Passover

by Aphrodite Anagnost

  “Crockett!”

  It was probably too late. Wise let the flashlight’s beam jerk to the road. Crockett threw the trash bags onto the street and bolted back up the driveway, his feet churning in the dark—too slow. The sky flashed. Dave and Creed, poised on the porch, opened fire on the scarecrow.

  From inside the house, Rachel flicked on the porch light. Crockett was a third of the way up the long drive. Mr. Petty, like a fugitive from a Halloween party, feet now hovering above the ground, swooped with mind-shaking speed to a spot between Crockett and the porch.

  “God damn you,” shouted Creed, his target blurring, as if dissolving.

  Crockett halted. The thing floated, not five yards before the deputy, separating Crockett from the porch, its arms stretched, as if it were hanging from a cross.

  Creed and Dave pumped shot after shot into the mist of Mr. Petty’s back, but the bullets passed through.

  “Stop shooting.” Crockett yelled through cupped hands. “Stop, stop.”

  “Hold your fire,” said the sheriff. “You’re just keeping Crockett pinned down there.”

  Rachel stepped out, the screen door slamming behind her. “Stop.” She walked between the two men and pushed the gun barrels down. “Talk to it,” she said. Beatricia and Lev came out behind her.

  “All right,” said the sheriff.

  From where he stood on the porch, through the apparition, Wise could see Crockett lean forward. Petty’s arms extended like the forelegs of a praying mantis, ready to strike.

  “Don’t do it,” yelled the sheriff.

  “I’m going to,” Crockett’s voice was that of a doomed man ready to make a final effort before the executioner arrived.

  “I’m going to talk to him,” said the sheriff, fighting for time. “He and I go way back.

  Ain’t that right, Mr. Petty?”

  The ghost said nothing, but held its pose.

  “You can’t do nothing,” yelled Crockett. “It ain’t human. Just tell my wife and children I died a brave man. I hate this thing worse than I’ve hated anything in my life. And I’m going to have to run right through it.”

  “Let him go,” yelled the sheriff. “Mr. Petty, the way I figure it, you must have got some human left in you. There ain’t no point in hurting my buddy. Do me the favor of letting him be?”

  Beatrica hobbled forward, her canes slipping on the wet porch. Without thinking, Wise reached out an arm and steadied the old woman.

  A blast of wind blew rain in her eyes, plastering her grey hair to her head. The wind plucked at her clothes as she spoke to the ghost without yelling, voice cracking. “I knew your mother, Mr. Petty…” She raised one hand, acknowledging its presence.

  “God damn it,” yelled Crockett. “I can’t stand here anymore. I’m going to run through this son-of-a-bitch!”

  “I knew your father, too,” said Beatricia.

  “And may I recognize all things as illusion,” chanted Crockett. “And may I be devoid of clinging, released from bondage.”

  “Please, no,” said Sheriff Wise. “Forget the Dalai Lama. Listen to me. That’s an order, son!”

  But the deputy lowered his head like a fullback preparing to hit the line, and, without hesitating, blasted into the ghost, passed through it, then stumbled out the other side. He fell to his knees then dropped to the ground. As Wise threw up his hands in despair, the deputy commando crawled on his belly.

  His body started to fade. In seconds, it was transparent. And, then, at last, it was gone.

  And the grayest depression the sheriff had ever known rolled over him like the blanket of fog that had shrouded the sky.

  Nuno Sievers flew from the remains of his house and rose to the treetops in the rain before descending to the forest floor. It would be a slow and painful journey on tender wings. His blackened flesh sizzled. But the pounding of his hollow heart, empty of blood, brought new stabs of agony to revivified nerve endings. Crosswinds were playing havoc with the new wings, flapping them like loose banners. He needed more time to gather strength. Flight, he had discovered, was exhausting.

  Soon all signs of decomposition would be gone, but the injuries that had occurred before his death would remain—his flesh would be charred and black to the bone; a hand and all but three toes would be gone, burned away. His eyes would be useless; his ears burned back to nubs and his nose missing, leaving two black holes.

