and cocky, rode Naomi up the brief, steep hill, batting back the sticks and dead vines that had not yet greened since the winter, and clopped up onto the potholed blacktop. Naomi was faster on the highway, riding down the centerline, for it was completely flat, and where it dipped could be seen, and avoided, for several yards.

As he slowed her down at a bend in the road, there was a car stuck in mud on the shoulder.

2

Theron was not big on cars, not like the other boys, but this one was pretty and sporty, a two-seater.

A man stood beside it, kicking the bumper and cursing to high heaven. He was a lot younger than Daddy, but maybe only Mama’s age. He wore a tan suit, and had rolled his slacks up almost to his knees, which were black with mud.

He was soaked head to toe, caught, no doubt, in the storm.

His eyeglasses were fogged up.

Theron dismounted, and led Naomi up to the man.

“Mister, ‘scuse me, but what kind of car you got?”

The man looked at Theron as if he could not hear. Almost like his father in the shed. Then he said, “Right now it’s the kind that breaks down.”

“Pretty nice. Never seen one like that before,” Theron nodded. “You’re stuck.”

“You must be the local genius,” the man said, and then grinned. “Sorry, but you ever get so pissed off at something you can’t see straight, kid?”

“I guess.”

“So, kid, you live nearby? You got a phone or something?”

“Yeah, only we don’t let strangers use it.”

“Okay. Anybody else around here? A drugstore?”

Theron chuckled, and covered his mouth to keep from making the man feel too bad. “Sorry—sorry— don’t mean to laugh. Don’t mean to. But you’re twenty-five miles from town center.” He pointed toward the direction that the man must’ve already come.

“That piss hole? Christ, kid, that’s a town? I thought it was a mosquito breeding ground. Nothing the other way? You sure?”

Naomi whinnied, and Theron patted her nose. “She’s shy. Just shy of biting, sometimes, I think.”

He tugged at the bandanna around his neck, self-consciously.

There was something about this man he didn’t feel comfortable around.

The man said his name was Evan, and he was from Connecticut, and that he wrote magazine articles and was supposed to meet his wife up the shore, but he was doing some kind of article on lost byways of the South.

“You write,” Theron said. “That’s wild. Wild. Me, I barely read. I watch TV. Anything you write ever get on TV?”

Evan shook his head. “Yeah, I once did write for the TV news.”

“I can’t watch that. My daddy thinks news people make stuff up, but Daddy thinks anybody on TV’s a big fat liar.”

“Well, kid, I definitely I hated the work. I hate what I do now, too. What a way to make a living, huh? Get up in the morning, not liking your work? The rat race.”

“You do what you got to do.” Theron shrugged. “Survival of the fittest, I guess. Even rats got to eat.”

The wind, which had died, picked up again, rattling the dead reeds, shagging at the budding trees, dispersing the petals of those that had blossomed early.

The boy could smell honeysuckle already, up here on the Isthmus, and it wasn’t even May.

The man had a kind look to him, a wrinkled-brow honesty, and Daddy had always told him that when someone needed help, there was only one thing to do.

“Look, mister,” Theron said after watching the man pace his car, “if you don’t mind walking down there,” he pointed down the gully past the wetlands to the stand of trees that separated Chite from the mainland. “It’s about two miles. I’d let you ride her, but she wouldn’t make it easy on you. Look, my daddy’s got a phone and nobody’s supposed to use it, but I don’t know what else to do. Only I got to warn you about one thing.”

Evan said, “What’s that, kid?”

“We keep to ourselves most of the time. I go to school up in Isthmus, but we don’t really mix. My baby sister, Milla, she never even seen a mainlander.”

The man named Evan seemed to grasp this immediately.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Evan got a camera and a tape recorder out of the back of his car and strung both of them around his neck like ties. His shoes were brown and would be uncomfortable for the trip; Theron smiled when he thought of crossing the land on the other side of the rock pile road, where the mud would surely suck him to his ankles if he wasn’t careful.

As they descended from the highway, down to the road between the wetlands, Evan asked, “are there snakes down here?”

“Too cold still. There’ll be plenty by June. I once saw a man from Tangier bite the head off a cottonmouth. You ever see that? He just chomped, and spit it out like it was tobacco.”

Theron rode Naomi, but walked her slow so the man could keep up with them.

He wasn’t sure how Daddy or Mama, or even Leona for that matter, would take having a stranger over; Daddy was normally friendly with outlanders, but this was the hurting season, and it might be embarrassing for someone to walk right into the middle of that.

Theron assumed that other fathers had their own hurting seasons, although he’d been too awkward to ask any of the boys over in the high school, both because they always seemed smarter than him, and because he was already teased enough as it was for being so different.

The sun was just past noon when they reached sight of the house, and the wind had pretty much died. The sky was white with cloud streaks, and the earth was damp, the moss that hung from the trees sparkled with heaven’s spit, as Mama called rain when she was feeling poetic.

Naomi tried to pick up speed as they neared the shed, but he kept her slow out of courtesy to the stranger.

“How you doin’?” he asked Evan.

Evan wagged his head around and said, “Hey, kid, can I get a picture? You and the horse and the house and that thing—what is that? Some kind of bag?”

Theron looked in the direction where Evan indicated, as the man unscrewed his camera’s lens cap. Dangling from the willow, with the wash, was the Luck Sack.

“It’s for good luck,” Theron said. “It keeps away hurricanes and floods in spring.”

“How’s it work?”

“So far, so good.”

The boy posed for a picture, sitting up proudly on his horse, keeping his chin back so the man could get a clear shot of the red bandanna that girl in Tangier had given him.

Theron wished he had a hat—his father had a hat, and now that Theron had crossed the border between boyhood and manhood, he would’ve liked something brown with a broad brim to keep the sun out of his eyes, to make him feel like a horseman.

“So,” Evan said, snapping several pictures, “you have other good luck charms?”

Theron struck pose after pose, attempting a masculine look for this one, a shy look, a rugged, tough pose. “We’re not much into good luck. It’s what we call tradition. Say, how much film you got in there?”

“Lots.”

Snap–snap–snap.

“What’s in that sack, anyway?”

“One of the cats. We got seven. Kittens on the way,” Theron said. “I love kittens, but cats I ain’t so fond of. You gonna put my pictures in a magazine or something?”

“Maybe,” Evan said, lowering the camera. He let the camera swing around his neck. He reached beneath his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

The man’s face glowed with sweat—the two miles had been hard on him, because he was a Yankee. He seemed to be taking in the house and the river, maybe even the bay if his eyesight was any good with those thick glasses. “Are you people witches or something?”

Theron straightened up and grunted, “Nahsir,” his pride a little hurt by such an assumption. “We’re Baptists.”

“Ronny, honey,” Leona said, her eyes lowering, not even looking at the stranger; she kept the screen door shut, and her massive form blocked the way. “I don’t think you should be bringing people home right now.”

“This’s Evan. He’s a Yankee,” Theron said. “He needs to use the phone.”

Leona looked at Evan’s shoes.

Theron saw the squiggle vein come out on her forehead, like when she was tense over cleaning.

“Mister, our phone’s out of order.” She said it lightly, delicately, sweetly.

Then she looked him in the eye.

Evan blinked.

“That’s okay,” he said, patting Theron on the shoulder.

Leona arched her eyebrows and stared at the small tape recorder and camera around his neck.

“You a traveling pawnshop, mister?”

“Nah’m,” Theron butted in. “He writes for magazines. He’s a famous writer, Leo, he used to write for Dan Rather.”

“Not really,” Evan said.

“I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t come in the house. The little girl’s sick, and like I said, the phone’s not working. We had a big storm this morning. Always knocks out the power lines and such.” She kept her hands pressed against the screen door as if the man would suddenly bolt for it. And then, to Theron, “Now, Ronny, why’d you bring this nice man all the way out here when you knew the line was down?”

Theron said, “‘Cause I thought it’d be up by now,” turning to look up at Evan, who kept staring at Leona. “It’s usually up in a hour or two,” and, as if this were a brilliant idea, he clapped his hands. “I know, Evan, you can stay and have some sandwich and pie, and then maybe the phone’ll be up.”

A groan from the shed out back, and Evan and Theron both glanced that way. It was Daddy with his hurting. Leona groaned, as much to cover up the other noise as anything, and she clutched her stomach. “I tell you, mister, what little Milla’s got, we all seem to be coming down with. You’d be wise to get on back up to Isthmus.”

“Some kind of flu,” Evan said.

“That’s right. That one that’s been going around.” She nodded, looking pained.

Evan grinned, as if this were a game. “Had my flu shots, ma’am. And anyway, even if I hadn’t, I’ll survive it.”

Leona lost all semblance of pretend kindness. “Just get off this property right now, and Ronny, you take him back up to the highway.” She stepped back into the gray hallway and shut the big door on both of them.

“She always this sweet?”

Theron shook his head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her today. She’s almost a hundred, but all age done for her is make her ornery.” He went and tied Naomi around the sapling.

“I thought you had your marching orders,” Evan said, following him.

“I don’t listen to Leona. She’s just the hired help. You take orders from servants, my daddy says, and you end up a shit frog. We got them in the spring house. You ever see a shit frog? They go from the stable to the river, but they still can’t get it off them.” Theron grabbed the laundry rope with both hands and clung to it, letting his knees go slack. “You gonna take more pictures?”

“I don’t know,” Evan said, but he lifted his camera again, snapped some more of the boy, and then of the river, and the house, and the tire swing, and the Lucky Sack hanging on the willow. He looked all around, through his camera, as if trying to see something else worth photographing, when he seemed to freeze. He lowered the camera and turned to face Theron.

Theron shivered a little bit because of the man’s look, all cold and even angry, maybe.

“Where are the lines?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“Kid, if you got a phone, where’s the pole? Where’re the lines? If the line’s down, you got to have a line in the first place, kid. What kind of game is this?”

Theron didn’t have an answer, not yet anyway. He said, “Dang.”

From the shed, a series of shouts, cusswords as strong as Theron had ever heard from the boys at Isthmus.

The stranger named Evan turned around at the sound, took in the whole landscape, the house, the river, the shed, the springhouse, the laundry rope, the bay, the boats, the way the grass was new and green and damp. He walked over to the Lucky Sack, and Theron shouted, “Mister! Evan! Hey!”

But the man had already opened the sack, his face turning white, and he looked at Theron, his eyes all squinching up, and Daddy began screaming at the top of his lungs from the shed, and Old Moses, the horse, started thumping at the wood.

“You sick fucks,” Evan said, weeping, “you sick fucks, you said it was a cat, you sick…” But the sobbing took him over, racking his body, the convulsions of sadness shaking him.

Theron blurted, “It’s bad luck to look in the Sack, mister.”

“Who is it, you sick fuck, what is this?”

Theron tugged at the red bandanna around his neck. “It’s private.”

“Listen, you.” Evan raised both fists and brought them down on the boy, knocking him to the ground.

Theron was angry, and knew he shouldn’t, but told him anyway because he hated keeping the secret. “It’s the first girl I ever kissed. It’s the part of her that’s sacred. It’s the part that made me a man!”

But then Mama was there, behind the man, and hit him with the back of the hoe, just on his skull, and the glasses flew off first, and then his hands wriggled like nightcrawlers, and he crumpled to the ground.

3

Milla held on tight to Mama’s skirt, her brown eyes wide, her hair a tangly weedy mess.

She looked like an unmade bed of a baby sister; when Theron got up from the ground, he went and lifted her up.

“It’s okay, it’s just fine, Milla-Billa-Filla,” he said as he bounced her around. She was only three, and she looked scared. Theron loved her so much, his sister. He had prayed for a brother when the birthing woman was in their house, but when he had seen Milla in the shed, lying there in his mother’s arms, while the birthing mother screamed as Daddy tied her to the mast, he knew that he would love that little girl until the day he died, and protect her from all harm.

Mama said, in her tired way, “Ronny, why’d you bring him down here?”

Theron kissed his sister on the cheek and looked up to his mother. He was always frightened of his mother’s rages, for they, like the hurting season, came in the spring and lasted until midsummer. “I—I don’t know.”

“That ain’t good enough. And don’t lie to me, or you shall eat the dust of the earth all your days and travel on your belly.”

“All right. I guess because I wanted Daddy to stop hurting for a while. I want us all to stop hurting for a while, Mama,” and then he found himself crying, because he didn’t like the hurting season, and he didn’t completely understand the reason for it.

For a moment, he saw the temper begin to flare in his mother’s eyes, and then she softened. She bent down, dropping the hoe at her side, and gathered him up in her arms, him and Milla both, hugged tight to her bosom. “Oh, my little boy, you may be a man now, but you will always, always be my little boy.” She threatened to weep, too, and Theron figured they’d be the soggiest mess of humans in the county, but Mama held back. Daddy was silent in the shed, no doubt exhausted.

Theron thought it might be the right time to ask the question he’d had on his mind since he first discovered about the hurting season. “Why, Mama?”

“Ronny?”

“Why does it have to be us?”

“You mean about the season?”

“Not just the season,” he said, drying his tears, “but us here, and them,” he looked across the bay to Tangier, “over there. We don’t mix.”

His mother reached over to his forehead and traced her finger along the brand that had been put there, a simple X. He felt her nail gently trace the lines of the letter. “It’s our mark,” she said, “from the beginning of creation. Passed through the fathers to the sons.” Theron looked at Milla. “What about the daughters?”

“Uh-huh, that, too, but no birthing, no creation. Our womb must not bear fruit. You remember the scripture.”

He did: “And your seed shall not pollute your womankind, but shall be passed through the women of the land to bring your sons and daughters into lesser sin. And of your daughter, the fruit of her womb shall be sewn shut, and neither man nor beast may enter therein. Behold, you and your seed shall sin that the world may be saved.”

But when he told the lines to one of the boys in Isthmus, the boy laughed and said he knew the Bible by heart and that wasn’t in it. But in the hide-covered Bible that Leona kept above the bread box, it was right there, in Genesis.

The man on the ground began to stir, his hands twitching.

“I’m gonna take him to the shed,” Theron said, pulling away from the warmth of his mother’s arms.

4

The man was heavy.

Dragging him through the mud was made more difficult because of the way he was moving, for his legs kicked a bit, and Evan was groaning, but the blood had stopped from the wound on the top of his skull. Theron felt muscles in his arms and legs begin to plump with this effort. He was sore from riding, too, which didn’t help. He smelled the spice and meat from the stewpot and felt crazy hungry, but dinner would wait until after the important work.

When he reached the shed, Evan looked up at him, although the glasses had fallen somewhere along the way. Theron could tell by the way he was squinting that he wasn’t seeing much right in front of his face.

“It’s okay, mister,” the boy said, “don’t worry.”

Evan, scrunching up his face, not quite sure where he was, coughed up some spit, which dribbled down the side of his chin. “Uh-awh,” was the noise he made.

Theron rapped on the shed door, not wanting to let go of the man’s shoulder with his other hand.

“Daddy,” he called, “open up, Daddy!”

The door opened inward, and his father seemed to know what to do. He bent down on one knee, cradling Evan’s face between his hands. His father’s face was slick with greasy sweat, and there was blood around his eyes where he’d driven the fish hooks beneath the lids. He brought his face close to Evan’s and kissed the sputtering man on the lips.

Theron knew then that he had done the right thing, for it would mean that Spring would come fast now, and that Daddy didn’t have to suffer through the hurting season alone. While he kissed the man, Daddy brought the oyster boat hook with its length of chain down beside their lips, and began pressing its rusty point into the man’s forehead to carve the X of their mark upon him so that the transfer of hurting could begin.

5

Laundry dried by three, with Leona taking it down, and laying it out across the basket.

Milla was playing on the tire swing, head first through it, her small fingers clutching desperately at the black sides as she twirled around.

Mama was napping, and the horses had calmed after the first wave of screeching.

Theron sat out on the dock, twiddling his toes in the icy water, and soon, Daddy came and sat down beside him.

“Give him some rest,” Daddy said, but the pain was gone from his eyes, for the first time since Winter Festival.

“No more storms, I reckon,” Theron said, feeling the weight of his father’s arms around his shoulders. A bird was singing from one of the trees, and there were ducks bickering out on the river. Across the bay, the solitary Tangier, so close, so distant.

“You may be right.”

“Daddy?”

“Boy?”

“Why does it have to hurt?”

“What do you mean?”

“This life. Why does there have to be a hurting season?”

His father had no reply.

That was what disturbed him about life, the very mystery of it, the deepness of its river, where on the surface all was visible, but beneath, something tugged and grabbed and drowned, and yet the current flowed, regardless.

“Look there.” His father pointed off toward Tangier.

Theron squinted but could see only the island and the emptiness beyond it.

“The curvature of the earth,” his father said. “Why does it go in a circle? Who knows? It’s for God to decide. But we have our task here. We follow the rituals so the circle remains unbroken.”

Theron was fourteen, a man now, he had been kissed, he had helped his father with the serious work of life, he had the mark, but he thought, looking at the eastern horizon, that one day he would go beyond Chite and Tangier and even Isthmus, and see the places that the Yankee had seen, in some yonder springtime.

He would take what he knew of his task, of his mark, and show the world what it meant.

I Am Infinite, I Contain Multitudes

1

First off, I’ll tell you, I saw both their files: Joe’s and the old man’s. I had to bribe a psych tech with all kinds of unpleasant favors, but I got to see their files.

I want you to sit through my story, so I’ll only tell you half of what I found.

It was about Joe. He had murdered, sure, but more than that, he had told his psychiatrist that he wanted only to help people.

He wanted only to keep them from hurting themselves. He wanted to love.

Remember this.

It makes sense of everything I’ve been going through at Aurora.

Let me tell you something about Aurora, something that nobody seems to know but me: it is forsaken. Not just because of what you did to get there, or how haywire your brain is, but because it’s built over the old Aurora.

Right underneath it, where we do the farming. I heard this from Steve Parkinson, right underneath it is the old Aurora. I saw pictures in an album they keep in Intake.

It used to be a dusty wasteland.

Yes, the old Aurora was smack dab underground. Back then they believed it was better, if you were like us, to never see the light of day, to be chained like animals and have your food shoved to you in a slot at the bottom of your door.

Back then, they believed that nobody in the town outside the fence wanted to know that you were there. But that’s not why it’s forsaken.

You will know soon enough.

There was a town of Aurora once, too, but then it was bought out by Fort Salton, and ‘round about 1949 they did the first tests.

I heard, from local legend, that there were fourteen men down there, just like in a bunker at the end of the war.

They did the tests out at the mountain, but some people said that those men in Aurora, underground, got worse afterward.

I heard a story from my bunkmate that one guy got zapped and fried right in front of an old-timer’s eyes. Like he was locked in on the wrong side of the microwave door.

The old-timer, he’s still at Aurora; been there since he was nineteen, in ‘forty-six. Had a problem, they said, with people after the war.

He was in the Pacific, and had come back more than shell-shocked.

That’s all I ever knew about him, before I arrived. You can safely assume that he killed somebody or tried to kill himself or can’t live without wanting to kill somebody.

It’s why we’re all here.

He’s about as old as my father, but he doesn’t look it. Maybe Aurora’s kept him young.

He was always over there, across the Yard. He knew everything about everyone. I knew something about him, too. Actually, we all pretty much knew it.

He thought he was Father to us all. I don’t mean like my father, or the guy who knocked your mother up. I mean the Father, as in God The.

In his mind, he created the very earth upon which we stood, his men, his sons.

He could name each worm, each sowbug, each and every centipede that burrowed beneath the flagstone walk; the building was built of steel and concrete and had been erected upon the backs of laborers who had died within the walls of Aurora; the sky was anemic, the air dry and calm; he could glance in any direction at any given moment and know the inner workings of his men as we wandered the Yard, or know, in a heartbeat, no, the whisper of a heartbeat, where our next step would take us.

There was no magic or deception to his knowledge.

He was simply aware; call it, as he did, hyperawareness, from which had come his nickname, Hype.

He was also criminally insane by a ruling of the courts of the state of California, as were most men in Aurora.

I watched him sometimes, standing there while we had our recreation time, or sitting upon the stoop to the infirmary, gazing across the sea of men.

