“Exactly.”
“All right, then. Where is it?”
This wasn’t the first time Jess kicked himself for letting Clark James grab the solar flash out of his hand and then disappearing. He chose his words carefully.
“James took it with him.”
“Of course he did.”
“I’m telling you, Sheriff…”
A sharp rap on the door interrupted Jess’s protest.
“Not now!” Burke called out.
The rapper ignored this, hit the door harder, and pushed it open. It was one of the deputies who had accompanied Jess in the squad car from the theater. He wasn’t much more than a kid, old acne scars threatening to come back and eyes flickering with nervousness at busting in on his boss. Burke didn’t help matters by jumping down the young man’s throat.
“What the hell do you want?!”
The deputy coughed, struggling to find his voice. When he finally did, Jess was probably the most surprised person in the room.
“Stark’s lawyer is here.”
Burke frowned. He looked at Jess. “Don’t remember you asking for one.”
Before Jess could tell the sheriff he had made no such request, the door swung open wider and a man in a three-piece suit that was as crisp and spiffy as when he put it on fifteen hours earlier popped in the door. Jess immediately recognized him, though it had been close to a decade since he last saw him.
“J. S. Summers,” said the attorney who had been Walter Stark’s deal-closer and go-to legal counsel for almost thirty years. He had close cropped hair, was perennially tan, and glanced at a watch worth six months of Thaddeus Burke’s salary. “You’ve got fifteen minutes to release my client.”
“On what grounds?” Burke asked.
Summers proceeded to unleash a stream of civil rights violations and illegal statutes that Jess lost track of by the third one. All he knew was that with each passing minute, Burke shrunk deeper into his chair and the deputy got more of a kick out of his boss getting the shaft. Jess was ceremoniously shown the exit with the proverbial warning not to leave town.
He thanked Summers profusely for showing up, but the attorney said it wasn’t his idea. He told Jess his benefactor was waiting outside in the parking lot.
Jess walked out of the sheriff’s office to find Kate Stark sitting behind the wheel of her Mercedes. She rolled down the passenger window and motioned him toward the car.
“It’s late, darling. Let’s go home.”
Jess didn’t need to be asked twice.
As he got inside the Mercedes, Jess thought the old saying was true. Sometimes, the only thing a boy really needed was his mother.
EXCERPT FROM THE JOURNAL OF EDWARD D. RICE
June 11
Clark James seemed to thrive from the moment he arrived at Meadowland.
Walter Stark was there to greet us when the ambulance arrived that first evening. Stark embraced the actor, but I could tell it was a put-on façade. I don’t think I would have noticed it had Clark not told me that Walter Stark “owed him.” It made me realize this was a business arrangement and nothing more. But Clark seemed happy to be in a gated facility. It kept the press away and he didn’t have a dozen poking doctors trying to figure out what was ailing him.
“You’re my doc,” he told me in front of Walter Stark. Right after we got James situated, I signed an employment contract with Meadowland. I thanked Stark for the opportunity, but he was indifferent, confirming I was just a byproduct of a deal between the two men. He wanted nothing to do with me.
I think that was where my resentment began toward Walter Stark. I don’t like to think my future involvement with his family came from a Machiavellian place, but I believe at some subconscious level I wanted to prove to the old man I wasn’t just a piece of dirt under his thousand-dollar loafers.
The paperwork complete, I became Clark James’s primary physician. He immediately began to show marked improvement. Clark went a day without a blood transfusion and said his appetite was returning, though I don’t recall him actually eating anything. He had a couple of visitors—his daughter, Tracy, who had been a constant companion since his return from Mexico, and Walter Stark. I was constantly monitoring him, but Clark said I didn’t need to keep checking on him so often.
“You’re on staff now, Edward. You’re paid weekly, not by the office visit.”
I took his blood pressure and was satisfied to see it running only a tad low. “Just showing my appreciation to my benefactor.”
Two hours later I found him collapsed on the floor. I checked his pulse and vital signs. He wasn’t breathing—and wouldn’t be doing that again anytime soon.
He had detached himself from the heart monitor and shut it off before getting up, which was why I hadn’t been alerted. I rooted around for the call button just as someone entered the room behind me.
The first thing I noticed was the motorcycle suit that encased the man from neck to toe. I told the new arrival he had to leave. “You can’t be here right now.”
But the man closed the door and took two steps into the room. His voice was simultaneously mellifluous and terrifying.
“I think I can be of help, Doctor.”
I was immediately paralyzed because I remembered where I had heard that voice before. It was from my half-dream in the tent, what I thought had been an apparition hovering over Clark James. Now I realized it had actually been real, not a phantom from a nightmare.
Its mouth opened. The teeth were pointed.
That was the first time I met the Civatateo.
8
The last time Jess remembered his mother driving him somewhere, he had been in seventh grade and the principal had called her to pick him up. He’d gotten into an altercation with his archenemy, Stewart Trank, over what most adolescent boys do battle over—a girl.