  “Let my people go,” he hissed endlessly. Each time he spoke, he gathered more of the energy that had accumulated in the basement of his home, the site of his murder. He was a conduit, a pipeline. Animal magnetism hurled out of him as he materialized further. He howled as it left him, feeding the dead things of the forest and fields. It held Ewell and Petty in place, watching the Shelton house, and kept Deputy Leveaux in the woods seated on the tractor. It was already rebuilding the shape of Crockett in the driving rain.

  “Let my people go,” said Nuno Sievers. Yet such was his grief, so extreme his pain, his waking mind lost track of its objectives. Now and then his thoughts disappeared entirely and he howled mindlessly in the blackness. Then the hunger to kill came washing over him again.

  The horror of Crockett’s disappearance swept over Rachel. She wrung her hands, twisting her fingers and bending them back past extreme ranges of motion. The space between her eyebrows throbbed, the emotional voltage running haywire just beneath her skin. But when she spoke, calling everyone in the house together, her words were slow but sure, each stamping itself into the overheated air. She imagined herself as the Biblical Deborah, the most glorious judge of Israel, whose song she still recalled.

  “Wake up, wake up, Deborah! Wake up, wake up!

  Break out in song! Arise, Oh Barak!

  Take captive your captives, O son of Abinoam.”

  We need a plan, she thought. Channeling Deborah might be a good idea, though not an easy task.

  There was no use in concealing anything from the boys. Zack was fourteen and already knew too much. And Leo, eight years old, had to be let in on what was happening, if only to prevent his imagination from taking flight and building a phantasmagoric enemy even worse than the one facing them. They had to be kept informed. Their lives might depend on it. They were both first-born children, after all.

  Once again, everyone gathered in the dining room by the roaring stove. This time, Rachel sat at the head of the table. She nodded to the sheriff. “Go ahead.”

  “Here’s what I figure,” said Wise. “I shouldn’t have held the flashlight on that spook out there. They’re inanimate without light. Ruiz’s headlights probably woke it up. And Crockett’s death, well it’s my fault. I shined that flashlight in Petty’s eyes.”

  Leo’s face froze. He made an audible gulp. Rachel had an impulse to take the boy’s hand, but let it pass. He was a tough kid, with a brown belt in karate, and had long since stopped coming to her crying when he arrived home from school with bumps on his head. He would adjust. Kids are so adaptable they can scare the shit right out of you.

  “There’s no way to know for sure about the lights,” Rachel said. “Too few cases, but it’s possible.”

  Why had she said that? She had startled even herself by accepting her intuition as a footnotable source. Maybe next she would starve herself, the better to summon spirits.

  “What else do we have to go by?” Wise’s voice seemed almost lost in the salvo of thunder in the distance and the drone of the rain that sounded too much like the humming of locust wings. Rachel looked out the window, thoughtfully. There were messages in the rain, perhaps sitting in the trees like sparrows.

  “We’ve got to sacrifice a chicken from the barn very soon.” Lev opened the door to the wood stove and rolled a log over until it was wrapped in flames.

  “We don’t have a lamb,” said Rachel. A cedar branch snapped, the wind hurling it against the dining room window.

  “We need blood,” said Lev. “A chicken might do.”

  Rachel knew it was true the moment he said it. There had to
be blood, but she rejected the idea of going to the barn to get it, even though she had no better solution. Beet juice was hardly a substitute.

  “We can’t go out there,” Rachel said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “We can just wait inside,” Dave said, looking into everyone’s faces, one by one, but apparently at no one in particular. “Nothing’s broken into the house.”

  “Yet,” said Rachel.

  “Yet,” he agreed.

  She closed her eyes and let Dave’s words slip away without leaving a mark. They’d not been intended as humorous. On good days Dave was a semi-savant from his painter’s fingers to his architect’s brain. But he was also rather often a study in attitudinal behavior and source of cynical or cryptic remarks. Sometimes they helped; sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes he was appreciated; sometimes not.

  At present, he wasn’t.

  “Something broke into the Ewell and Petty houses,” said Wise. “I guess whatever is after us can break in here too.”

  “Unless we have blood on the door,” said Lev, staring into the sheriff’s eyes as if in search of agreement.