His army, he called them, his infantry: they would one day spread across the land like the fires of Armageddon.

The week after Danny Boy got out was the first time he ever spoke to me.

2

“Hey,” he said, waving his hand. “Come on over here.”

I glanced around. Me?

I had been at Aurora for only four months, and I’d heard the legends of Hype. How he called on you only after watching you for years. How he could be silent for a year and then, in the span of a week, talk your head off.

I couldn’t believe he was speaking to me. He nodded when he saw my confusion. I went over to him.

“You’re the one,” he said, patting me on the back.

You couldn’t help but look him in the eye, he was so magnetic, but all the guys had told me not to look him in the eye, not to stare straight at him at any point. They all warned me because they had failed at it. They had all been drawn to his presence at one time or another.

He was pale white. He kept in the shack at all times. His hair was splotchy gray and white and longer than regulation. His eyes were nothing special: round and brown and maybe a little flecked with gold. (“He milks you with those eyes,” Joe had told me.) There were wrinkles on his face, just like with any old man, but his were thin and straight, as if he had not ever changed his expression since he’d been young.

“I’m the one? The one,” I said, nodding as if I understood.

I had a cigarette, left over from the previous week. I offered it to him.

He took the cigarette, thrust it between his lips, and sucked on it.

I glanced around for an orderly or psych tech, but we were alone together. I didn’t know how I was going to light the cigarette for him. They all called me Doer, which was short for Good-Doer, because I tended to light cigarettes when I could, shine shoes for one of the supervisors I’d ass-kiss, or sweep floors for the lady janitors.

I did the good deeds because I’d always done them, all my life. Even when I murdered, I was respectful. But since there was no staff member around, I couldn’t get a light for the old man.

Hype seemed content just to suck that cigarette, speaking through the side of his mouth.

“Yeah, you know what it means, but you’re it. Danny Boy, he would’ve been it, but he had to pretend.”

He drew the cigarette from his mouth and held it in his fingertips, “He is of a certain breed of sociopath, you must’ve recognized that. He had to perform for his doctor and the board. He studied Mitch over in B—the one who cries and moans all the time. Mitch with the tattoos?”

I nodded.

“He studied him for three years before perfecting his technique. Let me tell you about Danny Boy. He was bom in Barstow, which may just doom a man from the start. He began his career by murdering a classmate in second grade. It was a simple thing to do, for they played out in the desert often, and it was not unusual for children to go missing out there. He managed to get that murder blamed on a local sad little man. Later, dropping out of high school, he murdered a teacher, and then, when he killed three women in Laguna, he got caught. The boy could not cry. It was not in him to understand why anyone made a fuss at all over murder. It was as natural to him as is breathing to you.”

He paused, and drew something from his breast pocket. He flicked his lighter up and lit the cigarette. Although we weren’t supposed to have lighters, it didn’t surprise me too much that Hype had one.

As an old-timer he had special privileges, and as something of a seer, he was respected by the staff as well as by his men.

It’s strange to think that I was suitably impressed by this, his having a lighter, but I was. It might as well have been a gold brick, or a gun.

He continued, “Danny Boy is going to move in with one of the women who work in the cafeteria. She’s never had a lover, and certainly never dreamed of having one as handsome as Danny Boy. Within six weeks, he will kill her and keep her skin for a souvenir. Danny Boy would’ve been it, but he wasn’t a genuine person. You are. You know that, don’t you?”

“What, I ‘cry,’ so that makes me real?”

He shook his head, puffing away, trying to suppress a laugh.

“No. But I know about you, kid. You shouldn’t even be here, only you come from a rich family who bought the best lawyer in L.A. I assume that in Court Ninety, he argued for your insanity and you played along ‘cause you thought it would go easier for you in Aurora or Atascadero than in Chino or Chuckawalla. Tell me I’m wrong. No? How long you been here?”

“If you’re so smart, you already know.”

“Sixteen weeks already.” He grinned, shaking his head. “Sixteen weeks of waking up in a cold sweat with Joe leaning over your bed. Sixteen weeks of playing baseball with men who would be happy to bash in your head just for the pleasure of it. Sixteen weeks hearing the screams, knowing about Cap and Eddie, knowing about how all they want is the taste of human flesh one more time before they die. And you, in their midst.”

He seemed to be enjoying his own speech. “You’re not a sociopath, son, you’re just someone who happened to kill some people and now you wish you hadn’t, and maybe you wished you were in Chino getting bludgeoned and raped at night, but at least not having to deal with this zoo.”

The bell rang.

I saw Trish, the rec counselor, wave to us from over at the baseball diamond. She was pretty, and we all wanted her and we were all protective of her, too, even down to the last sociopath.

“Looks like it’s time for phys ed,” Hype said. “She’s a fine piece of work, that one. Women are good for men. Don’t you think? Men can be good, too, sometimes, I guess. You’d know about that, I suppose.”

“What am I ‘it’ for?” I asked, ignoring the implication of his comment.

He dropped the cigarette in the dust. “You’re the one who’s getting out.”

3

I thought about what the old-timer’d said all day.

In the late afternoon, I sat beside Joe on the leather chairs in the TV room after we got shrunk by our shrinks.

I said, “I don’t get it. If Danny Boy wasn’t it, and ‘it’ means you get out, why the hell am I it?”

Joe shrugged. “Maybe he means ‘you’re next.’ That old guy knows a shitload. He’s God.”

Joe had spent his life in the system.

First, at Juvy, then at Boys’ Camp in Chino, then Chino, and finally some judge figured out that you don’t systematically kill everyone from your old neighborhood unless you’re not quite right in the head. But Joe was a good egg behind the Aurora fence.

He needed the system and the walls and the three hots and a cot just to stay on track.

Maybe if he’d been in some strict religion or in the army, with all those rules, he never would’ve murdered anybody. He needed rules badly, and Aurora had plenty for him. He had always been gentle and decent with me, and was possibly my only friend at Aurora.

I nudged him with my elbow. “Why would I be it?”

“Maybe he’s gonna break you,” Joe whispered, checking the old lady at the desk to make sure she couldn’t hear him. “I heard he broke another guy out ten years ago, through the underground. That old man’s got a way to do it, if you go down in that rat nest far enough. I heard,” Joe grabbed my hand in his, his face inches from mine, “he knows where the way out is, and he only tells it if he thinks your destiny’s aligned with the universe.”

I almost laughed at Joe’s seriousness. I drew back from him. “You got to be kidding.”

Joe blinked. He didn’t like being made fun of.

“Believe what you want. All’s I know is the old nan thinks you’re it. Can’t argue with that.”

And then Joe kissed me gently, as he always did, or tried to do, when no one was looking, and I responded in kind.

It was the closest thing to human warmth we had in that place.

I pulled away from him when a psych tech strolled in with one of the shrinks.

4

I wanted to believe that Hype could break me out of Aurora.

I spent the rest of the day and most of the evening fantasizing about getting out, about walking out on the grass and dirt beyond the fence. Of getting on a bus and going up north where my brother lived.

From there I would go up to Canada, maybe Alaska, and get lost somewhere in the wilderness where they wouldn’t come hunting for me.

It was a dream I’d had since entering Aurora. A futile and useless dream, but I nurtured it day by day, hour by hour.

I could close my eyes and suddenly be transported to a glassy river, surrounded by mountains of pure white, and air so fresh and cold it could stop your lungs; an eagle would scream as it dropped from the sky to grab its prey.

But my eyes opened; the dream was gone.

In its place, the dull green of the walls, the smell of alcohol and urine, the sounds of Cap and Eddie screeching from their restraints two doors down, the small slit of window with the bright lights of the Yard on all night.

Only Joe kept me warm at night, and the smell of his hair as he scrunched in bed, snoring lightly beside me, kept alive any spirit that threatened to die inside me.

I had never been interested in men on the Outside, but in Aurora, it had never seemed homosexual between us.

It was survival.

When you are in that kind of environment, you seek warmth and human affection if you are at all sane. Even if sanity is just a frayed thread.

Even the sociopaths sought human warmth; even they, it is supposed, want to be loved.

I knew that Joe would one day kill me if I said the wrong thing to him, or if I wasn’t generous in nature toward him. He had spent his life killing for those reasons.

Still, I took the risk because he was so warm and comfortable, and sometimes, at night, that’s all you need.

The next morning I sought Hype out, and plunked myself right down next to him. “Why me?”

He didn’t look up from his plate.

“Why not you?”

He had that stoned look of one who could see the invisible world. His smile was cocked, like a gun’s trigger.

“Why not Doer, the compassionate? Doer, the one who serves? Why not you?”

“No,” I said. “It could be any one of these guys. I’ve only been here four months. We don’t know each other.”

“I know everybody. I am infinite, I contain multitudes. I know all. Nothing is beyond me. I see the you within you. Besides, I told you, you don’t pretend.”

“Huh?”

“You don’t pretend. You face things. That’s important. It won’t work if you live in your own little world, like most of these boys. You’ve got the talent.”

“Yeah, the talent,” I said, finally deciding the old fart was as loony as the rest.

“I saw what you did,” he said.

As he spoke, I could feel my heart freeze. In the tone of his voice, the smoothness of old whiskey.

“I saw how you took the gun and killed your son first. One bullet to the back of the skull, and then another to his ear, just to make sure. Then your daughter, running through the house, trying to get away from you. She was actually the hardest, because she was screaming so much and moving so fast. You’re not a good shot. It took you three bullets to bring her down.”

“Just shut up,” I said.

“Your wife was easy. She parked out front, and came in the side door, at the kitchen. She didn’t know the kids were dead. All she knew was her husband was under a lot of pressure and she had to somehow make things right. She had groceries. She was going to cook dinner. While she was putting the wine in the fridge, you shot her and she died quickly. And then,” Hype shook his head. “Then, you took the dog out, too. Who would take care of it, right? With everybody dead, who would take care of the dog?”

I said nothing.

“Who would take care of the dog?” he repeated. “You had no choice but to take it out, too. You loved that dog. It probably was as hard for you to pull the trigger on that dog as it was to pull it on your son. Maybe harder.”

I said nothing. I thought nothing. My mind was red paint across black night. His words meant nothing to me.

He patted me on the back as my father had before the trial. “It’s all right. It’s over. It wasn’t anything anyone blames you for.”

I began weeping; he rubbed his hand along my back and whispered words of comfort to me.

“It wasn’t like that,” I managed to say, drying my tears.

Although we had been left alone, I looked across the cafeteria and felt that all the others watched us. Watched me. But they did not; they were preoccupied with their meals.

“It was …” I said.

“Oh. How was it?”

I wiped my face with filthy hands. I was so dirty. I just wished to be clean. I fought the urge to rise up and go find a shower.

“I wanted it to be me. I wanted it to be me.”

“But you wanted to live, too. You killed your family, and then suddenly—”

“Suddenly,” I repeated.

“Suddenly, your life came back into focus. You couldn’t kill yourself. You had to go through all of them before you found that out. Life’s like that,” he said. “The bad thing is, they’re all dead. You did it. You’re a murderer. But you’re not like these others. It wasn’t some genetic defect or some lack of conscience. Conscience is important. You couldn’t kill yourself. That’s important. I don’t want to get some fellow out who’s going to end up killing himself. You need to be part of something larger than yourself. You need God. Tell me, boy: How do you live with yourself?”

I couldn’t look him in the eye. I was trying to think up a lie to tell him. He reached out and took my chin in his hand. He forced me to look at him.

I remembered the warning: he milks you with those eyes.

“I don’t know how,” I said, truthfully. “I wake up every morning and I think I am the worst human being in existence.”

“Yes,” he said. “You are. But here’s the grace of Aurora. You’re it. You will get out. You will live with what you did. You will not kill yourself or commit any further atrocities.”

He let go of my chin and rose from the table. “You love your friend?”

“Joe?”

“That’s right.” He nodded. “Joe.”

‘Two guys can’t love each other,” I said. “It’s just for now. It’s surviving. It’s barely even sexual.”

“Ah.” He nodded slowly. “That’s good. It would be hell if you got out and you loved him and he was here. You must be careful around him, though. He is pretty and warm. But he has the face of Judas. He will never truly love anyone. Now, you, you will love again. A man, perhaps. Or a woman. But not our friend Joe. You know what he did to the last man he shared his bed with? He ever tell you?”

“No.”

“Ask him,” Hype said.

He walked away. From the back, he didn’t seem old. He had a young way of walking.

I believed in him.

“Tonight. Late,” Hype said to me later on, during our recreational time. “Two-thirty. You must first shower. You must be clean. I will not tolerate filth. Then wait. I will be there. If your friend makes trouble, stop him any way you can.”

5

Joe could be possessive, but not in the expected way.

He wasn’t jealous of other men or women. He simply wanted to own me all the time.

He wanted me to shower with him, to sit with him, to go to the cafeteria with him.

Our relationship seemed simple to me: we had met about the third week in, when he caught me masturbating in the bathroom.

He joined in, and this led to some necking, which led to a chilly week or so afterward when I felt strange from all that.

Then I got a letter from my mother in which she severed all connections with me, followed by one from my father and sister.

I spent two days in bed staring at the wall.

Joe came and took care of me until I could eat and stand and laugh again.

By that time, we were tight.

I had been at Aurora for less than two months before I realized I could not disentangle myself from Joe without being murdered or tortured—it was a Joe thing.

I didn’t feel threatened, however. I’d grown fond of his occasional groping and nightly sleepovers.

In a way, it was like being a child again, with a best friend, with a mother and lover and buddy all rolled up into one person.

That night, when I rose from my bed at two a.m., Joe immediately woke up.

“Doer?” he asked.

“The can.” I nodded toward the hallway.

Because Joe and I weren’t in the truly dangerous category, we and a few others were given free rein of our hallway at night. Knowing, of course, that the Night Shift Bitch was on duty at the end of the hall.

“I’ll go, too,” Joe whispered, rising. He drew his briefs up. He had the endearing habit of leaving them down around his ankles in postcoital negligence.

I tapped him on the chest, shaking my head.

“Doer,” he said, “I got to go, too.”

The two of us quietly went into the hall.

In the bathroom, he said, “I know what’s going on.”

He leaned against the shiny tile wall. “It’s Hype. Word went around. This is the night. Are you really going?”

I nodded, not wanting to lie. He had been sweet to me. I cared a great deal for him. I would be sad without him for a time.

“I’ll miss you,” I said.

“I could kill you for this.”

“I know.”

“If you leave I’ll be lonely. Maybe it’s love, who knows?” He laughed, as if making fun of himself. “Maybe I love you. That’s a good one.”

“No you don’t.”

I knew that Joe was fairly incapable of something so morally developed as love, not because of his sexual leanings, but because of his pathology.

“Don’t go,” he said.

“For all I know, Hype is full of shit”

“He’s not. I’ve seen him do this before. But don’t go, Doer. Getting out’s not so terrific.”

“I want freedom,” I said. “Plain and simple.”

“I want you.” Joe seemed to be getting a little testy.

“Now, come on, we’re friends, you and me,” I said, leaning forward to give him a friendly hug. “You’re my buddy.”

I didn’t see the knife.

All I saw was something shiny, which caught the nearly-burnt-out light of the bathroom. It didn’t hurt going in—that was more like a shock, like hearing an alarm clock at five a.m.

Coming out, it hurt like a motherfucker.

He pressed his hand against the wound in my chest. “You can’t leave me.”

“Don’t kill me, Joe. I won’t leave you, I promise. You can come too.” I gasped.

I felt light-headed. The burning pain quickly turned to a frozen numbness.

I coughed, and wheezed, “get help, Joe. Please.”

Joe pressed his sweaty body against mine.

I began to see brief tiny explosions of light and dark, as if the picture tube of life were going out.

Joe kissed the wound where he’d stabbed me, as blood pulsed from it.

“I love you this much,” he said.

6

I awoke in the infirmary three days later, barely able to see through a cloud of painkillers.

I stared up at the ceiling until its small square acoustic tiles came into focus.

When I was better, in the Yard, I went looking for Hype.

“I tried to make it,” I said.

He seemed to look through me.

“You know what he did to me,” I said. “Please, I want to get out. I have to get out.”

After several minutes, Hype said, “Love transformed into fear. It’s the human story. The last man Joe befriended was named Frank. He grew up in Compton. A good kid. He tore off another man’s genitals with his bare hands and wore them around his neck.

“His only murder. Sweet kid. Twenty-two. Probably he was headed for release within a year or two. He had an A-plus evaluation. A little morbid. Used to draw pictures of beheadings. Joe latched on to him, too. Took care of him. Bathed him. Serviced him. Loved him, if you will. Then rumor went around that Frank was getting some from one of the psych techs. Totally fabricated, of course. Frank was taking a shower. Joe knocked him on the head. Strapped him to the bed, spread-eagled.

“Don’t ask me how, but he’d gotten a hold of a drill—the old kind, you know, you turn manually and it spins. He made openings in Frank. First in his throat to keep him from screaming. Then the rest of him. Each opening…”

“I know,” I said, remembering the pain under my arm. Then something occurred to me. “Where did he get the knife?”

Hype made a face, like he’d chewed something sour.

“The knife,” I repeated. “And the drill, too. Everything’s locked up tight. You’re supposed to be God or something, so you tell me.”

Without changing his expression, Hype said, “Joe gets out.”

The enormity of this revelation didn’t completely hit me. “From here?”

Hype nodded. “It’s not something I’m proud of. I can open the door for about three hours, if I use up all my energy. Joe knows it. He was the first one I took out. But he didn’t want to stay out. He only wanted out to get his toys. Then he wanted back. He’s the only one who manages to get back. Why he wants to, I couldn’t say.”

For the first time ever, I watched worry furrow the old man’s brow. He placed his hand against his forehead. A small blue vein pulsed there, beneath his pale skin’s surface.

“I created the world, but it’s not perfect.”

“Joe knows how to get out?”

“I didn’t say that. I can get it open. I just can’t keep him from going back and forth. It something he does what nobody else seems able to do. And then the door closes again.”

I wasn’t sure how to pose my next question, because there was a mystery to this place where men got out. I had figured it to be down in the old underground, where Hype would know the route of the labyrinthine tunnels. “Where does it go?”

“That,” Hype sighed, “I can’t tell you, having never been through it. I just know it takes you out.”

7

Back in my own bed that night, trying to sleep, I felt Joe’s hand on my shoulder. He slipped swiftly between the covers to cradle my body against his.

“Doer,” he said. “I missed you.”

“Get off me.” I tried to shrug him away. He was burning with some fever. A few drops of his sweat touched the back of my neck.

“No.” He tucked himself in closer to me. I could feel his warm breath on my neck. “I want you.”

“Not after what you did.”

He said nothing more with words. His mouth opened against my neck, and I felt his tongue heat my sore muscles. All his language came through his throat and mouth, and I let him. I hated him, but I let him. Afterward, I whispered, “I want out.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yeah, I do. I don’t care if you stab me again. I want out. You going to get me out?”

I waited a long time for his answer, then fell asleep.

I was still waiting for his answer a week later.

8

I cornered him in the shower, placing my hands on either side of him. I could encompass his body within my arms. I stared straight into his eyes.

“I want out.”

He curled his upper lip; I thought he would answer, but first, he spat in my face.

“I saved you. You don’t even care. Out is not where you want to be. In here’s the only safe place. You get fed, you got a bed.”

He leaned closer to me. “You have someone who loves you.”

I was prepared this time. I brought my fist against his face and smashed him as hard as I could. His head lolled to the side, and I heard a sharp crack as his skull hit the tile wall. When he turned to face me again, there was blood at the comer of his lips. A smile grew from the blood.

“Okay,” Joe said. “You want out. It can be arranged.”

“Good. Next time, I kill you.”

“Yeah.” He nodded.

As I left the shower room, I glanced back at him for a second. He stood under the shower head, water streaming down—it almost looked like tears as the water streamed in rivulets across his face, taking with it the blood at his lips.

9

An hour later, Hype found me out by the crude baseball diamond we’d drawn in the Yard under the shade of several oak trees that grew just beyond the high fence.

“Your lover told me we’re moving up the schedule. Shouldn’t do this but once every few years. You should’ve gotten out that night. Joe shouldn’t have stopped you. Any idea why he did?”

