by Patrick Ness
“Wondering what?”
“Exactly. Wondering what to do. Wondering how to talk to them. Wondering how soon he can leave and go back to talking to adults.”
“Ooh, yeah, he does do the adult-talking thing. I caught Dawn Strondheim telling him about her divorce.”
“That woman.”
“I know. Though, knowing him, he probably gave her advice.”
“I’m not saying it’s a bad thing necessarily. Maybe that’s God’s gift to him. The noticing. The wisdom beyond his years.”
“Are you comparing him to Jesus? Because that’s taking it a little far.”
Adam, who liked being compared to Jesus, wasn’t happy about this part either.
“It just bothers me sometimes,” his father said. “Are we that much of a mystery to him that he needs to spend all that time figuring us out? What goes on in that little head?”
“God in his endless variety, sweetheart. Be a boring life if they weren’t different. Marty is a good, good boy. I wish Adam were a little less of a suck-up, but he’s a good boy, too.”
“I think we’re getting near for done,” his dad said, coming in now, catching him in the same half-dream state they’d been talking about that very night.
“I’ve still got to fill the Jacuzzi up,” Adam said. “Get the water heating.”
“Yeah, but–” his dad looked at his watch, being of an age where he still went there first rather than his phone– “not bad. You did good work today.”
Adam turned on the water. It’d be a good twenty minutes filling, then he’d need to chlorinate and set it heating, but his dad was right: they’d done pretty well.
“Thanks. Plenty of time to get to Angela.”
Big Brian Thorn sat down on the bench they used for those waiting to be baptized. This wasn’t even a proper room, really, just a storage area his dad had turned into the baptismal, complete with benches and doors leading to where the choir robes were kept and where those getting baptized changed into baptismal garments. “You really care for her, don’t you?”
“She’s my best friend,” Adam answered, simply. He’d decided not to tell his dad about Angela leaving yet. That felt like too personal a pain to be shared with someone as far away from him as his father.
“Not too many boys have a girl as a best friend,” his father ventured, but Adam didn’t think it was a poke. Oddly, it actually seemed like his father was genuinely making conversation.
“It’s different now than when you were young,” Adam said. “Fewer divisions.”
“That’s certainly true.” His father leaned back on the bench, crossing his arms, looking down at his feet. “We thought you’d marry her, you know?”
Adam decided to ignore the past tense. “I don’t think I’m her type. Too tall.”
“Oh, people get over bigger things. You’d be surprised.”
“Things like what?”
“Things like … things. It’s amazing what you can do with the Grace of the Lord.”
“Dad–”
“I’m not digging at you.” He was still looking at his shoes. He sighed. “This thing with Martin has … thrown me.”
Adam looked at him warily, trailing forgotten fingers in the water of the Jacuzzi. “It would throw anybody.”
“Yes, I suppose it would.” He looked up. He was grinning. It was strange. “I gotta tell you, Adam, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but you’re the one we thought we’d never be surprised by. You’d think it would be Martin because he’s … Martin. Dependable, I’ll-give-it-a-try Martin, but you… I don’t think we’d be surprised by anything you did.”
“That doesn’t really sound like you don’t mean it in a bad way.”
“Adam–”
“So you wouldn’t be surprised if I robbed a bank? Or murdered a small town?”
“Or won a Nobel Prize,” his dad said. “Or saved a family from a burning house. I’m just saying… We’re predictable people, Adam. It’s what we depend on Christ for. It’s what He promised us, that no matter what this life is like, there’s something guaranteed to be waiting for us if we love Him and do His will. It’s the great prediction.” His father clasped his hands now, almost as he would during prayer. “But I think… I wonder if we take that too far into our lives. And put too much value on the predictable. And never find the value in the unpredictable.”
“Like me.”
His dad’s grin tightened. “I’m not getting at ya, Adam,” he said again. “I’m trying to tell ya…”
He trailed off. Adam attempted to break the little weird tension that had arisen. “Your voice has gone folksy. Remember, I know you’re not from Kentucky.”
But his dad didn’t so much as crack a smile. “I just wish…”
“What?” Adam asked, still idly trailing his fingers in the water, though his stomach was starting to knot.
His dad looked at him. “I wish we could be honest with each other. I wish that for all of us. I wish it for your mother. I wish it for Martin. And I wish it for you, son. I wish it for you and me. I wish you felt you could be completely honest with me. It hurts my heart that you’re afraid.”
For a moment, a long one, they just stared at each other, the rushing water the only sound. Adam thought each of them was hoping the other would break the silence first.
Once, at thirteen, Adam had perfectly innocently been kicked out of a friend’s house in the middle of the night by the drunk boyfriend of the friend’s mother asserting his authority during a sleepover. Adam had been thrown onto the street, barely even able to make a phone call to his dad. “Can you come?” was all he’d said.
Big Brian Thorn arrived with his sleeves pushed up, his eyes wide open, and an air of threat and menace that Adam would have felt terrified of if he hadn’t been absolutely sure it wasn’t for him. “Did he hurt you?” his dad had asked.
