Passover

by Aphrodite Anagnost

  “It’s a good bet Enwright had something to do with the whole thing,” said Crockett.

  “Maybe something with what we’re facing right now.”

  “Mother of God.” The sheriff lumbered over to Lev, who was sitting in a chair by the hearth staring at the articles. He handed him the printer-warmed page. “This is the man whose house we found in the woods.”

  “God. Beatricia was right.” Dave slumped on the sofa, eyes still closed, hand pressed against his forehead. “N-U-N-O. She’s been mumbling that name for weeks.”

  “Let’s wake the old broad up,” said Creed, looking over Lev’s shoulder, squinting at the words.

  Lev finished reading. Swords of fire cast shadows across his sallow cheeks. He stood, hunched as if still cold. “What now?”

  He handed the paper to Deputy Crockett, whose long, sturdy fingers held it carefully. Crockett studied one page in the firelight, then passed it over to Deputy Ruiz, who let it fall to the carpet, then plopped herself down in a rocker, fingers gripping the carved lion arms.

  “Lookie here.” Wise returned the paper to the top of the stack, then went to the front bay window and pointed to the south. “I know that ain’t no scarecrow.”

  Dave slowly rose from the sofa, leaving a faint impression in the chenille upholstery and came to stand next to Wise.

  In the dark, outlined by flash lightning, the Sheltons’ driveway to its right, stood the smoky white shape of a man, arms extended on either side.

  Dave blinked several times, then checked his friends to see if they saw it too. He realized the village of Zebulon had been flung in at the deep end, and the remaining posse was totally unprepared for the reckonings of actual tormented souls from the hereafter. And this was, in his opinion, what accounted for the very great losses of his four neighbors and one young deputy. They’d suffered out there. They’d been casualties of a war they’d never signed up to fight.

  The energy gathering in the potato cellar of Nuno Sievers’ house had been replicating all day. It streamed out the door left open by Dave and took to the air in search of hosts, as if it were a living thing. Dave had a feeling in his gut he’d made a mistake by not closing the hatch. Now, he had a momentary vision of a turbulent green force growing exponentially like a virus and then flying through the air as a radio signal. At a cellular tower in Zebulon, it formed a presence and wavered there, ghostly, waiting for Sheriff Wise to dial the state police. When the call finally came, the energy leapt with such force the sheriff’s smart phone exploded in his hand.

  “Yow,” he cried, dropping the smoldering aluminum corpse.

  Ruiz shouted with alarm. The sheriff, breaking down, had finally agreed to call the state police again for back up. And now this. Dave ran for the phone in the foyer and put the receiver to his ear. No use. Dead. They were cut off. A specter now stood in his front yard, immobile, arms outstretched like a scarecrow’s.

  Lev and Creed crowded the front windows. A series of flashes lit a creature nailed by its palms to watery air.

  “We’re going to die,” said Deputy Ruiz, standing by the baby grand, legs shaking. Having glimpsed the creature once, she refused to turn again toward the window.

  “I’m guessing we won’t,” said Wise.

  “Not likely,” Creed cocked his rifle. “I could take a shot at that thing.”

  “It might be human,” said the sheriff.

  “It’s not fucking human,” said Creed. “But I’m going to take a shot at it anyway.”

  He snapped open the latch and started to pull up on the window frame before the sheriff could stop him. A blast of rain soaked his pants. Dave threw himself in front of Creed and slammed the window shut.

  “No,” Dave said. “There’s a chance it’s a person. Maybe a kid.”

  “It’s not human,” Lev said, lips tight, the scar crinkling. “There’s no chance of killing it.

  Not like that!”

  Dave sat by the stove and put his head in his hands. The hearth had grown so hot that it seemed to be toasting his skin. But his fingers and ears and the tip of his nose still felt like ice. To think deeply, he shut his eyes and spoke to himself quietly, his lips moving.

  “Maybe we should all turn tail,” said the sheriff.

  “No,” said Dave, “That won’t do my two boys any good. Remember the Harper children, blown to bits in Sharpsburg.”