I kicked at home plate, a drawing in the dirt. Aurora was a funny place that way—because of things being considered dangerous around the inmates, even home plate had to be just a drawing and not the real thing. The real things here were the fences and the factory-like buildings.

“No,” I said. “Maybe he’s in love with me and doesn’t want to lose me. I don’t care. He can go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”

“I once tried to get out all by myself,” Hype said, ignoring me. “It was back in the early fifties. I was just a kid. Me and my buddies. I tried to get out, but back then there was only one way—a coffin. Not a happy system. I didn’t know then that I’d rather be in here than out there.”

“Make sense, old man,” I said, frustrated. I wanted to kick him. The thought of spending another night in this place with Joe on top of me wasn’t my idea of living.

“A little patience’ll go a long way, Doer,” he said. It felt like a commandment.

He continued. “Then they started doing those tests—bombs and all kinds of things, twenty, thirty miles away. Some closer, they said. Some this side of the mountain.

“We lived below back then. Me and Skimp and Ralph. Others, too, but these were my tribe. We were shell-shocked and crazy, and we were put in with the paranoid schizophrenics and sociopaths and alcoholics—all of us together. Some restrained to a wall, some bound up in straitjackets. Some of us roaming free in the subterranean hallways. Skimp, he thought he was still on a submarine. He really did. But I knew where we were—in the farthest ring of hell.

“And then, one morning, around three a.m., I heard Skimp whimpering from his bunk. I go over there, because he had nightmares a lot. I usually woke him up and told him a story so he could fall back to sleep.

“Only, Skimp was barely there. His flesh had melted like cheese on a hot plate, until it was hard to tell where the sheets left off and Skimp began. He was making a noise through his nostrils. It was like someone snoring, only he was trying to scream.

“Others, too, crying out, and then I felt it—like my blood was spinning around. I heard since that it was like we got stuck in a microwave. The entire place seemed to shimmer, and I knew to cover my eyes. I had learned a little bit about these tests, and I knew that moist parts of the body were the most vulnerable. That’s why insects aren’t very affected by it—they’ve got exoskeletons. All their softs parts are on their insides. I felt drunk and happy, too, even while my mouth opened to scream, and I went to my hiding place, covering myself with blankets. I crawled as far back into my hiding place as I could go, and then I saw some broken concrete and started scraping at it. I managed to push my way through it, farther, into darkness. But I got away from the noise and the heat.

“Later, I heard that it was some test that had leaked out. Some underground nuclear testing. We were all exposed, those who survived. Never saw Skimp or Ralph again, and I was told they were transferred—back in those days, no one investigated anyone or anything. I knew they’d died, and I knew how they’d died. There were times I wished I’d died, too. Every day.

“That’s when I learned about my divinity. It was like Christ climbing the cross—he may or may not have been God before he climbed onto that cross, but you know for sure he was God once he was up there. I wasn’t God before that day, but afterward, I was.”

Hype was a terrific storyteller, and while I was in awe of that ability, I stared at him as if he were the most insane man on the face of the earth.

“So I found a way out,” he concluded.

“If that’s true, how come you don’t get out?”

“It’s my fate. Others can go through, but I must stay. It’s my duty. Trust me, you think God likes to be on Earth? It’s as much an asylum out there as it is in here.”

I was beginning to think that all of this talk about going through and getting out was an elaborate joke for which the only punch line would be my disappointment. I decided to hell with it all: The old man could not get me out no matter how terrific his stories were. I was going to spend the rest of my life with Joe pawing me.

I went to bed early, hoping to find some escape in dreams.

I awoke that night, a flashlight in my face.

10

Joe said, “Get up. This is what you want, right?”

His voice was calm, not the usual nocturnal passionate whisper of the Joe who caressed me. He hadn’t touched me at all. I was somewhat relieved.

“Huh?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

“You want to get out? Let’s go. You’ve got to take a shower first.”

I felt his hand tug at my wrist.

“Get the hell up,” he said.

The shower was cold.

I spread Ivory soap across my skin, rubbing it briskly under my arms, around my healing wound, down my stomach, thighs, backs of legs, between my toes. Joe watched me the whole time. His expression was constant: a stone statue without emotion.

“It doesn’t have to end like this,” I said. “I’m going to miss you.”

“Shut up,” he said. “I don’t like liars.”

After I toweled off, he led me, naked, down the dimly lit hall.

The alarm was usually on at the double doors at the end of the hall, but its light was shut off.

Joe pushed the door open, guiding me along. The place seemed dead.

Hearing the sound of footsteps in the next ward, he covered my mouth with his hand and drew me quickly into an inmate’s room.

Then, a few minutes later, we continued on to the cafeteria.

He had a key to the kitchen; he unlocked its door.

I followed him through the dark kitchen, careful to avoid bumping into the great metal counters and shelves.

Finally, he unlocked another door at the rear of the kitchen.

This led to a narrow hallway.

At the end of the hallway, another door, which was open.

Hype stood there, frozen in the flashlight beam.

11

“Hey,” I said.

Hype put a finger to his lips. He wore a bathrobe that seemed shiny purple in the light.

He turned, going ahead of us, with Joe behind me. I followed the old man down the stone steps.

We entered the old Aurora, the one that stretched for miles beneath the above ground Aurora. We walked single file down more narrow corridors, the sound of dripping water all around.

At one point, I felt something brush my feet—a large insect, perhaps, or a mouse. The place smelled of wet moss, and carried its own humidity, stronger than what existed in the upper world.

For a while it did seem that Hype had been right:

This was the deepest ring of hell.

But I’m getting out, I thought. I’ll go through any sewer that man has invented to get out. To go through. To be done with all this.

Joe rested his hand on my shoulder for a brief moment. He whispered in my ear, “You don’t have to do this. I was wrong. I love you. Don’t get out.”

I stopped, feeling his sweet breath on my neck. Even though I had been in Aurora only a little over four months, I had begun getting used to it. If I stayed longer, I would become part of it, and the outside world would be alien and terrifying to me. I saw it in other men, including Joe. This was the only world of importance to them.

“Why the change?” I asked.

“You don’t want to go through. I want you here with me.”

“No, thanks.” I put all the venom I could into those two words. I added, “And by the way, Joe, if I had a gun I’d shoot your balls off for what you did to me.”

“You don’t understand.” He shook his head like a hurt little boy.

Hype was already several steps ahead. I caught up with him while Joe lagged behind.

“I’m going out through that hiding place you talked about,” I guessed.

“No,” he said. When he got to a cell, he led me through the open doorway.

A feeble light emanated within the room—a yellowish-green light, as if glow-worms had been swiped along the walls until their phosphorescence remained.

It was your basic large tank, looking as if it had been compromised by several earthquakes over the past few years.

Joe entered behind me. “This is where Hype and his friends lived. This is where it happened.”

He waved the flashlight beam across the green light.

I shivered, because for a moment I felt as if the ghosts of those men were still here, trapped in the old Aurora.

“Tell him, Hype. Tell him.”

Hype wandered the room, as if measuring the paces.

“Ralph had this area. He had his papers and books—he was always a big reader. Skimp was over there,” he pointed to the opposite side of the cell, “his submarine deck.”

“Tell him the whole thing,” Joe said.

In the green light of the room, as I glanced back at Joe, I saw that he had a revolver in his right hand.

“Tell him,” he repeated.

“Where the hell did you get that?” I pointed to the gun.

“You can’t ever go back,” Hype said. “Once you’re out, you can never go back. I won’t let you back. Understood?”

I nodded. As if I was ever going to want to return to Aurora.

“Tell him,” Joe said to Hype. This time he pointed the gun at Hype.

Then, to me, he said, “The gun was down here. I get all my weapons here. We get all kinds of things down here. Hype is God, remember? He creates all things.”

‘To hell with this,” I said, figuring this bad make believe had gone too far. “You can’t get me out, can you?”

Hype nodded. “Yes, I can. I am God, Joe. Those underground tests, they made me God. They were my cross. I’m the only survivor. The orderlies, the doctors, the patients, I’m the only one. That’s when I became God.”

“You want to get out, right?” Joe snarled at me. “Right?” He waved the gun for me to move over to the far wall.

Hype turned, dropping his robe.

Beneath it he was naked, the skin of his back like a long festering sore. The imprint of hundreds of stitches all along his spine, across the back of his rib cage. To the right of this, a fist-sized cavity just above his left thigh.

“Tell him,” Joe said.

The old man began speaking, as if he couldn’t confess this to my face.

“Inside me is the door. The tunnel, Joe. To get through, you’ve got to enter me.”

The must vulgar aspect of this hit me, and I groaned in revulsion.

Joe laughed. “Not what you think, Doer. Not like what you like to do to me. Or vice versa. His skin changed after the tests. Down here, it changes again. Look—it’s like a river, look!”

At first I didn’t know what he was pointing at—his finger tapped against Hype’s wrinkled back.

Then, before I noticed any change, I felt something deep in my gut.

A tightening.

A terrible physical coiling within me, as if my body knew what was happening before my brain did.

I watched in horror as the old man’s skin rippled along the spine. A slit broke open from one of the ancient wounds. It widened, gaping.

Joe came closer, shining his flashlight into its crimson-spattered entry.

It was like a red velvet curtain, moist, undulating. A smell like a dead animal from within.

The scent, too, of fresh meat,

Joe pressed the gun against my head. “Go through.”

My first instinct was to resist.

Seconds later, Joe shot a bullet into the old man’s wound, and it expanded further like the mouth of a baby bird as it waits for its feeding.

Joe kissed my shoulder. “Goodbye, Doer.”

He pressed the gun to my head.

The old man’s back no longer seemed to be there; now it was a doorway, a tunnel toward some green light. Green light at the end of a long red road. His body had stretched its flesh out like a skinned animal, an animal-hide doorway.

With the gun against my head, Joe shoved me forward, into it.

I pushed my way through the slick red mass and followed the green light of atomic waste.

Once inside, the walls of crimson pushed me with a peristaltic motion deeper, against my will.

Tiny hooks of his bones caught the edge of my flesh, tugging backward while I was pressed into the opening.

12

We are all in here, all the others who got out through him.

Only, “out” didn’t mean out of Aurora, not officially. We’re out of our skins, drawn into that infested old man.

When I held the reins of him for an afternoon, I got him to go down and bribe the psych tech on duty.

I pulled up both of their files, Joe’s and Hype’s.

Joe was a murderer who had a penchant for cutting wounds in people and screwing the wounds. This was no surprise to me. Joe was a sick fuck. I knew it. Everyone who’s ever been with him knows it.

Hype was a guy who had been exposed to large amounts of radiation in the fifties. He had a couple of problems, one physical and one mental. The physical one I am well aware of, for the little bag rests at the base of my stomach, to the side and back. Because of health problems as a result of the radiation, he’d had a colostomy about twenty years back.

The mental problems were also apparent to me once I got out, once I got through.

He suffered from a growing case of multiple personality disorder.

I pulled my file up, too, and it listed:

Escaped.

I had a good laugh with Joe over these files.

Then God took over, and I had to go back down into the moist tissues of heaven and wait until it was my turn again.

There are prisons within prisons, and skins within skins. You can’t always see who someone is just by looking in his eyes.

Sometimes, others are there.

Sometimes, God is there.

“I am infinite,” the old man said. “I contain multitudes.”

Want More?

Read Night Asylum, 18 Stories of Mystery & Horror.

Click here to learn more.

MEET THE INMATES

Mysterious children surrounded by houseflies; a strange woman in a small town stalked by a preacher; boys trying to survive a terrifying boot camp; fraternity brothers who find a deeper brotherhood during a wintry Hell Week; a boy named Charlie, who may have more up his sleeve than meets the eye; a cop named Paul who discovers a tenement that opens the door into a place of nightmares — or heaven; Nix — a patient in an asylum — who holds the key to the secret geometry of night itself…and more.

Get the Book

Get the Newsletter

Get book updates, exclusive offers, news of contests & special treats for readers—become a V.I.P. member of Douglas Clegg’s long-running free newsletter.

Click here to subscribe now.

Also by Douglas Clegg

Click here to discover more fiction by Douglas Clegg.

STAND-ALONE NOVEL

Afterlife

Breeder

The Children’s Hour

Dark of the Eye

Goat Dance

The Halloween Man

The Hour Before Dark

Mr. Darkness

Naomi

Neverland

You Come When I Call You

NOVELLAS & SHORT NOVELS

The Attraction

The Dark Game (Two Novelettes)

Dinner with the Cannibal Sisters

Isis

The Necromancer

Purity

The Words

SERIES

THE HARROW SERIES

Nightmare House, Book 1

Mischief, Book 2

The Infinite, Book 3

The Abandoned, Book 4

The Necromancer (Prequel Novella)

Isis(Prequel Novella)

THE CRIMINALLY INSANE SERIES

Bad Karma, Book 1

Red Angel, Book 2

Night Cage, Book 3

THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY

The Priest of Blood, Book 1

The Lady of Serpents, Book 2

The Queen of Wolves, Book 3

THE CHRONICLES OF MORDRED

Mordred, Bastard Son (Book 1)

Mordred, Dragon Prince (Book 2)

COLLECTIONS

Lights Out: Collected Stories

Night Asylum

The Nightmare Chronicles

Wild Things

BOX SET BUNDLES

Bad Places (3 Novels)

Coming of Age (3 Dark Novellas)

Dark Rooms (3 Novels)

Criminally Insane: The Series (3 Novels)

Halloween Chillers

Harrow: Three Novels (Books 1-3)

Harrow: Four Novels (Books 1-4)

Haunts (8 Novel Box Set)

Lights Out (3 Collection Box Set)

Night Towns (3 Novels)

The Vampyricon Trilogy (3 Novels)

With more new novels, novellas and stories to come.

About the Author

Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neverland, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among many other novels, novellas and stories. His first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Berkley, Signet, Dorchester, Bantam Dell Doubleday, Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Alkemara Press and others.

A pioneer in the ebook world, his novel Naomi made international news when it was launched as the world’s first ebook serial in early 1999 and was called “the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace” by Publisher’s Weekly, covered in Time magazine, Business Week, Business 2.0, BBC Radio, NPR, USA Today and more. His book Purity was the first to be published via mobile phone in the U.S. in early 2001.

He is married, and lives and writes along the coast of New England.

@DouglasClegg

DouglasClegg

www.DouglasClegg.com

Disclaimer

The Nightmare Chronicles is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Publication Credits & Copyright

Copyright 1999 Douglas Clegg

This collection copyright 1999, but each of the previously published stories are copyright Douglas Clegg within the year in which they were first published.

Published by Alkemara Press in the United States.

Cover art provided by:

Damonza.com

The Words

A Novella of Supernatural Horror

For Bentley Little

“What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being…”

– M.R. James, from “Casting the Runes.”

1

The End Is Like This

After the last match goes out, he mouths the words to the Our Father, but it brings him no comfort.

He remembers The Veil.

He remembers the way things moved, and how the sky looked under its influence.

He doubts now that a prayer could be answered. He doubts everything he has come to believe about the world.

The echo of the last scream. He can hear it, even though the room is silent. It seems to be in his head now: the final cry.

Hope it’s final.

The scream is too seductive, he knows. He understands what’s out there.

It’s attracted to noise, because it doesn’t see with its eyes anymore. It sees by smell and sound and vibration.

He has begun to think of it by its new name, only he doesn’t want to ever say that name out loud. Again.

Your flesh won’t forget.

Prickly feeling along the backs of his hands, along his calves. In his mind, he goes through the alphabet, trying to latch onto something he can work around. Something that will give him a jump into remembering the words.

He presses himself against the wall as if it will hide him.

Rough stone. No light. Need light. Damn.

He thinks he must be delirious because the goofiest things go through his mind: Michelle’s phrase, Unfrigginlikely, Spaceman Mark.

Those aren’t the words. Spaceman Mark. Hey, Space! What planet you on today? Planet Dark, that’s what I’m on. Planet Midnight.

And out of matches.

The wind dies, momentarily, beyond the cracked window.

The damn ticking of the watch.

Someone’s heartbeat.

The sensation of freezing and burning alternately – a fever.

The sticky feeling under his armpits.

The rough feeling of his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

The interminable waiting.

Seconds that become hours in his mind. In those seconds, he is running through sounds in his head – the words? What are they? Laiya-oauwraii…no. That’s the beginning of the name. Don’t say it again. It might call it right to you. You might make it stronger. For all you know. What the hell are the words?

He clutches the carved bone in his left hand. It’s smooth in his fist. Like ivory, a tusk from some fallen beast. Slight ridges where the words are carved. Like trying to read Braille.

If only I could read them. Need to get light. Some light.

Distracted by the smell.

That would be the first one it got.

Over in the corner, something moves. Darkness against darkness.

Someone he can’t see in the dark is over there.

Eyesight is failure, Dash once told him. Perception is failure. All that there is, all that there ever will be, cannot be perceived in the light of day. At night, the only perceptions turn inward.

The words? he thinks. The words. Maybe if you remember them, you can stop it. Maybe it reverses. Or maybe if you just say them…

Moves his lips, trying to form vowel sounds.

The dry taste. Humid and weather-scorned all around.

In his throat, a desert.

Every word he has ever heard in his life spins through his mind. But not the words he needs.

Not the ones he wants to remember tonight.

A beautiful night. Dark. No light whatsoever but the ambient light of the world itself.

Summer. Humid. Post-storm. One of those rich storms that sweeps the sky with crackling blue and white lightning, and the roars of lions. But the storm has passed – and that curious wet silence remains.

Taste of brine in the air from the water, a few miles away.

He remembers summer storms like this – their majesty as they wash the June sky clean, bringing a gloom on their caped shoulders, but leaving behind not a trace of it. The smell of oak and beech and cedar and salt and the murky stink of the ponds and bogs. Their years together, all in those smells. All in the dark.

The night, summer, perhaps just a few hours before the sun might rise.

Might.

He wonders if he’ll ever see another storm. Another summer.

Another dawn.

Those damn words.

“Your flesh will remember the name even if your mind forgets,” Dash had told him, and he had still thought it was a game when Dash had said it. “The name gets in your bones and in your heart. Just by hearing it once. But the words are harder to remember. They don’t want you to know the words because it binds them. So, listen very carefully. Listen. Each time I say them, repeat them exactly back to me.”

He’s shivering. Sweating. Nausea and dizziness both within him, the pit of his stomach. Something’s scratchy around his balls – feels like a mosquito buzzing all along the inside of his legs. Twitching in his fingers. Tensing his entire body.

Afraid to take another breath.

A conversation replays in his head:

“It’s not that hard. Watch.”

“I can’t. I just…”

“All you do is take the thing and bring it down like this. Think of it as a game.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Don’t think of it like that. Pretend it’s a game. It doesn’t mean what it looks like. You’ve been trained to think this is bad by church and school and your parents. And the world outside. But it is not real. It is just a game, only nobody else knows this. They’re stupid. Nobody’s going to get hurt. Least of all one of us. Least of all you or me. I would never let it happen. You’re like my brother.”

“I know. But I can’t.”

“All right. I’ll do it. I’ll just do it. Just remember what you’re supposed to do. As soon as it happens. As soon as my eyes close. Promise? Okay?”

“Okay, okay.”

“And the words. After. If it’s too much. You know what to say. You remember?”

“Yes.”

“You know how to pronounce them? You have to know. If this gets out of hand, you can stop it. The name for me, and the words to stop it. If it’s too awful.”

“I know, I know.”

“’Cause it might get too awful. I don’t know.”

“Sure. Of course. I remember how to say them.”

“And the name?”

He has no problem remembering the name. He’d like to blot it out of his mind. The name is on the tip of his tongue, and he can’t seem to forget how to say it, how to pronounce it perfectly. The words have somehow vanished from his mind.

He tries to remember the words, now. How they sound. The language was foreign, but he couldn’t read them off the bone. Especially with no light. But even if he had some light, he knew the letters looked like scribbles and symbols. They didn’t look like sounds. All he can remember is the name, and he doesn’t want to remember that.

A name like that shouldn’t be said in a church.

A New England church. Saint Something. Old Something Church. Older than old, perhaps. Nearly a crypt. Made of slate and stone. Puritanical and lovely and a bit like a prison, now. Church of punishment. Rocky churchyard behind it.