  “We can cut ourselves,” said Rachel, reaching out to Lev and touching his arm. “Everyone can contribute a little.”

  “Might work,” he said, looking over at her. “But I don’t think so. The blood is a symbol of sacrifice. We have to sacrifice something. I know we’re relying on this death angel being irrational, but we don’t want to push it too far.”

  “The dog,” said Creed.

  “No one touches the dog,” said Rachel.

  “Here, Wolfie,” Zack whispered. The dachshund sprung into Zack’s lap and buried its nose in the crook of his elbow.

  The sheriff leaned back in his chair. “Maybe the ghosts surrounding us are all we have to fight right now,” said the sheriff.

  “But we have to fight whatever killed Ewell and Petty and the rest,” said Dave.

  “I mean,” said the sheriff. “Right now.”

  Beatricia stirred in her chair, hooking the crooks of her canes onto the tabletop. “The two ghosts outside have multiplied,” she said. Her eyes glazed over, as if she had fallen into trance. “I can sense four. Leveaux and Ruiz have joined Ewell and Petty. And all four are waiting. Crockett will join them, if he hasn’t already.”

  “What are they waiting for, Beatricia?” said Dave, leaning forward.

  “For Nuno Sievers.” She closed her eyes. Silence fell around the table. Everyone ceased talking or coughing. Zack stopped scraping his chair.

  “Don’t do it, Mother,” said Rachel. “Your heart.”

  “I’m an old lady,” said Beatricia. “Besides, this one’s easy. I don’t need a séance, or cards, or a board. Just to shut my eyes and have a moment of quiet.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve had a good life, Rachel,” she said. “Besides, this one is not going to kill me. Just give me thirty seconds.”

  “No more than that, and if you go to sleep or look the slightest bit disturbed, I’m going to wake you.”

  “Fine,” Beatricia said, eyes squeezed shut. Only the wind and the rain outside the dining room window made a sound, blowing at the glass with such force the panes rattled in their casings.

  “Nuno Sievers is coming,” said Beatricia. “I can feel his power growing, but he’s moving slowly, very slowly. Still, he’s sending energy out to hold his sentinels in place. To keep us from leaving. We have an hour, maybe more. I can feel something else, too. Petty is still in the front yard, waiting. Leveaux is starting the tractor. Ruiz and Ewell are patrolling the north and west gardens. Deputy Crockett is standing in the yard to the east, not far from the porch.”

  Her eyes opened.

  Dave sprang from his chair and ran to look out the window. A long stroke of dagger lightning tore through the sky. Thirty feet from the porch, Crockett’s form had condensed back into existence and was standing in the rain, arms outstretched.

  “Damn!” Dave shouted. Lev and the sheriff rushed to the door, Rachel and the boys close behind. Rachel turned to look at her mother. Beatricia opened her eyes, shut them again, and lapsed into sleep.

  Rachel had never before seen Dave so angered by the sight of anything. Hanging in the wind and the rain, like a scarecrow, in his deputy’s jacket, Crockett seemed eerie, but serene, like a Zen master gone agreeably insane. By contrast, he seemed a reminder of everything that had gone wrong with Dave’s life—his conflicts with her and Zack; his overwork and frustrations with his businesses; his artistic endeavors that had never taken him as far as they should have; the fact that he could be such a whiner, a lump. Rachel saw that his accomplishments, his strength and intelligence, and even his modest wealth he built from scratch disappearing in an instant. All he saw before him, Rachel knew, was endless insult and threat. And she watched, unable to do anything about it, as he squeezed his fists shut until his knuckles turned white.

  “Where’s Creed?” said Lev, glancing around the dining room. Leo looked under the table; Dave’s face flushed as he rocked forward and back in his chair, confused. Or was it rage?

  Creed’s rifle was missing and the kitchen door was open. “He’s gone off to the stable,” said the sheriff.

  Rachel removed her finger from her mouth, the snag of a nail now stuck uncomfortably between her two front teeth.