It had been Valentine’s Day and Jess had a crush on an eighth-grader, Wendy Clemmons. Shy, Jess found it difficult to speak to her, but worked up enough courage to slip an anonymous card in her locker. The four-line poem was the eighteenth version he had composed before committing to it in pen below the standard greeting.
He watched from down the hall, half-hidden by the water fountain, as she opened the locker on her lunch break. She squealed with delight upon finding the red envelope and her eyes lit up as she read the poem more than once. This reaction emboldened Jess to step forward and claim his rightful place as the card-giver, but Stewart Trank, who made it his life’s work to fuck with Jess Stark’s head, beat him to the punch. He had seen Jess place the card in the locker and walked up to Wendy to claim the card as his own. Stewart asked if she liked the poem and Wendy said she loved it. Even worse, she agreed to go to the Valentine’s Dance with Stewart, which was the sole reason Jess had composed the card in the first place. Something to help him work up the nerve to invite Wendy himself.
Jess wanted to tackle Stewart right there, but wasn’t going to make a scene in front of the girl he secretly admired. He waited until Wendy returned to class to confront him, but barely got a word out of his mouth before he heard, “Snooze you lose.” Which was punctuated by shoving Jess into the bank of lockers. Still, Jess resisted the urge to fight back.
But then Stewart Trank, that stealer of hearts and greeting cards, delivered the coup-de-grace. “I’ll let you know if she puts out.”
Jess went ape-shit. “She’s not that kind of girl!” he yelled, causing all the kids to turn and stare.
He launched himself at Stewart Trank.
By the time the teachers pulled Jess off his sworn rival, Stewart had lost two teeth and a lot of blood on the floor. What felt good at the time was fleeting. On Sunday morning, Jess heard Wendy had spent the entire dance fawning all over Stewart’s wounds. Jess wanted to kill himself, which was exactly how he felt when his mother dropped by the principal’s office to pick him up and start his two-week suspension from school.
It took the entire drive home to pull the story out of him; Jess was embarrassed
and not used to telling his mother anything about his private-thirteen-year-old-so-miserable life. When they parked in front of the Stark mansion, Kate shut off the engine and stared at her oldest son for what seemed like forever.
Jess dreaded the scolding and punishment he was certain that was coming, so he was completely knocked off guard when his mother finally spoke.
“That was pretty gallant.”
“What? What was?” asked Jess, truly in a quandary.
“Standing up for a young woman like that. Especially one who doesn’t even know you exist.”
“That’s only because she’s in the grade ahead of me.”
His mother had smiled, incredibly touched. “I wish someone had done that once for me.”
Thinking back on it years later, that was the first inkling Jess got into the complicated relationship between his parents.
Now, riding alongside his mother who had rescued him from the sheriff’s station, Jess looked at her in disbelief and simultaneous awe. He wondered how she had stood by Walter all those years—and how would she react if she learned he really wasn’t dead and buried?
“How did you know where I was?”
“Your sister came home and couldn’t wait to tell me what happened at the theater.”
“She probably has me ready to be strapped into a chair and injected.”
“Sarah has always been… how should I put it… overly dramatic. Don’t get me wrong, I think she loved Edward, or had convinced herself she did. Whether it was reciprocated on his part or he was just trying to marry into this family, we’ll never know.”
She kept her eye on the road to navigate a turn, but could sense Jess’s dubious raise of an eyebrow. “And yes, I was guilty of letting Edward become entrenched in our lives too quickly. Regardless, your sister lost the man she thought she was going to spend the rest of her life with. You have to give her a little room to work her way through that loss.”
“By going out on the town with Jaime Solis?”
“We all handle grief differently, darling.”
Jess thought back to how his mother had taken to her bed when Walter died. She looked remarkably better. Perhaps she needed something to rally for, like her eldest child getting dragged into custody.
“I take her rants and raves with a shaker of salt.” She turned to look at Jess. “But I know you couldn’t have killed Edward.”
“What else are you going to say? You’re my mother.”
“It’s more than that, Jess. I gave birth to all of you, but three children couldn’t be more different. And even though I was remiss in not spending enough time raising you, I know you all better than anyone. Harry is impetuous, says what he believes, and doesn’t have a mean bone in his body.”
“That’s for sure.”
“Sarah is your classic middle child who feels like she has to fight for attention. You would think being the only girl would have been enough, but she’s always resented that you were the first and your brother the baby. Couple that with a domineering father, it’s no wonder she’s drawn to men that she feels the need to please. I just keep hoping it’s a stage she’ll eventually grow out of.”
“We can wish.”
“And then there’s my sensitive, introspective first born. I know we have never been close. I also know I had to back your father in situations you not only disagreed with but might have felt were a betrayal.”
And there it was. Suddenly, Jess realized that his mother had known the darkest secret of all.
“Tracy?”
Kate nodded.
“How did you find out?”
“I told your father I’d leave him if he didn’t tell me what he did to make you disappear.”
Jess was still reeling from this revelation. “How did you know it was Dad?”
“Because who else but your father could make you run away without even saying goodbye?”