He remembers the graves with the mud and the high grasses and the smell of wild onion and lavender, as if it were years ago rather than the past hour. Smell of summer, wet grass, and that fertile, splendid odor of new leaves, new blossoms.

The smell of life.

He is inside the church. In a room. The altar is at the opposite end.

Danny had the lighter, he thinks.

If I get it, maybe I can at least save her.

He wasn’t sure if the shape in the doorway was Danny, or the thing that he didn’t even want to name. Not Dash. Not anyone he had ever met or known.

An ‘It’. A Thing. A Creature. Something without a Name.

But it has a name. He knows the name, but he does not intend to ever say it again. He knows the name too well, but it’s the words he keeps trying to remember. The ones that are on the bone. The words that might stop it from continuing.

He tries to lick his lips, but it’s no use. His mouth is dry.

Dry from too much screaming.

Nearby, there’s a very slight noise. A sliver of a noise. He is sensitive to sound.

In the Nowhere.

Someone might’ve just died outside. He doesn’t know for sure. Who? He just heard the last of someone’s life in a slight moaning sound.

The open window. No breeze.

Just that sound.

A soft but unpleasant ohhhhhh.

The puppy whimpers. Somewhere nearby.

Other sounds, barely audible, seem huge.

Branches against the rooftop. Scraping lightly.

His heartbeat. A rapping hammer.

In the dark, the ticking of his watch is too loud. He slowly draws it from his wrist. Carefully, he presses it down into the left-hand pocket of his jeans. The watch clinks slightly against his keys. He holds his breath.

Needs to cough.

Fight it. Fight it. Swallow the cough. Don’t let it out.

Closes his eyes, against the darkness. Closes his eyes to block it out. To make it go away.

Holds his breath for another count. The cough is gone.

Brief sound.

Someone’s breathing. Over there. Across the room. Small room. More than closet, less than room.

Her? Thank god. Thank god. He licks his lips. Mouth, dry.

After a few minutes, he can just make out her shape.

He’s staring at her, and she’s staring at him, but they can’t really see each other. Just forms in the dark. Michelle? Ambient light from beneath cracks in the walls creates a barely visible aura around her as he stares.

Dead of night. Dread of night.

The dread comes after the knowledge. He remembers the line from the book. That awful book that he thought was fiction.

But the words do not come to him. The sounds of them, just beyond his memory.

Breathing hard, but as quietly as he can.

Smells his own breath. The stink of his underarms. Glaze of sweat covering his body. Shirt plastered to him. Hair wet and greasy against his scalp.

The chill that hasn’t left him, not since he came up out of the earth. Burning chill.

She’s going to do it.

Or I am.

One of them is going to scream again. He knows it. He wasn’t even sure if he had stopped screaming a half hour before.

Problem is, when the screaming starts, it happens.

And neither of them wants it to happen.

But the puppy is okay.

It doesn’t want the puppy.

That’s what someone said before. How many minutes ago? Did he say it? Had he said it and just not remembered it? “It doesn’t want the puppy.”

She whispers something. Or else he imagines she whispers.

Or it’s the sound of the leaves on the trees, brushing the rooftop.

If it’s her, it’s wrong for her to whisper. Neither of them knows what decibel level it needs to find them, but she whispers anyway, “Please say it’s a game. Please god, say it’s a game.”

He’s not close enough, but he wants to hold her. Hold her tight. Rewind the night back to day, back a year or more, so he can undo it all. He wants everything to turn out okay, but he knows it won’t.

Most of all, he wants her to shut her mouth up. He wants to hold her and press his lips or his hand against her mouth and keep in whatever she’s trying to let out.

Silence. Come on, silence. Don’t...

Even her whisper is too loud.

And it hears her.

And it wants to make her scream.

If she screams, it’s all over.

Not just the game. The game will never be over.

If we can just hold out ‘til daylight, he thinks.

But the noise begins. From her throat. He wants to shut her up, but he can’t. He can’t. She’s over there in the dark, and he’s on the other side of the room from her.

The scream is coming up from her lungs in a staccato gurgle.

She can’t hold it in.

That’s when he hears the sound.

Not her scream.

Dear Sweet Jesus, do not let that noise out of your mouth. Do not scream. It is inside here. With us.

He hears the sound it makes as it moves.

Wet, popping sounds, like bones springing free of joints, and then that stink of over ripeness.

Rotten. Steaming.

Then that awful thumping begins again.

And the steady hissing, as if dozens of snakes trail behind it.

He leans back against the wall, wanting to press himself into the wood as far as he can go. Wanting his molecules to change and move through the wood so he can just escape.

He’s praying so hard he feels like his skull is going to crack open, only the prayers are all messed up and he’s sure they don’t work if you get them wrong. Dear God, Dear Jesus, please help this poor sinner, Hail Mary, full of grace, Hail Mary, full of grace and the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

It whispers something in the darkness.

He begins shivering when he hears the words.

The girl in the corner finally begins to scream as if she already knows the game is up.

It sweeps toward her. Sweeps.

He can’t stop it. He’s too scared. He’s so scared he’s afraid he’s going to pee his pants and start giggling because something inside his head is going a little haywire.

And then, he feels the wet fingers – he hopes they’re fingers – along his ankles.

He tries to remain perfectly still.

Perfectly still.

Like I’m not alive.

Like I’m not even here.

Remember. Come on. Remember. Remember.

Damn it, the words.

2

Before the Night

All that screaming and darkness happened one night when they were eighteen, but the truth was, it started long before, at least for Mark.

The longest day of the year; the shortest night of the year. But they didn’t take off for the party until the dark had fallen. No one in his right mind went to a party early.

But that was the end of it.

The beginning was a game. A game within a game.

The game was about darkness.

There was a history of minor corruption between Mark and Dash that began when they were thirteen.

Dash was named, he told Mark early in their friendship, for Dashiell Hammett, a writer. Dash refused to read anything Hammett had written.

Mark was called the Spaceman because, he assumed, he must’ve seemed spacey at times. He didn’t do any illegal drugs, but other kids were sure he did. Dash only called Mark “Marco.”

“Names have power,” Dash told him. “Only I can call you Marco.”

Back when they were a bit younger, Mark was completely unnoticeable. He had few friends, and tended to mumble in school. Like the other students at the Gardner School, he had been pulled from public school for one mysterious reason or another.

He arrived, newly thirteen, at the Gardner School in Manosset Sound, at a spur in the Massachusetts coastline. It was nearly a forty minute drive from his home, which was in an outer suburb of Boston.

Some nights, he slept over at the boarding department, but most, he went home. Sometimes, his mother or father drove him to school; sometimes he carpooled with another older student who had a car.

The Gardner School was the only school that would take him after the little incident with the knife.

“I found it out on the blacktop,” he’d told the guidance counselor at his previous school. “I did not bring it to school. I didn’t threaten to kill anyone. And I didn’t stab him. I held it up and I wanted him to get away from me. He was a bully. He tried to push me. He got cut because he pushed me on the blacktop and then he was about to hit me and I put the knife up between us.”

Dash told Mark that he was at the Gardner School for something messed up, too.

“I have an IQ of 180, so I’m apparently really smart only I’m bored with school already. Why don’t they get better teachers here? It costs a fortune to go here. You’d think they could hire a better group.”

They’d bonded immediately.

They both turned up in French class, sitting next to each other in eighth grade. They found themselves with lockers side by side. Mark was an altar boy at St. Peter’s. As he got into his robe one Sunday, there was Dash inside one of the confessionals, his head poking out from behind the narrow doorway.

“Wanna smoke?”

“How’d you get out here?” Mark asked. Dash lived closer to school than to Mark’s neighborhood.

“Bus.”

“I didn’t know you were Catholic.”

“I’m not,” Dash said. “I don’t believe in that stuff. I was just waiting for you to get off-duty. And have a smoke. I saw you smoke in the stalls at school. I like to hang out in graveyards, and there’s a nice one behind this god place. I was having a smoke, and I saw you troop in with all the other god people.”

Dash had a funny rhythm to his speaking voice, even then. As if he were preparing lectures, an old professor in the body of an adolescent.

“We’re too young to smoke,” Mark said. “And it’s bad for you.”

“Like I said, I saw you smoke at school. Or at least, I thought it was you. Do you have vices? Self-destructive ones?”

Mark only hesitated a moment. He had never smoked a cigarette before in his life.

“They might catch us in there.”

“Nope. Confessional’s all empty. Come on,” Dash said.

He held up a pack of Marlboros. “This is the slowest way of killing yourself. One cigarette at a time, but if you start young enough, it’ll help.”

“Not everyone dies from that,” Mark said.

“Everyone dies from something. That’s the problem of life. You’re just going to die,” Dash said. “Me, I’ll get hooked on any number of things if I can. It’s always good to improve the odds if you want to succeed.”

“That’s like suicide. That’s a sin.”

“For you. You’re Catholic. You have that whole resurrection of the body thing and the life everlasting, choirboy,” Dash said. “Not that I don’t find that appealing. I’d love to die and then come back. Conquering death should be the alternate goal if dying is the common one. I’d love to be a messiah. It would suit me. Now, come on, let’s have a smoke.”

In school, they went into the janitor’s closet -- a deep broom closet that had stacks of Playboys beneath a pile of cleaning supplies. The closet stank of Comet and bleach and oil.

“Just shut off the lights.”

“Why?”

“Just shut ‘em off.”

“Okay.”

Off went the lights.

“Listen,” Dash said.

“To what?”

“Just listen. Hear my breathing? Now?”

Mark mumbled something about bad breath.

“See? This is the Nowhere,” Dash said.

“This definitely is nowhere.”

“The Nowhere. It’s a different place than when the lights are on,” Dash said. “Different rules apply. Hell, there are no rules. With the light on, it’s all rules and regulations and laws and order. But with the dark, it’s a different world. When you’re dead, you’re in the dark.”

“When I’m dead, I’ll be somewhere else.”

“You think so?” Dash asked. “Now here’s the thing. I know these people who believe they talk to the dead.”

“Psychics?” Mark said.

“No, none of that crap. I mean people who actually believe they talk to the dead. They summon them from graves. They believe it. I don’t know if I believe it yet.”

“Are they in school?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I met them in a graveyard. Manosset has more than just the rocky beach. There’s the Old Church. They were there. Doing a ceremony. They were sacrificing a turtle.”

“Gross.”

“It wasn’t as gross as you’d think,” Dash said. “They told me all about the Nowhere. How it changes the world. Darkness. Night. Absence of light. And in the dark, they think they talk to the dead. They have an old religion. Older than, well, yours. One of them told me that people still practice it, only no one ever talks about it. Bands of believers, basically. It’s not so much different than yours. Only, they believe in a messiah of darkness. A savior who comes by night.”

“You making this up?”

“I wish I were. I don’t really believe it. But they do. I find it a very attractive kind of belief system. It’s this interesting idea. And you know how I like interesting ideas. And you’ve got this absolute connection between death and life. Bringing back the dead,” Dash said this last part in full old professor mode. Then, he asked, “Do you believe in God?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then you might as well believe in the Nowhere. I mean, virgins and miracles and raising from the dead. It’s not so far from what they believe.”

“You mean your made-up people who sacrifice turtles?”

“Not just turtles,” Dash said. “Other stuff, too. Goats sometimes. Chickens. I’ll introduce you to them one night. Did you know that a man named Crossing actually wrote several stories about their group? More than a hundred years ago. He was one of them. People thought he was writing fiction, but apparently, none of it was made up. I’ll loan you one of his books sometime. He said that the darkness has a reality to it that lets illogic through. Isn’t that a cool way of saying it? The darkness lets illogic through. He called it The Veil.”

He paused.

Smoking.

“It’s not so different than anything else. It’s almost logical. There aren’t any virgins in it. But there are some miracles. Take the streets: lights on. It’s normal. Boring. At night? Lights out. No light. No moonlight even, it’s a place where you make up the rules. You define the space. You create what’s there and what’s not,” Dash said, his breath all warm. “You create what’s there. And maybe it creates what’s there.”

“It?”

“The Nowhere. There’s something out there. In the dark. And if you’re in it long enough, it comes out. That’s why they had to do the sacrifices. They told me it stops worse things from happening. You know about eastern philosophy?”

Mark did not.

“Some of it is about how it’s all an illusion. Everything we think we see. It’s not what’s really there. And if that’s true, maybe what’s really there is something else. Only we don’t see it because we’re too busy perceiving the crap we expect to see. We’re taught from an early age to see things a certain way, and we name things so that they stay that way. But the darkness is fluid. It defies perception. You know how your eyeball works? How everything you see, you’re really seeing upside-down, only your eye somehow adjusts it back again?”

Mark had never heard of this before. Sometimes, Dash’s ideas went right over his head; or else they hit him square in the face and gave him massive headaches.

“Or a rose. They’re not really red. How it’s the absence of some pigment, and how all the other colors are there, and it somehow makes it red? But if you turn off the light, is the rose still red? Or is it no color? Is it even a rose? Does it become something else in the dark? And do you become something else in the dark?”

“Cool,” Mark said. “But, I mean, I’m…me. I’m me even now. Even in the dark.”

“Are you? Are you sure?”

Mark laughed a little.

“I’m not joking. Are you the same you in the dark as you were when the light was on?” Dash asked. “Would you do the same things in the light of day that you’d do if no one could see you? Do you ever wonder why people have sex in the dark?”

Mark didn’t answer.

“Maybe it’s ‘because they can be something different in the dark. Or maybe they really are something different in the dark,” Dash said. “Maybe right now, you’re not even Mark. Maybe you’re something else. Do you believe in life after death?”

“Well,” Mark fumbled with his thoughts. “I’m sort of Catholic.”

“Sorta?”

Mark shrugged. “I believe some things and not others.”

“The only thing I believe about Christianity is the resurrection of the body. I mean, I think dead bodies still have somebody in them. Maybe we do them a disservice by burying them.”

“What, you mean if you didn’t bury a body it would just be fine?”

“Not saying that,” Dash said. “If you can’t think deeper than that, Marco, I don’t know about you. I just don’t know. I mean, what are those caskets for? They’re like little traps. What if we could all roll the stones away from our tombs after we die? Maybe there’d be more messiahs around. Who knows? Let me give you a rundown on deity.

“First, God’s name is not God. Second, in the Old Testament, they called him Yahweh or Jehovah. In Greek, Deus. The Greek name for the top dog god was Zeus. Pretty close to Deus, don’t you think? And Jehovah is pretty close to the Roman god, Jove, alias Jupiter.

“I won’t even go into what I learned about the goddess Ishtar and her relationship to your Queen of Heaven. You don’t want to know what the word Easter comes from, trust me. It would blow you out of that little church world you’re in. God, Yahweh, what have you. And none of these are the names of God, and even with God, there are other gods.

“That’s why you have this commandment, ‘Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me.’ It’s because there are other ones. And people can’t say their names because no one really knows how to say the names. They used to. That’s what priests in ancient times did. That was their power. They knew the real names of the gods. And naming them means bringing them. Invoking them.

“And that’s what these people in the Nowhere have. For centuries, they’ve kept alive the name of a particular god. Maybe it’s ‘the’ God. I don’t know. But the name of the god is the power. And the god of the Nowhere is all about death and resurrection and darkness.”

Dash had been reading a lot.

He claimed to have read the Bible three times till he knew it backward and forward, and a book called the Aegyptian Book of Darkness. He spoke of Kierkegaard and Kant and Buddha and Hesse and Yeats and Eliot and someone named Robert Graves and someone named Colin Wilson and about quantum something, and about transformations and chiaroscuro and shadows.

He loaned books to Mark, and asked him questions about what was in them.

Mark found it irresistible, although the books were tough to get through.

Only the short stories by Wacey Crossing seemed to be any fun. In them, Crossing wrote about ancient practices that called up creatures of beauty and malevolence. He even mentioned Manosset Sound by name, as if these practices happened there in the 1800s. T.S. Eliot and Robert Graves were a little rougher going, although Mark loved a book called Demien by Herman Hesse.

Dash told Mark that, in the dark, everywhere was Nowhere. And it was better to be in the Nowhere than in the Somewhere.

Particularly if you were like one of them.

A bit outcast. A bit funky. A bit eccentric. A bit different.

“Nowhere guys,” Dash said.

Their favorite song became “Nowhere Man.”

They loved to say to their parents – when asked, “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere. Honest. Just Nowhere.”

And the Nowhere was always dark, and always somewhere else.

But Mark didn’t ever get to meet these “people of the Nowhere,” as he began thinking of them.

Dash mentioned them now and again; he acted as if he were getting close to them in some way that wasn’t expressed. He became secretive about some of the goings-on when Mark wasn’t with him.

“There’s a ceremony they have called the Tempting. Each of them cuts his left arm open and spills it over a newly dug grave. They say some ancient words, and begin chanting something I still can’t make out. They have these stones and they put the words on them, and dip them in this syrupy mixture, and then put the stones under their tongues, and the words are always inside them after that. Their bodies memorize them or something. They don’t even use their minds. It’s weird. And then, one of them becomes possessed by the dead person.”

Mark assumed it was made-up, stolen from Wacey Crossing’s stories, and as a year or so passed, he grew to appreciate Dash’s offbeat and dark sense of humor.

Once, together again in some dark place, hanging out, Dash asked, “Do you love me?”

“Excuse you?”

“I don’t mean that,” Dash said. “I mean, do you love me. Like a brother. Like we have a bond?”

Mark thought a minute, feeling uncomfortable with the question.

“Sure. Like a brother.”

“We’ve got to have that bond to make any of it worthwhile. I mean, we’ll get married to some babes someday and do all kinds of stuff, but if we love each other like that – like brothers – than we can move mountains.”

“Sure,” Mark said, but decided to turn the light on the back porch at his parent’s house.

He was surprised by what he saw.

Dash sat next to him, but he had a hypodermic needle in his arm, just withdrawing it.

“What the hell is that?”

Dash held the needle up. “It’s not for you. Don’t worry.”

“You a junkie? Dash? What the hell is that?”

“It’s not heroin. Jesus, it’s The Veil,” but Dash would not explain further. He took the needle, covered it, and pressed it into a plastic case that looked more suitable to a toothbrush. “See? I’m not tripping out or anything. Don’t freak.”

Dash reached up to shut the light off.

Dark again.

Mark sat there wondering if he shouldn’t end the friendship or talk to someone at school about what seemed to be Dash’s latest self-destructive habit.

But he didn’t.

He did what others probably did when their best friends were on drugs – he somehow just put it out of his mind, because Dash never seemed high or wired.

And Mark didn’t see much evidence of the hypodermic needle again. Nor did he look for it.

After a few months or so, Mark blocked that moment from his mind. Everything seemed normal, in its own messed up way.

Dash was his only real friend at school, anyway.

On a night-smitten country road, Dash would flick the headlights off.

Suddenly, it was as if the world vanished. They were in a car with the world gone.

With just a sense of “road.” A sense of “nowhere.”

Dash started doing the headlight trick before he even had his license. This was back when he had managed to steal his brother’s car and sneak out in the night.

He’d pick Mark up down the hill from where he lived. Always after midnight.

Mark would be out there waiting for him, waiting for the adventure.

“I been here forever,” he’d say.

“Forever must last about fifteen minutes,” Dash said, giving him a gentle punch to the shoulder.

They’d go to parties, or sneak off and grab a burger, or find out where some of the other guys were hanging out, smoking, drinking. Sometimes, they just watched people make out in their cars.

Neither one of them did much wild stuff. Mark even wrote down what he called the Nowhere Manifesto, but he tore it up one afternoon, worried that his mother might find it.

At the end of most evenings, they just called it a night and Dash dropped Mark off at his house.

But, on some nights, Dash took Mark to the graveyard behind the old church.

Mark never saw him draw the needle out again, but he knew that when Dash asked him to wait in the car a second, he might be going into the darkness to shoot up with whatever he used. The Veil.

Mark could ignore it. It didn’t matter. They were friends.

Mark got out of the car this one time, and Dash, up near the church, whistled to him to come on up the path to the graves.