“No, I just want to go.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
They’d driven away, his dad even letting Adam cry from the shock of it all, rather than trying to get him to stop like he usually did. If the drunk boyfriend had laid a finger on him, Adam was fairly certain his dad might have beaten him all the way to death. If protectiveness was love, his dad was an avalanche of it.
But.
And it was a big “but”, wasn’t it?
The sermons, the fear and suspicion of Enzo (who, to be fair, they were right to be suspicious of), Marty telling him how much they all talked about him…
What was his father asking him here? What was his father telling him?
If it could be like this. If they could be honest with each other. If Adam didn’t have to be afraid.
But he did, he did, he did.
Didn’t he?
Big Brian Thorn was overbearing, punitive, capricious, not a big fan of the gays or anything alternative, but he clearly loved his sons, in his own flawed way. And if Adam would argue to himself that it wasn’t love if it altered when it alteration found, it was a kind of love. Fierce, ferocious, baffled. He’d be lying if he said he looked at what Martin – up until this morning, at least – had always had with his parents and was never jealous.
He found it coming out of his mouth before he even knew what he was saying. “Something happened at work today, Dad.”
There are ancient agreements with this world, agreements made before memory with the people who were first in this place, people who gave the faun and his Queen different shapes in their dreams and prayers, shapes that changed as the people did, shapes that become ever more elastic until he often doesn’t know what physical form he will take when he steps out of the lake until he has done so. Still, as changeable as both sides were, they had once agreed to put a war to its end.
He, for example, has not wilfully eaten the flesh of one of these creatures for millennia. The impulse to hunt him in return was removed from their thinking. Reciprocity.
All of which will vanish if the Queen dies. She is the k
eystone between the worlds. Should she die, the treaty will be only the first thing to unravel. The universe will soon follow.
And so he catches the bodies before she can hit them with her full force, he drags them out of her way when they try to stop her; he replaces the throat of a man who tries to physically restrain her. The man is breathing as the faun leaves him behind, and for now that’s the best he can manage.
She will not answer his questions, though he believes she can now hear him.
“My Queen,” he says, reattaching an arm to a thankfully unconscious guardswoman, erasing the memory and the pain from her thoughts. “We must get you to safety. We must get you to the lake.”
But she carries on, remorseless, relentless. He hasn’t seen her like this since before the world began, when it needed forming, when she had to beat back the very darkness itself that threatened to consume them all.
The world is at stake again. He wonders if she will win this time. And if she doesn’t, will he have time to eat anyone before the worlds disintegrate?
The man she seeks is deep within this prison. She can feel him there.
What does she want with him? She is unsure and she senses this confusion seeping through the identity that binds her. But the drive is not confused. The drive is pure. The drive is a torrent and she can only be swept along.
She destroys another iron door. Beyond is a corridor, barred rooms on either side. The bars are too close-set for the faces to peer at her from all but the most oblique angles, but she senses enormous curiosity here, a willingness to shout, a wish to leer and call–
But there is only silence as she steps in. The men – they are all men – stand as if they have taken a breath and held it. They do not shrink back, they are clearly men long past being afraid of anything, no matter how majestic, no matter how powerful, men who would take a moment to chew first if their own God asked them to rise from their dinner table.
But nor do they offer disrespect. The first two men, right and left, stare at her firmly, unwaveringly, and within them she recognizes the spark that drives some of these creatures. The one that compels them to consume too much, gorge themselves to the point of actual physical harm and beyond, the greed and gluttony that would burst their very skin if they could manage it. There is injustice here, certainly there is, there has never been a creature as unjust as these, but there is badness here, too, true and deep, eyes that lead down wells with no bottom.
“Judge me,” the one to her right says.
“Judge me,” echoes the one to her left.
“My Queen,” she hears behind her, but she raises her hand to silence it.
“I will,” she says. “I will judge you.”
“He did what?” Big Brian Thorn said.
“He didn’t come right out and say it,” Adam said. “But it was all there.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“You’re sure?”
“Well, no, I mean, like I said, he didn’t come right out and say it but–”
“This man made a sexual advance on you?”
“That’s what it felt like.”
His dad flexed his fists for a moment, breathing heavily through his nose. “God forgive me if I say that what I’m feeling right now is that I’d like to kill him.”
“The thought had occurred to me, too.”
“And you’re sure?”
“How many times are you going to ask?” The Jacuzzi was full now. Adam turned off the faucet and started flipping the heater switches.
“There’s no way you could be misinterpreting him?”
“That’s what he said.”
“But surely he could have meant–”
“I saw the hard-on in his pants, Dad!”
Big Brian Thorn winced. There was so much in the sentence that would have been difficult for him to hear, his son saying “hard-on” pretty high among them.
Adam kept talking, was annoyed to find his voice shaking a little as he remembered, kept talking anyway. “He was … touching me. He had his hands on my thighs. Pressing just a little too hard.”