  “Impossible to forget,” said the sheriff. “You’re right to think of it.”

  “They’re both first-born,” said Dave, rubbing the coarse shadow of an early beard. “I’m not Zack’s biological dad.”

  “Reckon I recollect that, too,” said the sheriff, “Anybody here a first-born son, but Leo and Zack?” Lev and Crockett raised their hands.

  “Jesus,” said the sheriff.

  “Maybe that thing in the yard is just a scarecrow,” said Dave. “Put here to scare us—to keep us here until something else comes along.”

  “Whatever it is,” said the sheriff. “It might not have anything against anyone here who’s not a first-born son.”

  “How about Leveaux?”

  “I don’t know,” said Wise. “He may have been a first-born son, or simply someone who was getting in the way.”

  “Damn my soul.” Deputy Ruiz fished in her pockets and pulled out the keys to her Charger.

  Wise looked at Ruiz, and shook his head. The slight movement was just within Dave’s perception. Wise was worried about her. Dave could see that. He didn’t envy the sheriff’s responsibility for his deputies. He imagined the sheriff’s worry must be clawing at his gut. Ruiz had joined the force only months before. She had children to feed and her husband was out of work.

  The sheriff’s tone was gentle, tinged with real concern. “I guess you’re fit to be drowned in a barrel, Deputy. You want to skedaddle.”

  “I think the thing outside is just a scarecrow,” she said. “Even if it’s not, it’s probably not after me.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “I’m going to get help,” said Ruiz, snapping up her raincoat. “But I can’t take being here anymore. This waiting.”

  Wise turned toward the men. “Nobody’s gonna try to shoot that thing outside unless I say so. Deputy Ruiz’s goin’ for help—to the state police. Failing that, to the sheriff’s office at Accomack. Deputy Ruiz, you get yourself out the side door and make a run for your car while we keep an eye on that thing from the porch. If it starts to move toward you, we’ll lay down a field of fire that will tear it apart.”

  “Sounds like roses to me, Sheriff. I’ll go straight to the Hornsby station.”

  “Let’s do ’er,” said the sheriff.

  Lev pulled open a package of size C batteries. They tumbled onto the rectory table. Dave gathered and stuffed them into flashlight handles. From the front window he watched the specter half disappear in the heavy rain and wind-hurled leaves as Deputy Ruiz prepared to bolt, keys in hand.

  At the sheriff’s command, Creed threw the door open and rushed through it to the porch. Deputy Ruiz broke from the house, dashed past Creed and crunched across the shell driveway through the rain to her patrol car, then slammed its door shut.

  In an instant, she switched on the headlights. Wipers slapped the water from her windshield.

  “Move it,” muttered Dave. “Jesus.”

  Ruiz revved the Charger’s engine, drawing no response from the specter in the front yard. The car backed into a rosebush and turned around in the driveway, headed toward the empty street, then stopped, like a horse refusing a jump.

  Something must be wrong with the woman’s brain, thought Dave. The rain was streaming from the sky, and Ruiz just sat there in the car like a tourist under a waterfall.

  The veil of water seemed impenetrable, yet something was appearing on its other side. Dave blinked. A shape, a darkening form. Could Ruiz see it too? He rubbed his eyes to clear away the apparition, but there it remained, gaining bulk, solidity—a phantom with the spread-open arms of a man, drifting towar
d the police car, as if seen from the other side of a shower curtain. Dave Shelton’s heart was beating like an uncontrollable, insidious drum, but there was no way to slow it. Every inch of his body ached with cold. He was shouting, but seemed to hear his own voice from a distance. The world was suddenly upside down, and he was spinning. Still, he could make out the figure approaching the cascade of water that tumbled over the car. Mr. Petty! From Daisyland!

  “Drive away, Ruiz,” mumbled Dave.

  The sheriff screamed, waved his arms, leapt forward. “Ruiz! Get out of here.” Just then, the deputy floored it.

  The patrol car roared to life and shot down the driveway and across the street. It blasted into a crape myrtle and burst into flames.

  Dave bolted for the door.