It was not Mark’s church, nor was it Dash’s. It was older and more of a historic landmark than a functioning church. All Mark knew about it was that the founding fathers of the area had built it, or built the original building that no longer existed.

The graves behind it had those names like Goody Something and Sir Walter John Something, but most of the gravestones were rubbed smooth and coated with a slimy ooze of moss and yellow-green muck.

A bog, just the other side of a thin line of trees, had flooded the area, so they walked in mud and damp weeds.

“This is where I saw them,” Dash said. “This is where they spoke to me. They showed me The Veil for the first time. Here.”

Mark glanced around, but they were alone together.

“They asked me to tell them my heart’s desire,” Dash said. He went over and sat on a long flat stone. He patted the area beside him. Mark went over and joined him. “They told me that the Nowhere needed guys like me. Maybe like you, too.”

“Are they some kind of witch cult?” Mark asked, chin in his hand. He stared across the expanse of field and wood beyond the old church. “Do they worship Satan?”

Dash grinned. “No. Not witches. Not Satan. That’s all fairly new stuff. This is older than that. Long before. They’re wise people, though. They know things. They believe that they talk to the dead. They believe the dead tell them things. They know the name of all the different gods. The real names. The names of power. I don’t know how they do. They knew things about me that even my mother wouldn’t know. Even you wouldn’t know.”

“Like what?”

“You don’t want to know,” Dash said. “There are some things I wouldn’t want people to know. But they knew.”

“Is it about why you had to leave the other school?”

Dash ignored the question. “Want to know something funny?”

Mark shrugged.

“They told me about you. This was before we met. They told me about that thing you did. When you were eleven.”

“What thing?”

“You know,” Dash said. “With the knife. Don’t worry. It’s kind of cool.”

Dash put his hand on Mark’s shoulder. Felt his breath against his ear.

“I did something terrible when I was twelve,” Dash whispered. “Something you can’t ever tell anyone else in the whole world, or I will hunt you down and kill you and tear out your heart and cut the eyes out of your face. Understood? We’re fifteen, but when you’re a kid – I mean a little kid – you do things without really knowing why. You’re changing. Everything is changing. You have these impulses. You do things because something inside you tells you to do them.

“I once saw the most beautiful dead woman in the world, lying on the ground. She had killed herself, but it left no marks on her because she took pills. She was naked. I was caught doing something to her. But it wasn’t what you think. Nothing perverted. She was so beautiful I didn’t want to hurt her, even when she was dead and was beyond hurting. And they knew about what I did. They had spoken to her. The Nowhere people. After she died.

“They had gone to where she was buried, and they’d dug her up from the grave. She told them about me, about what I did, and they think I’m some kind of messiah because of it. Like it was a sign that I was the golden child or something.”

On the phone, the next afternoon, a Saturday:

“I made it all up. None of it’s true,” Dash said, and then hung up.

Mark didn’t see Dash for awhile, but eventually, Mark saw Dash’s car idling on the street beneath his bedroom window.

Mark was furious with his father for taking away his stereo because of a drop in grades, and he snuck out the back of the house and got in the car and told Dash, “It’s about time you showed your sorry face.”

Once, they narrowly missed being hit by a car that was following Dash's car too closely. They followed the car for miles just to annoy the driver.

They planned raids on some houses, too.

When a family was out of town, Mark and Dash would go out in the dark, late as they could stand and still feel awake.

They’d break in, way out in some suburban neighborhood. They wouldn’t take anything from the home. They’d just get in through some window – it was easy to jimmy one of them open – and see what the house was like on the inside.

They wouldn’t disturb anything. They kept the lights out, and wandered room to room.

Dash said he wanted to see how other people lived, what they owned, what they had.

Mark once said it seemed psycho to do it but Dash reassured him that they weren’t doing any harm.

Sitting there, on someone else’s sofa, Dash would sometimes speak in some language that wasn’t English. They weren’t any kind of language Mark had ever heard.

He would say a few of these words and, if Mark asked about them, Dash would say that he hadn’t said anything at all.

Sometimes, they’d move a book around on a bookshelf. Or they’d put a CD out of its case and put it on a windowsill. Just enough that it might seem curious to the family, returning from a weekend away.

But this was the worst of what they did together, and it really wasn’t much. Some of the other guys at school regularly shoplifted. Others were smoking marijuana half the school day. Others were doing much worse.

Mark assured himself that what he and Dash did was fairly innocent. It really hurt no one. He tried not to think about that needle that Dash had. He didn’t really see it, although sometimes he noticed the plastic toothbrush carrier inside Dash’s green army jacket.

Although Mark and Dash loved girls and talked about them as much as any other guy in school, they really adored each other. They could’ve been brothers. Before they’d met – at thirteen – nobody would’ve thought they resembled each other. But by fifteen, they could’ve been twins.

Dash made Mark promise to be his Best Man at his wedding, whenever it happened; Mark asked Dash to be the godfather of his first kid, whenever it came into the world.

In the Nowhere, sometimes, Mark would say things to Dash that he never told anyone else. When Mark got dumped by Emmie, he told Dash first.

When Dash decided he was going to kill himself rather than grow up, he only told Mark.

“That’s right,” Dash said. “Why turn into some corporate robot and end up like our dads? I’d do it with a knife. I’ll become one with the Nowhere. You?”

“Hanging. The front staircase.”

“Do it at my folks’ place. In the foyer. From the chandelier,” Dash said. “In the dark.”

They had a good laugh about it, and then shared a cigarette.

“What about those people?”

“What people?”

“The ones,” Mark said, grabbing the cigarette from Dash’s mouth, “that were in the graveyard. The ones you told me about.”

Dash flicked on the light. Regarded Mark with a nearly mistrustful look. His eyes were bloodshot. “Listen, they’re dangerous, sometimes. They showed me some things that were kind of nasty.”

“Like what?”

Dash shivered slightly. Mark couldn’t tell if he was just joking or not.

“Just some really bad shit,” he said. “They have these ceremonies that you have to study. I’ve been studying them for a long time now, and I still don’t completely understand them.”

“Why haven’t I met them?”

“They decide who meets them and who doesn’t,” Dash said.

“I thought you made them up,” Mark laughed again, puffing on the cigarette. “To scare me. You told me you made it all up. Remember?”

“No,” Dash said. “I got a little scared. I was worried they might come after you. The priests of the Nowhere are real. They’re practically holy. They’re really good people, but they do some nasty shit. I’m sort of into what they do.”

“Sort of philosophically,” Mark added.

“Maybe,” Dash said. “Give me that cig back, or go buy a new pack.”

Dash would end the night out in the middle of godforsaken nowhere, spinning the car in the mud, or gliding down an icy patch of road, the back-end of the car fish-tailing.

All around them, the dark, as if they drove inside their own minds, and the world existed only for them.

They could talk about their deepest thoughts, argue philosophy, their sense of the meaning of life and if there was one at all. They determined that there was no meaning to life, but to truly enjoy life, they each must act as if there were a meaning to it.

Their understanding of girls became legendary, as they discussed sexual availability versus the sacred virgin as it applied to the girls they knew; misunderstanding of other boys in school, which manifested in an open contempt for jocks and their football parties; they shared their love for Herman Hesse’s novels and Joan Armatrading albums and this writer with the unusual name of Wacey Crossing who wrote When Nowhere Comes and other books in the 1800s.

Dash owned three Wacey Crossing books, all short stories, and their bindings were leathery and cracked like old Bibles, and inside the books, people had written messy illegible notes all in the margins and drawn what looked like dirty pictures of naked women with huge breasts in the front and back pages.

The Crossing stories were about a mystery cult that had survived centuries of persecution, misshapen creatures that lived beneath graves, and ancient ones that prowled the darkness.

Mark borrowed each of them, and read them thoroughly, enjoying the terribleness of the punishments meted out to those who treated the Nowhere people badly. There were six primary deities in the Crossing stories, all with nicknames: the Devourer, She Who Befouls The Night, Hallingorianang-the-Eater-of-Souls, Oliara-the-Sword-of-Fire, The Swarmgod of the Thousand Stings, The Pope of Pestilence, and Julaiiar the Conqueror.

Mark began calling Dash “the Devourer,” and he in turn might call Mark “Swarmgod.”

It definitely sealed their fates within weirdo-hood. Mark was perfectly happy with that.

They dreamed together, aloud, of what they’d do if they had the powers of Julaiiar the Conqueror who came in Shadow and cut the heads off friend and foe; or if She Who Befouls the Night decided to make it with Oliara-the-Sword-of-Fire, what kind of kid they’d produce.

It all happened when the lights went out.

Heading down some lonesome road, the headlights off. They’d light their cigarettes, and the world would change from its unsubtle self to some kind of dark wonderland.

Even though Mark might be in the backseat with a current girlfriend making out and doing everything two teens can do with each other while still keeping most of their clothes on, it was Dash who made him feel as if it were just their world: in the car, on a dark road, with nothing but the unexpected wonders of night around.

And one night, Rachel Cowan had a big party out at the country place her folks had, a few weeks after graduation, and everybody they knew was going.

Michelle and Danny needed a lift, and even though Dash and Rachel went out once on a date and now didn’t get along very well, Mark convinced him to go.

“This is a perfect night for this,” Dash said.

“Yeah?” Mark asked, grabbing a cooler of beer. Checked his watch: 10:15. “I figure the party’ll be hoppin’ by eleven.”

“It’s a sacred night to the Nowhere. It’s a night they call Lifting the Veil.”

“Oh,” Mark said, used to Dash’s tales of the Nowhere and its priests.

Dash whispered to him, as Mark slid into the front seat next to him, “Let’s have some fun with them. Okay?”

Mark couldn’t reply, because Danny had already gotten in the back of the car, and Michelle rapped at Mark’s window for him to unlock her door. In her arms, a plastic and wire cage.

She brought a stupid puppy from her sister’s kennels as a surprise birthday gift for Rachel, who had just turned nineteen, and whose dog had recently passed away.

“Just a little fun,” Dash said. “For a sacred night.”

Then, he reached around to unlock the door for Michelle.

3

The Night Begins

Dash flicked the headlights off.

The night came up like veils of shadow against shadow – purple darkness, black darkness, and the curious ambient light of the earth itself – particles of illumination from unknown sources.

Reflections of slivered moonlight off distant ponds. It was beautiful, Mark thought.

The narrow, winding road was ripe with pot-holes and wounds, and the June-fat trees hung low over it – it was a beautiful world as far as Mark was concerned, and he felt comfortable there with Dash in the front seat, their world, their Nowhere surrounded them.

Mark glanced over at Dash, beside him. Dash in his green army jacket, with holes through out it. Beneath, he wore a black t-shirt. Even in the summer he wore the jacket, his emblem of weirdo-hood, of not abandoning his outcast nature.

Smoke from his mouth. The red glow of the cigarette lit Dash’s features. His hair had gone from brown to dark blue with fiery tinges where it flopped around his eyes. His eyes seemed to have a light of their own.

Dash smiled, showing all his teeth.

It was not pitch black quite yet, for the moon half-lit the world. Its light, diffuse behind scalloped clouds, hinted the outline of a dilapidated farmhouse with its property cut in a ragged square from the encroaching forest, and a balding fringe of dead trees at the edge of the road before the property. A single light glowed in the house, and it somehow made Mark think about loneliness, despite being there with his friends.

He wondered what he would do – now that college loomed, and he and Dash would probably grow out of their friendship, as all friends seemed to after high school. He didn’t want it to happen, but there was an inevitability to it – they would move on and stay friends, but lose that closeness, that brotherhood they felt. The farmhouse became a blur as Dash recklessly swung the steering wheel to negotiate a curve in the road.

Then, the woods appeared again, thick and dark, and another turn, another break in the woods cut by a stream and ditch to the left.

They passed what seemed at first an empty, desolate field, and there came the moon across it, a white sickle of moon. It was not empty, but was some kind of cemetery – Mark didn’t recognize it at first, but then knew he had been there before – of course, he thought, it was here, the Old Church is here. Saint Something.

They had been mostly silent in the car – me and Dash in front, our world, our night world.

Mark grabbed another beer from the back, and nearly stuck his hand down Michelle’s shirt – she was sure I was making a grab for her, but Danny already had his hand halfway down her shirt, and suddenly something stank like a dead animal in the car, and I knew it was the puppy, in his crate. It was whimpering.

Michelle, after nearly slapping him, reached back and thrust a finger through the small Kari-Kennel opening and murmured, “That’s okay, baby, that’s okay,” then, she reached up and flicked on the car’s interior light. “Some light in here would be nice. What’s this thing with darkness?”

“Darkness is cool,” Mark said.

“Friggin’ Goth,” Michelle said; Mark was not a Goth. He was just a guy who felt better in the dark. With friends. In the car. It was his comfort zone.

“Are you sure Rachel wants a new dog?” Dash asked. “She can’t exactly take it to college with her.”

“I already talked to her mom about it. Her mom’s going to keep it while Rachel’s at Smith.”

“She got into Smith?” Mark asked.

“Last minute,” Michelle said.

“Where are you two going?” Danny asked, fairly innocently. With the question, came the unspoken: they were a couple to some extent. Mark and Dash were paired in the minds of their classmates.

“How could you not guess?” Michelle huffed. “They’ve practically been talking about it since sophomore year.”

“Oh, yeah,” Danny said. “I thought maybe Mark might go to Georgetown.”

“I didn’t want to go to Georgetown,” Mark said. Then, he added, “Really. I didn’t.”

“U-Mass for us,” Dash said.

Mark sniffed at the air. “Who farted?”

“That dog crapped,” Dash said. “He needs to go outside. Not in the car.”

Mark laughed, popped open the beer, and reached for the radio buttons. Dash rolled down a window, and the humidity poured in – a gentle steam. He switched the air conditioning up to a higher level.

Michelle began lecturing Dash on why the puppy was in the car in the first place, and how Rachel had wanted the puppy ever since her last dog was hit by a car out on the highway; and how, even though we were headed for “what no doubt is going to be some kind of brawl,” the puppy would be fine, and when they got to Rachel’s house, she’d let it out to do its business in the wild.

“Whoa!” Dash cried out, “that was close!” Another pair of headlights, in the opposite lane from them, fast approaching and crossing the invisible line in the road. Dash swung the car to the right a little too hard, and they all felt the car leaning into the ditch on that side.

Then, back to normal, driving in the dark.

“Do you really want to hurt me?” Mark began singing along with the radio, which he’d very wisely turned up slightly to drown out Michelle’s whine. “Jesus, nothing but oldies.”

He punched the radio buttons, but the best he could find was a heavy metal.

Briefly, he turned the sound up high; Dash reached over and switched the radio off. Then, he switched it back on, and a voice came up that was nearly monotone, “And the angel carried a crown and a burning sword, and sayeth unto…”

“‘Jesus radio. I love it. Selling God on the airwaves without really knowing all about God,” Dash said, switching to a soft rock station. “I like oldies better.”

“Look,” Danny said, rising from the back seat. “I think that’s Carbo’s truck over there. Hell, did Rachel even invite the dropouts?”

“That redneck,” Michelle whispered, as if no one would hear her. “Carbo is such a hillbilly. I’m surprised he ever even got into Gardner.” She drew the little yellow puppy from the crate into her arms. She let it lick her all over her face. Her shirt was still unbuttoned, and she wore no bra. Mark could make out the roundish mounds of her breasts, glancing back at her for a second too long. He found them unappealing. They weren’t as big as they looked when covered up.

Perhaps it was because it was Michelle, whom Mark found generally unappealing.

She had a well-bred look, as if her parents had never been in love, but had know that between their checkbooks, their inheritances, and their basic health, they should mate and produce offspring with equally good checkbooks, inheritances, and health. Like some alien life form that must have progeny in order to conquer the earth.

Michelle was the natural product of this loveless but purposeful union.

He had seen her type throughout high school – she was not a prototype the way Dash was, or even Rachel, who was a true original. She was just one of the herd. Dash had a thing for her, but he said that his interest didn’t go much past the flesh.

“She’s a copy of a copy of a copy. But with an especially nice rack,” he’d said at some point.

Michelle was mass-produced. She was one of many rich girls with not a lot going on other than her birth certificate and her trust fund. She had teeth – and a lot of them – and hair, and a strangely seductive little jaw of determination that waggled side to side when she was pissed off. She dressed like hot stuff, even in her khaki shorts, with visible panty line, and white top wrapped for maximum breastage.

Mark supposed there were boys with the low expectations of a Danny who found her completely irresistible.

But she was no Rachel.

She wasn’t even an Emmie, Mark’s girlfriend who had dumped him on Prom Night right after they’d made love on the golf course at the Country Club. Right after he’d lost his virginity. Just dumped him, and left him on the moist morning grass as the turgid sun rose somewhere – Mark, there, near the seventh hole, his tux jacket somewhere else in the world, cummerbund lost, shiny black shoes in a sand trap, and carnation shredded from passion.

Still, he had his cufflinks, and a hazy memory of his first time. Emmie had given him that, and she was more of a human being than Michelle could ever hope to be.

Unfortunately, Michelle and Emmie were best friends, so Mark knew that Michelle knew about his getting dumped in that way.

She probably knew about how badly he’d fumbled with Emmie’s shiny blue prom dress, how he probably was less-than-perfect at the whole sexual thing and how he may have said something stupid in the throes of doing-it that really made Emmie dislike him once and for all.

“You know, that dog has worms,” Mark said to her, in the car, still looking at the sloping mounds of her breasts through her open shirt. “And you letting him lick your face could put wet puppy spit full of microscopic worm larvae on your skin, and from there, they could get inside you. And when they do…”

“Only someone like you could come up with something that disgusting,” Michelle said.

“I want to hear,” Dash said. He drove with one hand; he had a cigarette in the other.

“The puppy has roundworms, and maybe tapeworms,” Mark said. “Almost all puppies have them. The puppy will get wormed soon, but right now, that poop inside that little crate probably has tiny strands of spaghetti – that wriggle.”

“God!” Michelle shouted, kicking at the back of his seat. “Stop, now. Just stop.”

“I want to hear it,” Dash said. “So what do they do?”

Mark shrugged. “Well, to dogs and cats, they do a lot. But worming pills will take care of it, most likely. When those worms get into people, it’s harder to get rid of them. They make little canals under the skin. They like to go for the eyes.”

“You’re making that up,” Danny said.

“No, for some reason, the roundworms can’t mature into adults in people. So the larvae just make do, and they seem to really like getting the tissue around the eyes.”

“If,” Michelle said, slowly but with her usually dominating force, “you. Do. Not. Shut. Up. Right. Now.”

“I won’t even go into the tapeworm possibility.”

“Jenny Patterson had tapeworm when she was twelve,” Dash said. “Remember?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know her back then.”

“She had it, and she lost twenty pounds practically overnight. She was sick for a long time. She said it was pretty nasty.”

“They grow inside you,” Mark said. “They grow as long as they can. They can fill your intestines, and just eat at you.”

“I once saw a dead body that was opened up and full of worms,” Dash said. “I almost threw up when I saw them in her mouth.”

“Shut up!” Michelle shouted.

The puppy began whimpering.

Dash laughed and accidentally dropped his cigarette.

Michelle cried out something that Mark thought was “What,” and that’s when they hit something in the road.

4

The Deer

The car didn’t just hit something in the road.

It slammed into something like a brick wall.

Sounds of brakes squealing, metal crunching and glass breaking filled Mark’s ears. He felt the world spin. His head knocked back into the head-rest of his seat. He slammed against the glove compartment, almost into the windshield. Something flicked against his scalp.

Michelle screamed. Danny made a noise like he’d had the air knocked out of him. Dash whooped as if he enjoyed the ride; Mark wondered if the puppy was going to be okay.

But it was over in a second.

Mark opened his eyes and saw something dark and liquid.

Covering his eyes.

He reached up.

“Shit.” He was bleeding. Something had cut his forehead.

Someone touched him on the scalp.

“Not much, Marco.” It was Dash. “Just a little blood. It just seems like a lot to you.” Then, “Everybody okay back there?”

No answer.

Whatever they’d hit had darted out in front of the car from the edge of the bundle of trees at a bend in the narrow road.