  Creed moved through the darkness and blowing rain, a large plastic trash bag and twist ties stuffed into a pocket of his raincoat. He’d turned off the light in the kitchen before sneaking out the back door, down the porch steps. As he crept across the brick patio, he prayed, for the first time in years. He’d prayed no lightning would light up the sky. With luck, the moon would stay hidden behind the old trees he so loved, and no one from the house would point a flashlight. Everything depended on that. Before him, he remembered, a hedgerow loomed in the darkness. He crouched and inched ahead. When he reached the privet, he still blundered into them, stifling a gasp. He paused, listening for footsteps or the swish of ghosts. He imagined Ruiz and Ewell making their grisly patrol of back fields.

  No sound but the rain—and now, the distant roar of a tractor. He felt the thrill of a mouse safely bypassing a cat, and looked to the sky, praying again there would be no shining light to give away his position. Then, he moved right, where the hedgerow ended and the first gate hung open. He thanked the clouds for sticking around.

  But the moon and stars fluttered through the quilt of clouds, and he caught a glimpse of Ruiz’s ghost fifty yards west in the middle of the north pasture and left of the barn. He smiled. Having often helped Dave and Rachel with their horses, he knew it was possible to cut through a paddock that led to the right-hand side of the barn and then pass through the iron gate that led to the riding school, after which he would be able to enter the back of the barn, unseen, sneak past the horse stalls in darkness and grab a roosting chicken from a ledge.

  He slipped through the gate of the round pen and felt for the drenched chain he would have to lift from its hook on the post. It took a minute to find it, as he cursed to himself, prayed to God, and finally fingered the cold links, shivering. He pushed the gate open and paused, listening. The tractor’s far-off thunder muttered in his ears, but there came no footsteps or sibilant swoops, no screeching of a devil.

  So the ghosts could be fooled, avoided, providing there was no light. He crouched, uncomfortable without his rifle, the rain sweeping toward him, stinging his face. Taking slow steps he crept through sucking mud and high grass to the second gate on the right side of the barn; if the Ruiz scarecrow were to spot him it would have to see through the dark as well as wooden planks. Then, his enemy, lightning, flashed.

  He had arrived at the second gate not a step too early. He unfastened it more quickly than he had the first and hurried through the riding school, shielded by the long wall, coming at last to its Dutch door. He entered the barn and held a breath. There he paused again, listening. He crouched by instinct until his eyes could adjust to this particular depth of darkne
ss. The scarecrow, evidently, had held its place, not thirty feet away, on the other side of the planking.

  Through the door of the barn Creed saw the silhouette of the Sheltons’ brick house. The lights in the kitchen were off. Good, he thought. Rachel could be a bitch but she was damn smart, knowing to keep the lights off so he could see to get back the way he had come.

  The horses whinnied in their stalls. Were they alerting each other to danger? Maybe they could smell him. Perhaps they wanted food. Maybe the wind carried the scent of a mare, or an unholy creature. Dave had once told Creed that horses were sensitive to minute quivering of the earth, that even nearby rodents shook the ground enough to transmit vibrations through horses’ hooves and up their legs. Which, in turn, transmitted to their brains in the form of sound and made them tremble all over. It was natural he should think of that now. If the scarecrow should move closer, would the animals rear in their stalls?

  Instead, they looked only wide-eyed and fitful. Perhaps the consistent drumming of the rain had a calming effect that damped down their misgivings. For a moment even Creed felt lulled, as if the barn were warm and he could lie down on the hay bales and drift to sleep. But the terror returned. He startled. There was something wrong here, in the barn. He smelled the acrid stench of burning flesh that had descended in a fog, perhaps emanating from the ghost of Ruiz.

  He bounded like a cat, quick and silent, to the chicken coup, which consisted of an empty horse stall faced with wire to keep out foxes and weasels. There he found the sleeping birds, snuggling into the warmth of their neighbor. It would be a shame to kill two or three. The Sheltons kept Auracanas, the Easter egg layers, and silkies, fuzzy chickens used less for produce than for pets. They made excellent mothers and could be trusted to hatch out other artisan breeds. Creed hesitated, then steeled himself. The silkies, in their straw, seemed like half-hidden kittens of blue and beige down.