  Wise tackled Dave from behind like a linebacker and pulled him down. “No one goes out! Not on my watch. She’s dead!”

  “I gotta get her.” Dave said.

  “There ain’t no her,” said the sheriff. “Just pieces of her. I’m in charge. No one else goes out.”

  • • • •

  Swimming up from her night terror, away from the winged shadow of a grackle that dove at her from a black sky, Rachel woke with a start. She found herself slumped on a stool, leaning over the butcher block in the kitchen. She was sweating, shaking, fingernails digging into the hard maple. Night terrors were like that. They obliterated all else. They would strike in dreams and dissipate before she woke. They were about the same vague monster, a flying creature pursuing her. And each time she woke, she was left with only a shadow of the flashing wing.

  And the lingering odor of charred skin. For seconds, her inner and outer worlds were obliterated, and she would know only the free-floating intense anxiety brought about by the dream.

  Since their marriage, Dave would usually be beside her when she woke trembling. But, today, he wasn’t. She found herself in the kitchen alone, struggling to reorient herself, only groggily concluding she’d fallen asleep. She looked down and brushed Oreo crumbs off her chest.

  From a distant room, Dave was shouting something unintelligible. Footsteps stomped through the dining room and thumped on the side porch. Instead of leaping up, Rachel sat very still and took several slow, deep breaths.

  Memories of Aristino snapped into her mind, one after another: the beautiful horse using his prehensile nose to open the door latch; wandering around the barn, hanging his head over a stall and dipping his nose into the waterer; in the tack room, nudging a saddle and jiggling a bit; wandering through the double Dutch doors and around the arena; pulling carrots out of the small square garden ten yards from the back door of the kitchen. And, always, lifting his head, pricking his ears, nickering, looking for her.

  When Aristino had been shot by goose hunters, she’d cried for days. No, weeks. Sometimes she cried even now, almost a year later.

  Rachael took her own pulse, then rubbed the artery in her neck, the carotid bulb, to slow her heart. Water dripped from the kitchen faucet. Rain was still beating on the window—not surprising, since the sky had been spitting rain when she fell asleep. But the thick darkness outside was new. This night was different somehow. It had come too fast, and there was no daylight remaining, only the whine of wind and branches scraping the windows like ragged fingernails.

  She thought of calling for help, but dismissed the idea. There was no point. She was okay. The terror was over. All she needed was to get up from her chair and continue making supper. The men would be finishing up their silly research, and whether or not they deserved it, she would feed them.

  Any resentment could be voiced later. Thank God, her mother was safely put to bed and had ceased her nonstop chatter. Rachel’s fear was subsiding. Maybe because of, rather than in spite of, the night terror. She'd begun having night terrors as a child. Their passing had always left a pleasant haziness. A sense of security, step by step, took their place, as if the terror itself was a cleansing device for the spirit.

  She stood and collected an assortment of pots and pans from the iron hanger. Between gusts, the house stood in stern silence, broken only by the sounds of men talking fearfully.

  Then, she heard heavy hooves approaching the back door of the kitchen, the one that led out to the east pasture and the stables, where her horses were doubtless waiting out the storm in the warm comfort of their pine-chip bedding. The wind had subsided, and Rachel though she heard a snort.

  She listened closely. Quiet, and then a nicker. The rain resumed. She dribbled oil in a frying pan, turned on the flame, and dumped in a bowl of diced peppers. The rain backed off again. Another snort.

  One of the younger horses—Magistrate, perhaps—must have escaped his stall and come to the brick porch behind the kitchen. And she would have to get him back to the barn, and check the doors and fencing, or have Lev do it.

  Rachel peered out the window over the sink. Rain streaked the glass so that nothing was visible. She pulled her raincoat off a hook in the butler’s pantry and put it on quietly, then eased open the back door. Outside, the porch light failed to make much headway against the buttress of black air drizzling mist.

  Something large stood at the end of the porch, stomping a hoof and scraping its neck against a column.

  Rachel blinked a few times, waiting for her pupils to widen.