Dash didn’t turn the headlights back on. Perhaps they didn’t even work. Mark wondered if something awful was going to happen now. If one of them was dead. Or if they’d killed an animal. Or if Dash’s parents would ground him and take away all his privileges for the summer and beyond.

Mark wiped his face. It was a lot of blood for a little cut, but he felt the irregular slice at the top of his scalp, and it was, indeed, not much of a wound.

“Lots of bleeding at scalp level,” Dash said. He grabbed a tissue and daubed it on Mark’s forehead. “See? All better. You knocked it on the dashboard.”

“I thought I was dead.”

“Maybe you are,” Dash said. “Maybe we all are. Maybe we’re dead but doomed to stay right here in this wreck and never leave the dark road.”

“Hmm,” Mark said. “I think I saw that old Twilight Zone episode.”

From the backseat, Danny gasped, “Oh my god, we hit a deer.”

Michelle shouted out “Fuck!”

The word seemed to stretch into an eternity of several seconds.

Outside the car, the world was dark.

For seconds, they were all silent again.

Mark closed his eyes and wished it away. When he opened them again, he was still in the car, feeling bruised, a throbbing at the front of his scalp.

“Is everybody okay?” Dash asked a second time, breaking the quiet. He didn’t bother turning around to check. He adjusted the rearview mirror, and glanced back.

“I guess I’m ok,” Mark said, although the back of his neck hurt from the way he’d slammed back against the seat. His scalp stung.

“Just a little upside down back here,” Danny said. “More beer, please.”

“I’m fine. The puppy’s fine. As if you care,” Michelle said, coughing. “My arm hurts a little. And ow. My knee.”

Dash began cussing up a storm. When it subsided, he looked at Mark, tapped him on the shoulder and gave a slight squeeze. “Damn, and I forgot to pay my insurance this month. I am so screwed.”

It wasn’t a deer.

At least as far as they could tell, although Danny insisted it had antlers, and since he was the drunkest of them, he was the least believed.

Mark got out last, generally pissed off that they wouldn’t make it to Rachel’s party at all.

They were somewhere between school, and the Sound, and it was a section of road he couldn’t quite identify. There were no lights in the distance. There was no traffic noise from some nearby highway. Trees all around, thick with leaves. The moon existed somewhere, but not where Mark stood.

Dash had a flashlight and waved it around the front of the car.

“This car is fucked,” Dash said. He spat out some more choice words, and Mark thought it was a bit like watching a three-year-old have a temper tantrum, the way Dash stomped around in a circle, muttering and shaking his head.

“It is, truly,” Danny said. He hoisted a beer to his lips, and drank the entire bottle in one gulp. Then, he belched.

The damage to the car was extensive. The front end had completely smashed inward, practically wrapped around the engine; the front axle was bent; and Danny made a joke that it was a miracle none of them was hurt.

“Even the puppy,” Danny said. “Man, that was a hell of a deer.”

“I didn’t see a deer,” Michelle said. She had put the puppy on a short leash and walked around the front of the car. “I saw some people. A few of them.”

In the flashlight’s beam, she looked like a doll that had been through a windstorm. Pale white, her shirt half unbuttoned, her hair a mess. For a second, Mark thought her lip was cut, but it was just an odd shadow.

“If we hit somebody, they’d be lying here screaming right about now,” Danny began, but Michelle gave him a harsh look that shut him up fast.

“I saw these people. I didn’t see their faces or anything. I just saw a group of them. Maybe three. Maybe more.” She began crying a little.

When the half moon came out from behind a cloud, beyond the trees, casting the slightest amount of light across the road, Mark noticed how her tears shone on her face.

“Somebody hold me,” she said.

Danny obliged; his arms wrapped around her. “No, babe, it was a deer. I’m sure it was.”

“We killed some people,” Michelle said, but even as she said those words, it didn’t sound like she really believed it, seconds after saying it. “They all had shaved heads. They might’ve been monks or something. I know. It sounds crazy. Maybe it wasn’t people.”

“We’re not far from the old church,” Danny said. “Maybe it was some monks.”

“I didn’t see any monks,” Mark said.

“Monks, skinheads,” Michelle said with a bit of venom in her voice. “I saw faces. And maybe one of them had antlers on.” Then, she laughed. “Oh, my god, it sounds ridiculous. I’ve had two beers exactly and I sound ridiculous.” She looked at Mark and Danny. “You would’ve seen it if it was people, wouldn’t you?”

“Antlers?” Mark grinned.

“What?” Dash let out a huge laugh, like a balloon popping.

“Okay. Something on his head.”

“It was dark,” Mark said.

“Maybe,” Michelle began. Then, seemed to change her thought. “All right. If I saw them, they’d still be around.”

“Well,” Dash clapped his hands together. “Mystery solved. You got bounced around back there. Maybe it jogged some memory or made you hallucinate.”

“Well, I guess you three have talked me out of my mania,” Michelle said.

“It was pretty dark, ‘chelle, and it happened pretty fast,” Dash said. He shook his head, chuckling. “Antler hats. Pretty good. Skinheads in antler hats.”

Mark looked at Dash, but couldn’t read anything in his face.

It was only later, when Dash went to take a leak with Mark, that Dash said, “It was them. The priests of the Nowhere. This is the night.”

They stood at the edge of a mossy embankment that encircled what looked like a bog. Thin trees all around. Mark had the uncomfortable feeling that they weren’t alone. He kept looking off in the woods as if he would see Danny or Michelle standing there.

Mark toggled his zipper and let loose a stream onto some twigs.

“This is fun, no?” Dash asked. “We’re going to be part of a ceremony.”

“What are you talking about?” Mark zipped up.

“I guess I didn’t tell you. It's a sacred night. Remember in the Wacey Crossing story?”

Mark did. There was a Wacey Crossing story about midsummer’s night, and how it was the weakest point of darkness in the world, so the Nowhere gods had their moment to come into the world of Man. It was a bit of a shivery tale, and Mark had a few nightmares after reading it.

“It was just a story,” Mark said. “You nut.”

“Everything Wacey Crossing wrote was true,” Dash said.

Mark nearly looked at Dash straight on, but didn’t. It looked like Dash was pulling that toothbrush case-that-didn’t-hold-a-toothbrush out of his inside jacket pocket.

Mark didn’t want to see the needle come out.

Or see Dash use.

Excerpt from “The Night of Changing” by Wacey Crossing, from the collection, In The Grave of the Devourer & Others published 1882, N.M. Quint & Sons Press, New York, NY. Used here with permission.

…The one called Rowan motioned to Petra, a flourishing movement of hands that reminded me of fish, swimming. Petra left my side, and I was loathe to let drop her hand, for fear, for the terror I had begun to feel in my heart. She was my beloved, and she was too innocent for this night of madness. Her mind would become twisted from their heathen perversions and dark callings. I looked upon her in the shaded and sickly moonlight, upon her luxurious dark hair, her figure so lovely and dress of gossamer. I was afraid of what this Unholy Man would do to her, what he might take from her, as he had taken my peace from me.

But it was too late. She had persuaded me to bring her, for she longed to speak again to her father. She begged me with tears and cries and silence until finally, weak man that I am, I allowed her to come with me to this ceremony.

Gudrun took her hand, and brought her into the sacred circle, drawing down her cloak, and painting strange figured upon her face and neck.

I did not know what to expect, for although I had been an initiate for nearly a year, I had not borne witness to this highest of their Holy Days, the shortest night of the year at Midsummer. From my studies, I knew that this was the thin sacred veil that flowed between the world of the Nowhere and the world we human beings occupied. The gods were at their most powerless to resist human intervention in their affairs. I was
well aware that invocations would be made, that the Names would be said, and the seven words of power would be intoned over the exhumed grave of one of the early Masters.

The bones of the Masters had been given, relic-like, to the handful of followers left in the world – one some distant European shore, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Each bone, whether a toe-bone or knuckle or entire skull, had been held in secret, and buried with one of the followers, and the circles of belief arose around the grave that held the relic.

I had known that this particular spot of worship held a rib from an early Master. On this rib, these bones, the runes of Boediccaeringon had been carved. These, the last words uttered in a time of famine and torture in the west of the British Isles in those ancient times. It was used, they said, to ward off the invasions of Romans and Norsemen. I had never seen this sacred rib, but now, Gudrun held it.

In the darkness, I saw only its knife-like appearance, curved slightly at the end.

Then, Rowan drew close to her. I saw their shadows nearly touch, and it filled me with both jealousy and dread.

And I knew what he was about. He had lied to me about what this ceremony was – yes, there was truth to his lie. But I knew in that instant that I would forever regret bringing Petra to this bloodthirsty tribe of worshippers.

He was telling her the Words, and the Words were sacred and known only to the few.

And the Words were the names of the Gods, the TRUE NAMES, THE NAMES OF TERRIBLE AND SWIFT POWER, NAMES THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN REVEALED TO MANKIND!

To know the secret names of the gods, to be able to say them aloud, had been brought by one who had come back from the dead thousands of years ago. The legend of the Words was that the one who brought them could not get rid of them. They were accursed to the one who knew them, for he could not resist saying them. Could not resist intoning the names of the gods, and this brought terror and panic into the world, and with it, disease and ill-begotten monstrosities. So the first Masters had found a way to put a lock upon them, so that only part of the Names could be said by one, and the Masters knew the completion of the Names – but no Master knew the entire Name to himself alone. The priests that followed the Masters shared the Names as well, and for each gathering, two priests or priestesses would know the Names, and could perform the ceremony if times were needed to invoke the Wrath of Gods. The flesh of the one who heard the Words could not resist saying them, for the Words went wormlike not into the brain, but into the lips and the throat, and remained there until the point of Death.

Only in the last throes of Death would the Words emerge.

I knew then to what end they used my beloved Petra.

God have mercy on my soul that I had ever taken the woman I loved into their corrupt circle! Petra had been living within a world of despair since her dear father had died so horribly! Had I but known the lengths she would go to in order to reach him, in order to be with him again!

She herself took the sharpened bone and thrust it into her breast, and as she died, I heard her utter some insane language, a string of vowels and consonants that made no earthly sense. She fell; the others held me back, though I fought them dearly to get to her.

Rowan crouched down, a lion over its kill, and leaned into her ear to whisper something.

I struggled free and escaped my captors. I fled deep into miasmic bogs and woods, running from the terror and evil of it all. The visions of what I’d seen in the dark, of the dancing and singing of the priests and their minions, their shadows against the darker shadows of night, and within their circle, Petra, dying – and with her last breath, the demonic language!

At my apartment on Broad Street, I locked the door, and shuttered the window from the night. I lit candle after candle and lamp after lamp, to bring the brilliance of day into the late hours.

I heard a rapping at my door at nearly three in the morning.

She had found me. She had returned to me.

How could I resist her? She was my heart. She was my soul.

For her, I snuffed the candles, and turned down the lamps.

I left the Nowhere into my room. My soul.

Petra found me, before the morning had come.

She showed me the visage of a god whose true name should have been destroyed millennia ago. In the ancient tongue of the Chaldeans and Babylonians, a savage, devouring god whose hunger for children and the innocent is never-ending….

5

Shelter

Mark and his friends found nothing in the ditch on the side of the road. Neither were there any people – or deer – moaning in the woods.

“Whatever it was, it was big and strong.”

“Brilliant deduction,” Michelle said.

“A bear, maybe,” Dash said.

“We got bears out here?” Danny asked.

Michelle flipped out her cell phone. The green light came up, and she began punching in numbers. “You have triple A, Dash?”

“No.”

“Who you callin’?” Mark asked.

Michelle turned her back to them.

Then, she said, “Rachel? It’s ‘chelle. Listen, Dash wrecked his car out – no, we’re okay. Oh my god, I know,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper as she said stuff that Mark was sure had to do with what geeks they were and how she’d been stuck riding with them because Danny was too drunk to drive. Then, her voice returned to normal. “No, no idea. We’re not far from some farmhouse. And a graveyard. Yep. We have a special gift for you. I am not telling. Can you send your brother out to Route --Rachel? Rachel? You’re breaking up. Damn it,” Michelle said, slapping her phone shut. She spun around. “You guys have a cell phone?”

“I’m technologically challenged at the moment,” Dash shrugged, and went to grab a beer from the back of the car. When he got there, scrambling around the backseat, he shouted, “Jesus, Danny, did you drink two six packs?”

“I don’t think so,” Danny said, looking at both Michelle and Mark with the look of an innocent puppy. “Did I?”

“Found one. Wait, found three. No, five. Who wants a beer?”

“I do!” Mark shouted.

“Yeah,” Danny said.

Michelle opened her cell phone again, and tried dialing. “We’re in one of those dead areas.”

“Dead?” Danny grinned.

“Can’t get through,” Michelle said, practically under her breath. She went over and stood beside Mark, and touched him lightly on the shoulder. “I guess we can’t just walk to the party? Jesus, Danny, you always have that damn cell phone.”

“We can find another phone,” Dash said. “There’s that church.”

“Or the farmhouse.”

“Church is closer. There’s either going to be a payphone or an office phone in there.”

The sky began dripping with rain. The soft distant rumble of thunder.

“It’s coming back,” Danny said. “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.”

A few seconds later a flash of lightning hit that was so bright it seemed to illuminate the forest, and for a moment, Mark thought he saw people standing there, behind some trees.

Danny began counting again, and a louder rumble of thunder sounded.

The rain began coming down fast, and Dash called out, “Come on, this way,” and Michelle put the puppy in the little carrier; Danny took it in his left hand and held her hand with his right, and they ran together. Mark jogged behind them all, down the now-slick road.

Within minutes, Dash ran to the right, up the grass-covered path that led to the Old Church. Mud sloshed all around. The rain came down in sheets, and Danny was laughing and running, and the puppy in the carrier was barking; Mark held the flashlight up so they could see their way up the path, and couldn’t wait to get inside the church and be dry again.

As they got closer to it, Mark noticed that there was a flickering light from within the church.

“God, we should’ve just stayed in the car,” Michelle said.

She was soaked, her hair, dripping, her shirt pasted to her breasts. “This feels a little déjà vu in the junior high department. I can’t wait to get out of this place and get to Northampton. May this be my last rainy night in Manossett.”

“Yeah,” Danny said. Then, he added, “God, I feel wasted.”

“I’m amazed you’re on your feet,” Michelle said, nearly cheerfully.

“I can always go down the road to that farmhouse, too,” Mark said, not breaking eye contact with Michelle.

“No need, Marco,” Dash said.

They huddled inside the arched doorway of the church, Mark pressed against the thick wooden door.

“This is more of a chapel than an actual church,” Dash said. “It’s one of the oldest in this area.”

“It’s locked,” Danny said.

The windows were all shuttered and locked from the inside, as well – Mark had checked when they’d first arrived.

Lightning lit the night again, and Mark saw the rocky graveyard lit up. Again, he thought he saw people – a group of them there – but they seemed blurred to him, and he wasn’t sure if perhaps he should quit drinking beer.

“This kind of place,” Dash said, “has to have a key. This isn’t the kind of hangout people worry about getting broken into. Not way the hell out here.”

He felt around in the recesses of the arch as it peaked and then dipped, and cried out, “Gotcha!”

He held up a thin round key. “Ask and it shall be given to you.”

“Thank god,” Michelle said. “I just want to be somewhere dry.”

Mark kept looking out through the heavy rain at the darkness of the graveyard. He heard the door open behind him. The puppy whimpered in its carrier, and Danny made baby noises to it as he lifted it and took it inside.

One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.

The sky lit up with whiteness.

There, in the graveyard, shadows of people.

And what looked like an open grave.

Then, darkness. Rain. The grumble and crack of thunder.

“The world’s smallest chapel,” Dash said. “You probably know its history.”

The chapel was one oblong room, with angles cut into it to create recesses with shrines along its gray stone walls.

Mark noticed the windows first – barely slits to let in light, with stained glass in them. The shutters outside were deceptive – they were large, and made Mark think the place had large windows as well. When he and Dash had been in the graveyard before, they’d never thought to venture in the church itself. It was a plain, nearly bare church, with flat, long benches for pews. The altar looked very much like a wide flat stone of four or five feet in length, and two feet wide.

There were fat long candles in brass holders up and down the aisles, all lit.

“Well, there’s no phone here,” Michelle said. “At least it’s dry.”

“Yeah. And it’s better than being out there.”

“How’s the puppy?” she asked.

Danny crouched beside the carrier and looked in. “Doing fine. Chewing on his rawhide.”

“Damn,” Dash said. “My ciggies are ruined.” He held his pack of Marlboros up.

“I have some,” Mark said. He reached into his pocket, and drew out two cigarettes. “Got a lighter?”

“I do,” Danny said, feeling in his pockets.

“I got matches,” Dash said, withdrawing some from within his jacket. “And shockingly, they’re dry. Five left.” He struck one against the matchbook, and Mark passed him a cigarette.

“You keep these,” he passed the matches to Mark once he’d begun puffing on the cigarette. Mark thrust the matches into the back pocket of his jeans. “You got four more cigarettes and four more matches. Perfect, Marco.”

“I hope Rachel appreciates the effort we go to for her birthday,” Michelle said. She reached into her handbag and withdrew a comb. She ran it through her hair, her head tilting sideway. She wandered over to one of the pews near the front of the chapel. “So now what?” She patted the bench where she sat, and Danny sat down beside her. Soon his arm was around her waist, and she leaned against his shoulder, looking up at the candles at the altar. “This is one ugly chapel. Those puritans really – holy crap, look at that!” she pointed toward the curved wall behind the altar.

Mark immediately looked up. Behind the flickering candle, there was a painting that reminded him of something from his sophomore European History book. It was nearly medieval looking – a faded painting of what seemed to be several monks, their heads shaved in tonsure.

“Those look like the guys I saw,” Michelle gasped, and then giggled. “How bizarre.”

“Oh yeah, the monks we hit,” Dash said, his voice brimming with contempt. "The ones wearing antlers."

“Gives me the creeps, a little,” Michelle said. “Now I really wish we’d stayed in the car.”

“And risk getting hit from behind by another car? No thank you,” Dash said. “What good would that do? Your cell phone won’t work. I know this place. I’m sure there’s a phone in it.”

Mark said something about how seeing a painting of monks in a chapel was not the strangest thing in the world, but the whole time he felt like he was lying. Wasn’t sure why, but there was something funny about the painting.

He walked up the aisle to get a closer look. Stepped up the worn, uneven stone steps to the altar.

The monks had faces that were like softened inverted triangles, and large wise eyes. There were four of them. In one of their hands, there was what looked like a thin white flute that bore markings – Hebrew? Latin? Mark had no idea. As he gazed at it in the shimmering candlelight, he thought it might be the thin tusk of some wild animal rather than a flute. One of the monks held a round stone in his hand, or perhaps it was a large wafer of some kind. Again, this had strange marking upon it. The third monk held both his hands out. The third monk’s hands were merely presented as having nothing in them.

But the fourth monk in the group held a small human skull in his hands.

The skull had small bumps along its scalp – two just above the forehead. And its front row of teeth seemed unusually sharp, nearly wolf-like.

“It’s funny,” Mark said.

Behind him, Michelle. She had gotten up and looked around the altar, too. “What?”

“I was sure I’d been in here once. A long time ago. Some time. But I guess I never have. I’ve been outside before. But never in here. I’ve never even seen anyone go in here before.”

“Look at this,” Michelle said. He turned, and she was reading something off the top of the slab.

He went to look. The stone tablet was covered with a stubble of mold or some kind of dusty lichen. Michelle brushed some of it off. “Look at that, Mark,” she said, pointing to something carved into the stone.

Mark thought the drawing was a squiggle of circles and lines intersecting – some abstract Christian imagery. He noticed that it had eyes.

“It’s some kind of bird,” she said.

“Or bug. Look at its wings. There are four of them,” Mark said. In his mind, the words Swarmgod of the Thousand Stingers seemed to surface. Words beneath the carved figure. “Is this Aramaic or something?”

“It’s Latin,” Dash said from the back of the room. “Or Greek.”

“I took Latin in ninth grade,” Michelle said. “It doesn’t look like anything I remember.”

“Then it’s Greek,” Dash said. “I’ve been in here before. I got a guided tour. This is one of the oldest churches in New England.”

“How old?” Michelle asked, idly, her eyes never leaving the altar top.