Kate exhaled loudly while waiting for a signal to change. “That’s how I know you didn’t murder Edward Rice. If you were ever going to kill someone, it would have been your father seven years ago.”
Jess thought about it as they pulled up the driveway to the mansion. It was the sort of illogic that chillingly made sense. “But you stayed with him… all these years.”
“What good would walking out have done? It would have just let him off the hook, allowed him to continue a life of debauchery with no consequences.” She looked up at the mansion. “He deserved the coldness that fell upon this house.”
When she turned back, her eyes had gone icy. “That way he got up every day and went to bed each night having to live with the fact that he cost me my son.”
Jess realized something else about his estranged family. He had always thought Walter held all the power. But it was Kate Stark who wielded a sword and should never be crossed. As horrible as he felt for everything his mother had endured, there was a tiny part of Jess becoming increasingly fearful of her.
“At least you finally came home,” Kate said.
“I’m sorry it took Dad dying to do it.”
“Me too.” Her sad smile tugged at his heart.
Once again Jess wondered if things would have turned out differently if he had never returned his mother’s phone call that day.
“Did he ever ask you to forgive him?” wondered Jess.
“Constantly.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. I just stayed. I guess that was answer enough. Eventually he stopped asking.”
She looked up at the house one last time.
“The person he should have been asking forgiveness from all this time was you.”
EXCERPT FROM THE JOURNAL OF EDWARD D. RICE
June 11 (continued)
It didn’t take me very long to realize I had been set up—by a two-hundred-year-old Mexican vampire and a film star.
It was pretty clear the thing in front of me (even though it looked like a man, I still, to this day, regard it as a “thing”) was not a normal human being. I’m not sure it ever was, even though it has spent time masquerading as one. But I could suddenly attribute a lot of the strange occurrences since the deaths in the jungle to the “thing” hovering over Clark James’s dead body—the sliced-up film crew, James’s bizarre malady and aversion to sunlight, the bites on his body, and inability to remember what had happened to him.
The Civatateo, which he quickly identified himself as, laid out the sticky situation in which I found myself.
“I see three options. One, let me help Mr. James while there is still time. If it is not done soon after he has stopped breathing, it will be too late.”
I started to ask what “it” was, but the Civatateo kept talking.
“Second, I could leave him here and let you suffer professional ruin that would come from the way you mishandled Clark James’s case beginning to end. I would think you would never work in the medical profession again and could face criminal charges, most likely resulting in a long prison sentence.”
I managed to find my voice at that point. “What if I choose neither?”
The thing moved so quickly, I didn’t even see its arm thrust out. I was suddenly hurled across the room. I crashed into the wall and crumpled to the ground.
“You will suffer the same fate as the men in the jungle.” The Civatateo bared its teeth once more. “I should mention it is beyond painful.”
The fact that I didn’t offer up a protest gave the Civatateo the desired answer. It advanced on the dead Clark and bent over him.
The horror that followed I will take to my grave.
To a man of science, there was no earthly explanation, but I knew I had entered a world that no medical book or school could ever teach you about.
The Civatateo rolled up the sleeve of its bizarre motorcycle outfit and lowered its pointed teeth into its own forearm. Dark blood flowed like ebony from the puncture mark. The Civatateo leaned over and cradled Clark James’s head in his lap. It opened the dead man’s mouth and let the blood
trickle down his throat.
I was frozen in horror at this sight. I kept waiting for the moment when I would wake up and find myself having fallen asleep filling out job applications in my tiny apartment. I opened my mouth to protest at the vile act but was stopped by something more unbelievable.
Clark James began coughing and choking in the thing’s arms.
I leapt to my feet and started to approach the two of them, but the Civatateo snapped up its head up and glared. Never in my life had I felt closer to my own death. I knew if I took one more step, the Civatateo would rip me to shreds like a lioness protecting its newborn cub. I had no choice but to back off and watch.
The ebony blood continued flowing into Clark James’s mouth. He stopped choking and began to suckle, as if receiving mother’s milk from a surrogate savior.
Eventually the Civatateo removed his arm from James’s lips, but not without a struggle as the actor had regained a considerable amount of strength and wanted more sustenance. But the thing quieted him down, stroking his forehead like an Impressionist Madonna pampering her supine child.
Clark’s breathing became steady and normal for the first time since he emerged from the jungle. He lay in the thing’s arms, his eyes closed, softly murmuring.
To my amazement and horror, Clark James seemed healed.
And most frightening of all, content.
“What have you done?” I managed to ask.
“He has been turned.”
“Into what?”
The Civatateo told me.
I knew my life was never going to be the same.
9
The first thing Lena wanted to do was feed him. Forget the fact it was one in the morning. Lena would sooner run naked down Palm Canyon Drive than allow a Stark to walk out of her kitchen if she suspected an empty stomach in her midst. Jess realized he was actually hungry and scarfed down the omelet Lena whipped up in one quarter of the time it took her to make it.
Kate sat with them at the kitchen table and nursed a cup of tea. This was also a foreign concept for Jess; growing up the children never sat with the adults.
Descending Son Page 31