  “MG,” she scolded, approaching the soaked, muddy horse. But no—this animal was much too large to be Magistrate. She extended a hand to the furry muzzle just as the lightning flashed. She screamed so loudly the sound of her own voice roared back at her. “Aristino!”

  She snapped back the outstretched hand and smelled his grassy breath on her fingertips. “Oh God!” She shook her head and slapped her cheeks to make sure she was awake, and threw her arms around the horse’s neck. She felt his breath against her nape and stepped back away to look at him again, questioning his solidity, his reality.

  How could this be? Her beloved horse was dead. She and Dave had buried him themselves with the backhoe. Had the foul-smelling creature that had almost run them down in the woods—had it been Aristino, after all?

  But this Aristino, the one before her, smelled like horse, not like a grave. Had the rain simply washed him clean? Could it be that he’d been less than fully formed before, but now was whole? It felt as if the thunderstorm had migrated from the field and into her head. Were ghosts then real? For here was a ghost. Had she been wrong?

  She hummed to soothe him as she examined his flesh. Should she be afraid? If this was a specter, it wasn’t a hostile thing. Even if sparked to life by Nuno Sievers, it was not his creature, but hers. Unlike men, horses by nature were non-predatory, incapable of evil, regardless of the influence, and so insulated from it.

  “I don’t know,” she said, squeezing the bridge of her nose hard with two fingers. “I don’t know what I am either.”

  She ran a hand over his wet coat, swiping away the dirty water. She slipped a finger up the inside of his cheek, identifying the lateral ridges of his teeth. Then pressed a palm where his heart should be and timed its beating.

  So, it is beating!

  He was either real, or she was insane. In her mind she had envisioned Aristino’s return and now here he was. She smelled his breath. “Alfalfa,” she said.

  Then, she was psychic, too, as her mother had insisted.

  How different Aristino was from the cat, who had the protein-fueled energy of a predator. Aristino had sprung from her love. Not solely from the energy of pain or the torment of an insane man who had been burned to death in a potato cellar in the woods.

  All her life, the terrifying bird of her night terrors had been trying to contact her, to bring her something, and now it had.

  “Oh, Aristino.” She scratched him behind the withers until he lifted his nose and twisted it in bliss. She smiled and made a knot of the long wet hair that stuck to her neck. Then she felt a block of coldness, as if the air had frozen into ice around her. She could see the horse was shivering, too.

  Rach
el threw her arms around him and squeezed her eyes shut. Horses had been around longer than marriage and income tax, longer than dogs. She looked up as a bolt of lightning struck the ground out in the north pasture, where Aristino had been buried. The sky lit for a moment. The earth had been supplanted in an unruly pile.

  “You’re back.” She smiled.

  The rain crystallized into sleet and wrapped its icy darkness around woman and horse.

  Rachel took her belt off to fashion a lead to take the horse to the barn. But Aristino arched his neck and let out a worried blow.

  “I must let you go. It’s too dangerous here now.” She unbuckled the belt, kissed the horse, inhaling his velvety muzzle, and turned him to face the north woods that would lead to acres of farmland, through a nursery that would end in the next village, Freesburg.

  She pulled a few strands of mane, black with a shot of gray through it. “Go on! Come back when this is over.” She gazed into his prismatic brown eyes and got another whiff of grass breath. “Be my spirit guide,” she whispered.

  He blew and sighed, then bolted off.

  Rachel stepped out of the block of icy air, through the rain, up the steps, and back through the kitchen door. She grabbed an apron off an oak peg and dried her eyes, then her hair and neck.

  She held the lock of mane in her hand and brought it up to her nose, inhaling the musky scent, relieved her Aristino smelled like healthy sweat, not the carcass of a dead animal.

  Like most nights, she rang the green-splotched copper dinner bell, but this time only to save her voice. It was really a goat bell from her grandmother’s village near Corinth. Then she sent Zack and Leo back upstairs with a bowl of grapes to listen to music. Having requested the men to assemble at the dining room table, Rachel sat at the head. The thick odor of boiled beets, slipping from the kitchen, invaded the dining room. “Okay. Tell me what you know.”

  Everyone looked in surprise. They were tearful.