“I would guess the 1600s.”

“No, wait, I know what language this is. This is just French,” Michelle said. “It’s just carved in the stone with such a strange script, I didn’t notice it. Let’s see, this means, no, maybe it’s not French. It’s something I recognize.” She leaned against the stone tablet. “Why would the pilgrims write in Greek? Or French?”

“I’m sure more than just pilgrims have been using this in the past five hundred or so years,” Mark volunteered.

“That’s right,” Dash said.

“This is Latin, this part of it.” Michelle’s fingers traced the engraving. “VE. DEU. VI. Well, it’s all broken up. It could mean anything. And what the hell is that? It looks like a round mouth full of sharp teeth.”

“Deu is probably Deus,” Mark said. The words seemed to be in his head: The Devourer. She Who Befouls The Night. The Pope of Pestilence.

“Maybe,” Michelle nodded. “These drawings are fascinating. They almost look like caveman paintings. This word – AMOR. That’s easy. Unless it’s part of a longer word – too bad it got rubbed away here. I just wish I could figure out the letters in between.”

“I didn’t know you studied Latin,” Mark said.

“Two years, but I switched to French junior year. I stopped enjoying it,” Michelle said. Then she arched an eyebrow. “What, you think I’m just some dumb rich girl skating through life?”

“No, no, really, I don’t,” Mark said.

“Well, there’s always more to people than you think. Even you and your buddy,” Michelle offered a sweet smile. “I’ll probably major in comparative lit at Smith, if I can take German and handle it at the same time. Someday, maybe I’ll translate great works of literature. Or be a foreign correspondent.”

“Or a spy,” Dash said.

Mark almost wanted to tell Dash to shut up. He had his own interest in language, and had been studying Spanish in school, but had wanted to learn French, too. He looked at Michelle carefully, as if seeing her for the first time. She noticed, and laughed.

“I guess it takes a car wreck and a storm for us to get along,” she said. He felt warmth from her, just standing beside her. Connecting in some way that he never thought he could with a girl like Michelle.

“Well, obviously, there’s no phone here,” Dash said. “Maybe we better take a hike.”

“Yeah,” Mark said, feeling a bit more like a man.

“I’ll be fine here. I’m going to try and decipher this stuff,” Michelle said. “Danny, you want to go with them?”

Danny, the puppy in his lap, made a motion that seemed to indicate that the puppy needed him.

“Me and Mark will go to that farmhouse,” Dash said. “You two stay here. What, it’s maybe a mile down the road?”

Mark nodded. “Yeah.”

“We can run.”

“Sure,” Mark said, but dreaded the rain.

“You two just continue the party here, dry off, and we’ll be back,” Dash said. “Feel free to chug the last beer, Danny.”

The rain had slowed to a steady but light sprinkling. The lightning was off in a distant sky, barely lighting the path from the old church.

“Okay, now, here’s what we do,” Dash said.

“What’s all this?” Mark said.

“Huh?”

“‘Huh?’ You planned this,” Mark said. “I know you did. What is all this? The church. The crash. Huh?”

“Come on, Marco, I told you, we’ll have a little fun.”

“It’s not fun. It’s the opposite of fun. Fun would be the party. Fun would be anywhere but here.”

They walked out among the graves. Mark kept the flashlight on the ground to avoid any rocks and stones.

“She’s a bitch, you know that? Don’t let her fool you with all that Latin shit. She spent half of high school thinking that guys like you and me are less than toads, so don’t suddenly get all sugary just because she shows you her rack.”

“Maybe we are less than toads, Dash. Maybe all this Nowhere crap makes us warts on toads.”

“Blasphemy.” Dash reached over and slapped him hard on the face.

It stung. Mark reached up and touched his cheek.

“Tonight is the night.” Dash said grabbed him by the elbow, and pulled him close to him. The flashlight fell from Mark’s hand. Dash’s breath was all beer. “Look, you’ve known since you were thirteen that you were going to be part of this. You knew. And tonight is the night. Just like in the book. It’s the Night of Lifting the Veil. It is nearly midnight. It is midsummer’s night. The shortest night of the year. The night when the veil between our world and the world of the Nowhere is thinnest.”

Mark laughed. “Come on, Dash. Come on.”

He pulled away from Dash, walking ahead on a narrow, scraggly path between gravestones. “Get real.”

Then, Mark thought he saw something before him – some shape that was all shadow, and he saw that at the edge of the graveyard, like a gate, there were people standing there, in long coats or cloaks, he wasn’t sure, but he could see them.

He heard Dash groan behind him.

Sound of sudden movement.

Mark was about to turn around to see what was wrong, when something hit him hard on the side of the head, and he was out.

Mark awoke a few seconds later, feeling dizzy. His vision blurred. All shadows and scant moonlight around him.

The rain kept coming down.

He lay in mud.

He thought he saw others there, those people, those monks, whoever and whatever they were, and it seemed nearly natural to see them. He almost expected them. Had it all been true? Had everything Dash had been telling him about the Nowhere – all those stories – been true?

He lay there, blinking, in the rain.

Of course, a cult could survive. There were all kinds of cults and religions in the world. But right here? In Manosset, in the 21st century? And could they be so backward and ignorant as to truly believe that there were gods with such ridiculous names as She Who Befouls the Night?

But those were just nicknames. He knew that from the Wacey Crossing stories. All names for the gods were not their true names. Their true names were only known by those who held the power.

The back of his head throbbed.

He looked up into Dash’s face, shadowed with night.

Were they alone? He felt alone.

“Here’s the thing. You’ve got to listen very carefully, Marco. Very carefully. There are words, and they’re on this,” Dash pressed something into Mark’s hand. His fingers curled around it instinctively. “Sometimes, the god that enters gets out of hand. And has to be stopped. The words will stop the god. The words are the only thing that stops the god. Listen. Just lie there and listen or I will hit you again so hard so help me god Marco you might never wake up. Listen! This is so important,” Dash said.

Was he weeping? Was it rain? Mark couldn’t tell.

“I have to fulfill something here. It is my destiny. I am chosen for something, and tonight is the night. When this happens – and it has only happened nine times since the dawn of recorded history, Marco, nine times, I will be the tenth. I will be the tenth, and this hasn’t been arrived at lightly. They are very smart people. They have waited more than a thousand years in their religion to allow this to happen again. They feel it’s time. And I am the one. But you have got to remember the words when you hear them, Marco. I can only say them once. You are the only one who can stop this with the words. Only the one I…I,” Dash’s voice broke.

Then, strength returned.

“Only the one I have given my heart to can stop this once it starts. And the words have got to be remembered. These others,” Dash nodded to darkness, although Mark saw no one, “they have had their tongues cut out lest they utter the words. The one who told me, taught me, drilled me in this -- he's dead. I can say the words to you, but you must remember them. And with the words, I will tell you the names of the gods. This is an enormous responsibility. The world is corrupt. The time of human life is nearly over. The gods want to return and end the stupidity of this race of men. The names of the gods,” he leaned into Mark’s face, and pressed his mouth to Mark’s ear, he began whispering something that Mark tried to remember as soon as he heard it.

“There’s really a Nowhere?” Mark asked, pleading in his voice.

“Oh,” Dash sighed. “Marco, wait til to you see it. I mean really see it. There’s something you need to drink. Here, sit up.”

Mark felt Dash’s hand slip behind his neck. “It’s easier to see like this.”

Mark moaned a little – the pain at the back of his scalp intensified. “You hit me too hard.”

“Sorry.” Dash withdrew the hypodermic needle from the plastic case.

“What – what are you – what – don’t,” Mark whispered.

“It’ll take the pain away. And you’ll understand. You’ll see. You will really see,” Dash said, and he held Mark’s arm down, tore his shirtsleeve up to his bicep. Dash squeezed his bicep, and then Mark felt the needle go in, twisting into his flesh.

“This isn’t junk. This is ambrosia. Believe me,” Dash whispered. “You’ll have a taste of the Nowhere. What it really can be like.”

The sensation of floating, but not floating.

Hands moved in bird-like blurs before his eyes.

It was already morning. The rain had stopped. The sun was out.

But the sun was white, not a warm yellowish gold, it was white – all the light was pure white in the sky.

Mark sat up against the gravestone. The throbbing in his head was gone. The trees were funny, the woods seemed weird. Something moved along the bark of the trees. Snakes and worms wriggled along them.

The strange thing was: some things were missing. The trees themselves didn’t move in a light wind; and there was no rain, although there had been second before.

Dash was there, only he was Dash with a difference: he seemed better looking. Color in his face. A rosy glow. His eyes were like a little boy’s – all happy and expectant. Mark’s eyes went in and out of focus. He heard a strange humming in his head. He looked at his hands, and he saw them as liquid, contained within some invisible boundary that defined “hand.” When he waved his hand, some molecules of flesh dispersed – just a few -- and seemed to form into an insect of some type in the air – a ladybug, flying off.

“Ain’t it cool?” Dash asked. “It’s like the world only different. If you stay still, you disappear. Watch.”

Dash closed his eyes and mouth, and clasped his hands together. Within seconds, he seemed to evaporate like steam.

Then, he laughed, and suddenly was there again. “The world we’re used to has to move a lot or make noise for things in The Veil to see it. Otherwise you become invisible, even to the gods. It’s a strange place, no?”

Dash kept laughing, but it all seemed to move slowly, and Dash drew back his black t-shirt, tearing it, only it didn’t tear like fabric. It formed droplets of black goo that absorbed against his green jacket.

Then, Dash pressed his hand against his pale, hairless chest and drew back the skin – not as if it were cut or scraped, but in that liquid medium, as if Dash himself were a soap bubble – malleable and shifting, but within a boundary that kept the liquid in place.

Dash’s fingers went deeper into his flesh. He drew out what appeared to be a pulsing mass of purple and poppy red.

Smiling, Dash brought it closer to Mark’s face.

“My heart,” he said. “My heart and your heart.”

Dash reached into Mark’s chest, and it tickled. Mark laughed, and felt Dash’s fingers inside his flesh, moving along the organs within his ribcage.

A feather-like tickle of his heart.

All the while, the liquid between their bodies, the floating droplets, merged and mixed, splashing together.

Dash held both hearts for Mark to see.

“We’re brothers,” Dash said.

“The Veil,” Mark murmured, feeling particularly good, as if he had never know what it meant in life to feel good.

Dash nodded. “Yep. The Veil. From a garden that existed thousands and thousands of years ago. A garden destroyed by mankind when it learned the secret names of the gods. But the wise ones who knew its value rescued this flower and its seed. And they’ve planted it and cared for it in secret all these years, Marco. And it shows you the real world. The Nowhere. If I told you this was Eden itself, wouldn’t you believe me? Look, we flow. Look at the sky. This is night, Marco. Not daylight. This is true night. The blackness is an illusion. See? Look –“ Dash pointed to the sky. An eel wriggled in the white air as if it were moving through rippling milk. “This is the realm of the gods. This is what we’re blinded to. This is what the Nowhere people know. And always have. We can’t be here long. We can’t take The Veil too much. It’s addictive, but it can be horrible as well as beautiful. Do you see now? Marco? How beautiful? Marco, I’ve seen magnificent cities on the surface of the sea – I’ve seen creatures that have only been drawn in ancient texts – sea monsters, mermaids, all here, all within The Veil. And the gods, too. They cause what happen in our world, but we are blinded and cannot see – we see through darkness. The Nowhere is the true light.”

“I feel a little sick,” Mark said, reaching to his stomach. “Sick.”

“It’s your first time. But you’ll get used to it. You’ll enjoy it more. Right now, you can only tolerate a few minutes. But later, you’ll be able to have more of it. I’ll show you amazing things, brother. Amazing. One more beautiful than the next,” Dash said, and then he held something in the air. It looked like a white horn -- or an animal bone? Writhing around it, tiny red insects. “You’ll come out of this in a minute or two, Marco. When you do, you must say the names as soon as I’ve said the first part. And if it gets too much out of hand, you can stop it. There’s always a way to stop it. Just remember the Words. They’re here, on this bone. See?" He said them quietly and made Mark repeat them. "The Words are hard to remember. But once you hear the names you can’t forget, even if you try. You hear them and your molecules take them in and hold them. The flesh remembers. You have to say the names as soon as you see me die.”

“Die?” Mark looked at him, uncomprehending. “You’re going to die?”

“Not really. Not die like you think. You ready?” Dash held the bone in front of his chest.

He began saying the first halves of the names of the gods of the Nowhere.

Alone, with Dash, in the rain.

Out of The Veil. In the real world. The ordinary, awful world again.

Mark sat up.

Sky, black. The earth, sucking mud.

Taking the smooth thin bone, Dash pressed the sharpened end of it into his chest.

Mark reached for the bone, pulling it out. “No, Dash, please, no!”

As he let out a final breath, Dash whispered the names of the gods.

When Dash’s eyes were closed, Mark said the last half of the names. He didn’t know how he could remember them – they were a long string of sounds and clicks and howls. They hurt his ears to say, like a strangely out of tune sound of pipes being played from his throat.

He almost wanted to say the Words, as well, out of fear.

The Words that could stop this.

But he hesitated. He tried to think of the Words, but none of them came to him. He tried to remember Dash's voice speaking them, but it was like a wall of silence.

Dash opened his eyes again.

They glowed like the ends of cigarettes in the dark.

6

The Church

Mark began shivering in the darkness as he watched what had been Dash rise to its feet. It no longer seemed to be Dash, not in the sense that he had felt Dash had been. It had glowing eyes, and its teeth were sharp at the ends, small nails of teeth, and even in the moonlight, Mark could see the way spurs had burst from his joints –- elbows and knees -- and writhing worms, long night-crawlers, moved along his fingers.

“Nowhere is here,” Dash grinned, and for a second, Mark thought it was a trick.

The drug, perhaps. Still lingering in his system.

Of course. The drug. The Veil.

The needle that had gone in his arm.

“Jesus,” Dash said. “I’m hungry.”

Dash turned, glancing toward the church. Then, back to Mark. “You’re not going to understand this, Mark. If you could see what I see, you would.”

The red eyes burned and then seemed to fade into Dash’s normal eyes.

Mark heaved a sigh – it must’ve been the drug. He was still hallucinating. He still felt weak and dizzy, and he had to sit down again. His head was spinning.

It was the drug. That’s all it was. None of it had happened.

“Look, give me a minute,” Dash said. “You need to rest. You’re going through a lot. Shit, I’ve been through a lot.”

Mark turned, and threw up onto a gravestone. He wiped his mouth; a sickly sweet taste lingered in his throat. The Veil.

When he turned around, Dash was gone; by the time Mark rose up on his feet, he thought he saw some enormous winged bird – almost a pterodactyl, given its wingspan – landing at the door to the old church; but it was a man – no, it was Dash.

Mark walked toward the church, lurching with each step, stopping every few feet to cough.

God, what if I die? What if that drug kills me? He slid in the mud and had to pick himself up. His heart beat rapidly. It was poison. I’m going to die.

By the time he reached the door to the old church, he heard Danny’s shout.

The candles along the altar were lit. It was warm and humid within the church, as if the summer storm had turned it into a steam room.

“What the fuck?” Danny laughed. “Holy shit, what the hell have you been drinkin’, Dashy? Or maybe it’s me, maybe it’s just me!” He was beer-soaked at this point; the last couple of bottles of beer lay beside him on the stone altar. Michelle glanced up – they were making out, which is what they seemed to do whenever they had five minutes to themselves.

“Dash, don’t, just – just – get away,” Mark shouted from the doorway. He stepped into the back of the church. “Just come outside!”

“Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are callin’,” Dash began to sing, and practically skipped into the church. Danny had his pants off, briefs intact, button-down shirt still on with a few buttons missing; Michelle’s shirt was open; she made an annoyed sound in the back of her throat.

“Sorry to interrupt, lovebirds,” Dash said.

“Get the hell outta here,” Danny said, but he began laughing – it must have struck him as funny to be caught nearly doing it with his girl on the altar of this rat-hole church.

Michelle pushed Danny away and began closing her shirt up.

“Enough,” she said.

“Just a little fun,” Dash said.

Mark stood at the entrance to the church, watching Dash, unsure of what he was really seeing. Dash seemed to move with a grace he’d never had before, like a dancer or gymnast, and he went right up to the altar and pressed his hands down on two of the candles to snuff them out.

Only one left.

“Dash!” Mark called out. “Come on, let’s go. This won’t be fun.”

Dash turned back to him, and in the final candle’s glow, laughed a little – laughed the way he would when they’d first met, back in eighth grade, a let’s-have-fun laugh, and said, “Oh, wait and see.”

Then, he snuffed the last candle out. The room was plunged into darkness.

“Hey, who turned off the lights?” Danny shouted.

Mark saw shadows against shadows. Michelle started cussing, and saying she just wanted to get the puppy and get to the party, and why didn’t her cell phone work? Danny began laughing and telling her that it was going to be better in the dark, but Mark heard a strange groaning sound.

The door behind him slammed shut, as if by a great wind.

But there had been no wind.

And then, the screaming began.

Mark’s first instinct was to run away; but he moved forward in the darkness, hitting against one of the long benches. He dug into his jeans for the matches, and drew them out.

Only four left in the matchbook.

He lit one, and for a fizzing few seconds, the light lit up the room – there was Michelle, screaming, and something with enormous leathery wings, and crab-like appendages studding its body – it was Dash but it was no longer Dash –it had hold of Danny by the throat and was shaking him hard, side to side.

The match went out.

Another match; he struck it, and it flared up for a moment.

Michelle was running toward him, halfway there– her eyes were wide and seemed to have lost all intelligence –

A creature that seemed both insect and dragon – it was only an impression, like the flash of a dream – chewing on Danny’s scalp --

Mark dropped the match. Darkness blinded him.

Gurgling sounds followed, and then the wet shredding noise and cracking of bones.

He heard footsteps near him -- Michelle? Brushing past.

Dash’s voice:

“Yesssss,” snakelike and hollow. “Marco, the Nowhere is here, you helped bring it, it’s all true,” and then the sounds of a dreadful slobbering and gobbling, as of a wild dog swiftly devouring prey.

Mark drew out a third match, and struck it in the matchbook.

Dash stood so close to him that they were practically touching.

Shocked by the closeness, Mark dropped the match, and it went out.

In that second, he had seen the white and pink worms encircling Dash’s throat and hands, growing in pulsating movements from his flesh, and soft fuzzy tendrils gently fluttering from his bare waist and ribcage.

His mouth painted a dark red.

In his arms, he cradled what was left of Danny’s body. Torn and ragged, more meat that human.

“Any shape I desire,” Dash said, and tossed Danny’s remains to Mark when the darkness again engulfed him.

Mark felt nausea sweep through him. He dropped the body and turned to run, but fell to his knees instead.

“Pray to your little god,” Dash said. “Pray like a good altar boy. But you’re in the wrong place, Marco. This is the altar of the Nowhere. The Church of the Veil. Now, where do you think Michelle’s run off to? Not outside. I made sure the door was shut tight and locked. She must be here. Hiding. Oh, yeah! This makes it more of a game, doesn’t it? But I can see with more than eyes now. You know that, Marco. You’ve been through The Veil. You know that it’s a world of liquid white now.”

Mark wanted to cry out, or scream, but his voice had abandoned him – or else he had screamed so much in the past few moments – without realizing it -- that he had none left. He felt cold and hot at the same time.

The Words. Remember the Words.

You can stop him with them. They’re the words of ending. The god will return to The Veil. The Words. He imagined the bone with all the scratching on it. Dash's voice saying the Words and making him repeat them back.

Some kind of trick.

“I can hear her breathing,” Dash said. “She's gonna love what I do to her. I hope you’re there to see it, Marco. I hope you’ll partake.”

Mark thought he heard Michelle cry out from behind him.

“Run! Get out! Michelle! Just get out!”

The sound of her sobs echoed.

“It’s locked!” she cried out, banging on the door, “Somebody! Somebody help me! Help!”

“Michelle! Shut up! Just shut up!” Mark yells. “Stay still and shut up!”

It needs movement and noise. Maybe it will leave now that it had Danny. Dear Jesus help us. Help her.

The Words.

Remember them.