His dad looked up. “Pressing any way at all is too much.”
“He was just… Testing the boundaries, I think. Seeing how much he could get away with.”
“Sounds like you let him get away with a lot.”
Adam’s stomach went cold. “He shouldn’t have touched me, Dad.”
“No,” his dad said, quickly. “No, of course not. He’s in the position of power here. There’s an abuse of authority.”
Adam finished with the Jacuzzi. It would be ready for tomorrow morning’s immersions, ready to cleanse the souls of the white-shirted believers who would let themselves be dunked by the massive man sitting a few feet away. The massive man who even his son could see was clearly wrestling with what to say.
Adam felt one of his infrequent-lately waves of affection for him. His dad’s size – an enormous middle-aged belly now augmenting all that defensive lineman bulk – his serious beard, his blue, blue eyes that only Marty had inherited. A man who felt he should get what he wanted but who kept finding himself falling just short. The news from Marty was an obvious blow, and now here was his somehow troubling second son adding the picture of a man wanting sex. Worse, Wade wanting sex.
Maybe it was as simple as that here was a confused man struggling to figure out how best to love him.
“Dad–”
“And you’re sure you didn’t lead him on?”
That man vanished in an instant. “What?”
His dad rubbed his nose distractedly but then got a look like he had cast the die, so why not follow it through? “Adam, we … know. Your mom and I. We know.”
Adam ignored how his heart was racing. “Know what?”
“Don’t play stupid. You had pornography on your laptop. That kind of pornography.”
Adam didn’t know where to go with this so decided to aim for invasion of privacy, which was always as good as an admission of guilt. “You looked on my laptop?”
“And we know you had an … infatuation with that Mexican boy–”
“He’s Spanish.”
“But that seemed to have passed and your mom found the pictures a while ago–”
“Mom found it?”
“You seemed to be doing so well. So … you know, close to Angela and…”
“And what?”
His dad looked him straight in the eye. “Do you know how much we pray for you? Pray for your healing?”
“I don’t need healing.”
“We all need healing.”
“I don’t need that kind of healing. Nobody does. Seriously, Dad, do you know what year it is?”
“I don’t need to move with the times if the times are wrong–”
“And what are you saying anyway? That I led Wade on?”
Big Brian Thorn looked distinctly uncomfortable now. “I know the hormones of teenage boys. It can happen to anyone. Look at Martin.”
“Marty is no longer a teenager.”
“I’m just saying that, you know, if you … had a little crush on this manager–”
“Wade?!”
“Then maybe he thought you were … making yourself available.”
Adam blinked at his father. Just blinked. They were in unknown territory here, in so many ways. This was, remarkably, the first time since the Wendy’s that either of his parents had directly addressed the topic with him, though clearly they’d been doing so regularly with Marty. And if they’d found stuff on his laptop – nothing creepy, just the regular-looking kind of guy that Adam found himself preferring to professional porn – and not even mentioned it–
How dangerous did they think he was?
“Making myself available?” he said, feeling the fury rise. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
His dad looked up sharply, angrily. “Do not use language like that in God’s House.”
“But it’s okay to accuse your son of leading his m
anager into sexual harassment bordering on outright assault?”
“I’m just saying, maybe unconsciously–”
“I’m seventeen. He’s my gross boss with a gross moustache and looks like a road so well travelled I need to wash my hands after just being near him.”
“You let him put his hands on your thighs.”
This landed like a slap. The words of blame he had put on his own self, now coming out of the mouth of his father.
“So I was asking for it,” Adam said, his mouth dry. “Is that what you’re saying?”
All Big Brian Thorn did in answer to his son was shrug. But there was fear in his eyes. Fear even Adam could see. He’d thought the word “dangerous” just now.
Well, if that’s what they wanted.
“Do you know where I was this afternoon?” Adam said. “After leading my completely innocent boss into firing me unless I had sex with him?”
“Adam–”
“I was getting comfort in the bed of my boyfriend.”
It was Big Brian Thorn’s turn to look slapped. But not surprised. Not in the least surprised.
“Adam, I don’t want to hear this.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve heard a lot of things today I didn’t want to hear, so I’m going to keep talking.”
“No, you’re not. And don’t think you’re going out tonight either.”
“To the going-away party for Enzo? The boy I spent large portions of the last two years screwing?”
“Adam–”
“Which is actually not the right way around–”
“You will not speak to me this way! Not here–”
“But that’s okay, because I like being on the bottom. That’s what I did today with Linus.”
“With … what? Who?”
“Remember the boy you preached about? I mean, it’s less of a surprise when you think about it. This is hardly a very big town–”
“You’re seeing that … boy?”
“More than seeing. There’s quite a lot of sex involved.”
“Stop this!”
Adam held out his wrists. “You can still smell him on me. That’s why I’ve tried to keep my distance from you all afternoon. I didn’t have a chance to wash him off my body.”