7

In Darkness

And so, in the room in the church, the thing in the dark feels his ankles.

He has pressed himself against the wall, halfway between scared shitless and ready to do something – anything – to keep it from going after Michelle.

Slick and sticky and wormy, it seems to lick his calves with its feelers.

Michelle by the door, moaning out little noises – and the thing that Dash has become is slithering and feeling its way over to her.

In Dash’s mind, he must be seeing the whiteness of the darkness. He must be seeing the liquid move, and the unseen things that wriggle in the air and along the walls.

Dash must see Michelle, too, not as a terrified young woman of eighteen, but as some collection of molecules to be devoured, to be fed upon, to increase its happiness and its mission as it moves through the world, but sees and feels all through The Veil that Dash has now destroyed within himself.

The last of the tendrils that Dash-thing drags with him slides away from Mark’s foot.

Leaving him. Letting him go.

Moving toward her.

She is groaning as if she can’t contain her fear.

And then, she lets out a bloodcurdling scream – and another, and another in quick succession.

He hears the throaty laugh. “Come on, it’s only me, Michelle, come on,” Dash says, and for a fleeting instant Mark thinks that it might be a game. It might just be all fake. The drug! Yeah! It’s the drug! It was some kind of illusion. Some trick of light and dark. A bad acid flashback.

This is some kind of trip. This isn’t the real world.

Michelle’s sobbing, with screamlets in her voice, jagged shards of sound.

Get to Danny. Someone on him. Jacket. Jeans. A lighter.

It’s afraid of light. The Nowhere can’t exist where there’s any light. Any genuine light. If darkness is light to it, than surely light is its own kind of darkness.

“You always wanted me, Michelle, you always did,” the thing that Dash has become says. “Rachel told me how you thought I was quirky and cool, and when she did, when she whispered those things to me, it got me so revved up, baby, and I knew that someday, you and I would have this moment.”

As he spoke, Mark hears the whirring sound again – a soft, rapid fluttering.

If I just get to Danny’s jacket, Mark thinks. The lighter.

“Please,” Michelle whimpers. “Dash, please. Don’t hurt me. Please. Oh god. Please.”

Her “please” becomes the sound of bleating. In a horrible way it’s funny, it sounds like a joke, but Mark knows it’s not.

Why doesn’t she try to run? Is it blocking her way? Mark estimates that he can get to the doorway, to where Danny’s body rests. He can grab the jacket, and thrust his hand into the pockets. He can get the lighter, flick it up, and scare it away.

Scare that creature away.

“Oh, Michelle, baby,” it says. “I want to love you so badly. I want you to be my girl, don’t you know that?”

“Please,” she said in such an awful tone that tears came to Mark’s eyes even as he takes a step toward the opposite corner of the room.

“Take my hand, Michelle, don’t be afraid,” it says. “I want to love all of you in every way.”

The sound changes – it feels like an alarm has gone off somewhere. A sound like hissing and spitting and the crack of a whip.

“No!” Michelle screams, “Oh my god, oh my god, god, god, god, god!” Her screams turn into giggles and jets of laughter.

Mark races to Danny’s body, pushing through the wetness, tearing the shorts from what remains of the lower half of him, sifting quickly through the pockets until he finds something cylindrical and hard.

The lighter.

Hang on, Michelle.

The sounds are wet and bubbling. Michelle is moaning, as if she has been swiftly gagged.

Mark turns, flicking the lighter.

Doesn’t light up.

Flick!

Again no light.

Then, a spark.

A small flame erupts from the lighter.

He cups it in his hand, a yellow and rosy glow around his palm.

He calls out to Dash, but the splattering noise and that whirring has begun again –

Mark brings the flame up to see –

Shadows cast against the old bare wall of the room.

He sees what looks like the spread wings of a gigantic shiny beetle, and long white and pink worms –slender tentacles – moving between Dash’s body, which floats barely a foot in the air – holding Michelle – caressing her – she struggles against it -- the worms inside her mouth, her nose, tearing her shirt off, scraping at her skin until it is nothing but torn flaps hanging down – the wormy tendrils shooting and pulsing from Dash’s mouth and eyes and ears -- his ribcage opens like two doors creaking apart – and long feathery whips emerge and stroke her skin – Mark feels frozen in terror – the worms are wriggling, from Dash’s ribcage – boring out from them, feathery, barnacle-like fans – moving swiftly, tickling her breasts and along her ribs – and her eyes are wild and the worm-appendages of the thing reach into her ears – and they are –

Mark shouts, “I have light! You have no power in the light!”

He waves the flame around, his arm outstretches, his body taut. “I’ll set you on fire!”

Shivering, he walks toward Dash, what Dash has become, to the beetle-like wings, four of them, spread wide, with a layer of nearly-transparent wings in between.

Bone in one hand, lighter in the other, the flame shooting up high.

Mark tries to read the bone, but he can’t – not while Michelle is still…

But he tries. The symbols on the bone seem different than they did before. They seem to have smudged or moved around, and he can’t quite see them for the flickering light.

With the light, he can see the sores and pustules along Dash’s spine.

Dash turns for a moment, his face covered with many small black eyes, and he says, his words rapid-fire and ripe with excitement, “The light has no power over me, Mark. Not once the incarnation has happened. All the world is white light. Once in the flesh, I’m indestructible. Unless you remember the Words. But you don’t, do you? You will never read the bone, will you? How can you? Only the priests who have studied for decades can remember them, can speak them,” and then the creature turns about to Michelle’s beatific and glowing form, the blood shining along her body, and begins devouring her like a spider feeding upon a wriggly fly caught in its web, “Oh, so delicious, such a deleecious treat,” Dash says, his mouth foaming with white and red.

Then, his opening body, like a mouth, covering her, a Venus flytrap, a devourer.

Mark moves toward him and thrusts the flame against his neck, but the worms shoot out from beneath the wings and tear the lighter from his fingers.

The creature turns, its face bubbling with sores, its eyes blinking in unison.

It regards Mark with some interest.

The wings close, and it floats inches downward until it touches the floor.

Then, it shoots slender tentacles around Mark’s ribs. He presses against them, but he can’t pull free.

It lifts him up, and he feels the invasive, parasitic wormy fingers moving against the holes in his ears, pressing down onto his lips, forcing them open. Lower, his navel is stretching as the worms push inward. Wave after wave of nausea hits him.

The slick, wet tendrils pry the sacred bone from his fingers.

What feel like bundles of worms thrust down the back of his throat.

He feels the sharp jab against his stomach –
the bone –
going into him.

Dash’s voice, nearly sweet, whispering along with the dreadful humming of the wings as they move rapidly, “I won’t let you hurt for long, Marco. I want you and me to be together. We can do anything now. Anything, and we’ll bring the Nowhere into daylight. We’ll tear The Veil.”

Dying? Mark wonders as pain seeps through him. Blood is pouring from his stomach and legs.

Dash, in the dark, seeming human, seeming not to have a thousand wormy tentacles and barnacle feathers, lifts Mark up.

Lifts him with two arms. Broken bones shift; freezing pain.

No screams left in him. Mark is sure now that he screamed the whole time that the creature slaughtered Michelle.

Through the narrow hall.

Smell of fresh air. Outside again. Sky is clear. Moonlight, very little, but enough.

Dash strips Mark’s shirt off, and with his fingernails scratches markings on his chest and stomach. “You can be like this, too. Just like we said. We never have to be apart. We can be in the Nowhere.”

“No,” Mark tries to lift his head, but can’t. “Please, I need help, Dash.”

Dash lets out what can only be a sigh of contentment. “None of this has to change who we are. This is just the god thing. It’s what gods have to do. Look, Mark, I know things now. I gained knowledge. Yeah, it hurts some, and part of me feels bad, but when it takes me over, man, you have got to experience this. It’s like…like life. Like there’s no darkness at all. There’s a whole other world you can see when you’re like this. You can see things without your eyes. You have feelers. You have these parts of you that can stretch out and find things without even opening your eyes. And them? Michelle and Danny? Shit, they’re in another place. Death isn’t bad for them. They’re the food of the gods, that’s all, They’re chow. Gods eat life. That’s how it goes. The god of grass eats grass and the god of the flesh eats flesh, you can’t have life without this. It’s something we’ve all gotten away from, but the worshippers, the priests of the Nowhere, they’ve known. They’ve kept the ritual. They’ve put themselves at one with the gods to do this. We are anointed ones, we are gods in flesh, you can’t be afraid, you can’t look at this with the same eyes you had before, not once it’s happened. It’s stupid and human of you to do it. When you die, you’re not going over there. You’re going to come back here. Do you know what the gods are? Do you? Do you?”

A hiss that might’ve been contempt came from Mark’s lips as he looks up at the dark figure.

“The gods are creatures, just like us, but they don’t have boundaries. They reshape themselves at will. They let their hunger loose. Their lusts. Their wants. We think things happen because we do them or there are natural laws, but Marco, there aren’t natural laws – the gods make things happen, they make it all go. But their names are power. I have the power. It’s within me,” Dash says, passion swelling in his voice. “I can be anything, Marco. Anything.”

Mark, in the muddy grass, at the edge of the grave.

He looks up at what once had been Dash.

What is still Dash.

The moonlight is soft around his face. Dash has a beautiful face. Dash has an ugly face.

Michelle. Danny. Gone. In less than an hour.

It still looks enough like Dash, with his hair, stringy from rain, matted with mud. His longish jaw and his eyes that shine even in the absence of light.

Just two eyes. Two human eyes. No thousand eyes of some monster. Darkness around his lips. Blood?

“You’re dying,” Dash said. “Don’t be afraid of it. Just say the names. Just say them, Marco.”

“Mmm,” Mark said. “Nuh. No.”

“We never have to live anywhere but in the Nowhere again. Not ever,” Dash said.

“You’re dead,” Mark whispered, but wasn’t sure if Dash could even hear him. Mark felt so weak, with his life draining from him.

“The names,” Dash said. “Remember? You say then as you die. The first part. I say the other half of the names after you breathe your last. I know all their names now, Marco. I know each of the gods, and their wonderful hungers and the way they look – I can see them all around us. We are their children. I have them incarnate within me, too. I can be a thousand different things. I can be a hornet or dragon, Marco. I can bring up a wind or burn with fire. I can see clearly, more clearly than I could in daylight, see with more than just these useless eyes. I can smell my sight, I can feel sight. You will, too! We can go to Rachel’s party. We don’t have to miss it. We can bring her the puppy. I’m not going to hurt the puppy. It’s not like that. What’s inside me now, it has meaning. It doesn’t want puppies and turtles and goats and chickens. It wants more than that. Everyone will be there. Everyone from our class. And we’ll show them that we’re not just there for their pecking order and social put-downs. We’ll be there to show them the faces of the gods. We could even bring some more of them back, if we’re careful with their bodies. We could make all of us live forever, if you really want. I mean, yeah, it’s too late for Michelle and Danny, but I let it out too much. I hadn’t learned how to pull back on the reins yet. But I think I understand now. And the Nowhere is with us. They think I’m a messiah. They’ll know you as my lieutenant. We’ll change everything. Everything in one night if we have to. We’ll pull back the Veil. You and me, both. After you say the name. And then you’ll be here again. We can fly, now. We can swim under water for hours. We can turn to liquid, or move within the bark of a tree. We can become the darkness. Or light. And it’ll be you and me. Brothers. In the Nowhere. We’ll be gods here, Marco. We’ll do things we couldn’t have imagined before. Before it was just a game. Now, it’s real, and we’re real, and the others, the people in the world, your mother and father and mine and the teachers at the Gardner School, they’re the unreal ones. We can go on to Rachel’s next. Just the names. Let me whisper them to you.”

Mark closes his eyes.

Soft rain falling. Just drips of it. On his face. Cooling rain.

The feeling of Dash’s wet slippery hand touching Mark’s face.

“The names,” Dash says, as gentle as the rain. “Just say one of them for me. I love you so much. Just say it.” Dash may have tears in his eyes, or perhaps it is the raindrops falling gently on Mark’s face.

Opens his eyes.

The shadow of Dash’s face is all he sees. The smell of his breath – the same stink of the dead body, its flesh torn open.

Mark mutters something.

“Marco?”

Mark says it as loud as he can. It comes out a whisper. “You. Not my brother. I don’t love you. I don’t want to be with you after I die…far away from you.”

All his energy in those words. He feels smug. Numb and smug. A worm of pain somewhere in his gut, but otherwise, he’s ready to go. In the arms of Death.

Mark wants to close himself up.

To die without remembering the names.

Dash is holding him now, cradling him, practically kissing his ear as he begins to whisper something that Mark can’t quite make out.

Dying. Please take me, God. Take me now. Break me out of life. Crush my spirit and body and slam me into another place. Or just cut off whatever it is that life is within me. Keep me from the Nowhere.

But even as he dies, without wanting to, without desiring this, Mark parts his lips.

No! something within him fights against it. Don’t say it. Don’t say the names!

But his flesh is at war with his heart, and he realizes that Dash’s remark had been true: the flesh remembers.

Mark utters the unspeakable names of the gods of the Nowhere, of the Veil. Like the worst profanity coming from his tongue.

Permission to be called back.

He cannot remember the Words that would stop this.

Only the names that would begin it.

His life slips away, just as if it were dropping into a pool. A rock in water, hitting the surface and slipping down into the murky depths. He’s angry as he goes down to a place where the lights dim and flash and dim.

The lights are nearly out.

He can’t even sense that he is breathing, or that Dash holds him now.

Dash, singing some painful song in an unknown tongue as if he’d been singing it his whole life.

Mark has a sense of the others that are there – the priests and believers of the Nowhere.

Standing in a circle around them both.

The part of Mark that still has a speck of thought and life feels terror and calm all at once, knowing that after he goes, that thing that Dash has become will hold him in his arms and intone the other part of the names, the response – the litany – until Mark’s eyes, once again, open.

8

The Party

An hour or so later, and several miles away, a girl of nineteen, her arms around a boy of roughly the same age, says, “Oh my god.”

The lights in the house go out, suddenly.

The boy kisses her again, his breath all beer. “Rachel, you know what? I hope we spend every night together this summer. Our last summer together.”

“Damn, I’m not even sure where the fusebox is,” the girl says, pushing her boyfriend away.

“It’s a brown-out.”

“It’s just black-out.”

“Lights!” someone shouts, laughing. “Somebody hit the lights!”

“What happened to the music?”

“Party must be over. Nice hint, Rachel!”

“Yeah, you want us to leave you can just ask us.”

“It must be the storm,” somebody says, drunken slur to his voice.

“Looks like somebody forgot to pay the bill.”

“It must’ve been the storm.”

“Yeah, or maybe a burglar.”

“I love it in the dark. There’s more to kiss.”

“Perv!”

“Got a flashlight?”

“In my car. I’ll get it.”

“Jesus, it’s nearly two. I better get home.”

“We’ve got candles down in the basement, and some under the sink in the kitchen,” Rachel says.

“Get your hands off me, Josh. And go get me some more beer.”

“Somebody’s knocking at the door. Somebody get it.”

“No, something at the window. That a seagull? What the hell is that?”

“A bird hit the window.”

“No, it’s the front door.”

“Come in!”

“Where are the candles?”

“The kitchen!” Rachel shouts. “Under the sink. There should be six of them.”

“Here,” some boy says. He flicks on a lighter. For a second, the small blue-yellow flame lit his face. The shadows of others, around him. In the mirror on the back wall the reflection of the light reveals more: the enormous living room is packed.

“Everybody light your lighters.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Just get some candles.”

“Knock knock,” a boy, a junior from the Gardner School, reaches the front door. He draws the door inward.

A gust of steam. Humidity has risen.

Two figures in the dark, on the front porch.

“You’re late,” the boy says, sleepily, not quite recognizing them in the dark. “Party’s almost over.”

For a split second, the boy who has opened the door has an instinct, but he ignores it. He thinks he should shut the door and lock it, but he doesn’t know why he’d think that.

And then, it begins.

Also by Douglas Clegg

Click here to discover more fiction by Douglas Clegg.

STAND-ALONE NOVEL

Afterlife

Breeder

The Children’s Hour

Dark of the Eye

Goat Dance

The Halloween Man

The Hour Before Dark

Mr. Darkness

Naomi

Neverland

You Come When I Call You

NOVELLAS & SHORT NOVELS

The Attraction

The Dark Game (Two Novelettes)

Dinner with the Cannibal Sisters

Isis

The Necromancer

Purity

The Words

SERIES

THE HARROW SERIES

Nightmare House, Book 1

Mischief, Book 2

The Infinite, Book 3

The Abandoned, Book 4

The Necromancer (Prequel Novella)

Isis(Prequel Novella)

THE CRIMINALLY INSANE SERIES

Bad Karma, Book 1

Red Angel, Book 2

Night Cage, Book 3

THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY

The Priest of Blood, Book 1

The Lady of Serpents, Book 2

The Queen of Wolves, Book 3

THE CHRONICLES OF MORDRED

Mordred, Bastard Son (Book 1)

Mordred, Dragon Prince (Book 2)

COLLECTIONS

Lights Out: Collected Stories

Night Asylum

The Nightmare Chronicles

Wild Things

BOX SET BUNDLES

Bad Places (3 Novels)

Coming of Age (3 Dark Novellas)

Dark Rooms (3 Novels)

Criminally Insane: The Series (3 Novels)

Halloween Chillers

Harrow: Three Novels (Books 1-3)

Harrow: Four Novels (Books 1-4)

Haunts (8 Novel Box Set)

Lights Out (3 Collection Box Set)

Night Towns (3 Novels)

The Vampyricon Trilogy (3 Novels)

With more new novels, novellas and stories to come.

Get the Newsletter

Get book updates, exclusive offers, news of contests & special treats for readers—become a V.I.P. member of Douglas Clegg’s long-running free newsletter.

Click here to subscribe now.

About the Author

Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neverland, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among many other novels, novellas and stories. His first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Berkley, Signet, Dorchester, Bantam Dell Doubleday, Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Alkemara Press and others.

A pioneer in the ebook world, his novel Naomi made international news when it was launched as the world’s first ebook serial in early 1999 and was called “the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace” by Publisher’s Weekly, covered in Time magazine, Business Week, Business 2.0, BBC Radio, NPR, USA Today and more. His book Purity was the first to be published via mobile phone in the U.S. in early 2001.

He is married, and lives and writes along the coast of New England.

@DouglasClegg

DouglasClegg

www.DouglasClegg.com

Disclaimer

The Words is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Publication Credits & Copyright

Copyright 2002, 2009 Douglas Clegg

Published by Alkemara Press in the United States.

Cover art provided by:

Damonza.com

Table of Contents

Title Page

A Note from the Author

The Halloween Man

- Praise for The Halloween Man and Douglas Clegg

- Get the Free Newsletter
- The Halloween Man
- Prologue
- PART ONE
- the damnation highway
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- he whispered…
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- PART TWO
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- INTERLUDE
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- PART THREE
- INTERLUDE
- Chapter 27
- COMES THE HALLOWEEN MAN, REAPING
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Epilogue
- Also by Douglas Clegg
- Contact Douglas Clegg
- Disclaimer
- Copyright
- Publication Credits
- About the Author

The Nightmare Chronicles

- Praise for Douglas Clegg’s Fiction
- Discover Douglas Clegg’s Fiction
- Want More?
- Author’s Note
- Dedication
- Underworld
- White Chapel
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- O, Rare and Most Exquisite
- The Little Mermaid
- The Rendering Man
- 1
- 2
- 3
- The Fruit of Her Womb
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- The Night Before Alec Got Married
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- Only Connect
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- The Ripening Sweetness of Late Afternoon
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- Chosen
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- Damned If You Do
- The Hurting Season
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- I Am Infinite, I Contain Multitudes
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- Want More?
- Get the Newsletter
- Also by Douglas Clegg
- About the Author
- Disclaimer
- Publication Credits & Copyright

The Words

- Dedication

- Epigraph

1. The End Is Like This
2. Before the Night
3. The Night Begins
4. The Deer
5. Shelter
6. The Church
7. In Darkness
8. The Party
Also by Douglas Clegg
Get the Newsletter
About the Author
Disclaimer
Publication Credits & Copyright