After Debbi’s death, the catacombs had cracked open and sorrow had poured into town like all the reaped sins of these deserved whirlwinds. Sometimes he couldn’t tell the difference between the abominations he’d let loose and the madness that had been here before.
(Debbi was dead.)
I know, he told her. I’m sorry, but you have to stay with me, Joanne. I need your help. He traced fiery sigils in the air that blazed and floated for a moment.
“Why?”
Christ, that voice, so lifelike.
I need your help.
“Who are you, Master?”
It’s not important. I’m not your master, I won’t keep you in service.
“I want to know.” Lips set firmly, those empty eyes pinned him, and in her deathless beauty he understood the convictions of the poet. What could he have said to her before the butchering? In the cafés, along the rim of Broadway?
I’m Matthew Galen. His name felt wrong inside his own skull. I’m a friend.
She stood, and he almost backed away a step. There was a vacant aura of incompleteness surrounding her, yet for all her weeping Joanne seemed more aware of circumstances than he. “If you’re really my friend, Matthew,” she said, “you’ll let me go.”
I will, soon.
“Now, please, please, now.”
I can’t yet.
Suddenly she was at ease, walking about his room, regarding the empty walls as if remembering his posters and bookshelves. She stooped and peered at the burned rats, grimaced, then grinned as though seeing the wedding photo. It was possible, he thought, connected to him as she was now. “I don’t belong here. I’m not Joanne Sadler.”
No, you’re not, but you are the best lead I’ve got at the moment.
She stared at him. “Why is it so hard for me to talk?”
Your tongue has been torn out and spell cast to prevent you from speaking to me. But he had touched her corpse, and knew in that instant that she was a virgin, her blood on his fingers, the most powerful of witch’s brew. Whoever had kept her all those months before killing her had not raped or maltreated her. What did that say of his foe?
She started to say something, but the doorway abruptly filled with too much noise, a loud wheezing and awful reeking that made him spin with his fists aimed to throw hexes, the first syllables of a killing curse on his tongue. A padding bulk waddled off to one side of the room and awkwardly sidestepped and dipped back, as though drunk or walking aboard a ship.
“Is that a dog?” she asked.
“I don’t gaddamn believe this,” Matthew said. That’s Gus.
The girl grinned, her smile lacking human content, a greater caricature for this. Beauty, but no poetry. “Boy, is he ugly.” Now sounding more childlike, her front teeth catching at her bottom lip, a nearly come-hither look in those eyes. Soon would come greater seductions.
Gus handled the moment better than any other dog would have, the arcana playing on animal senses—he didn’t howl or try to bury his muzzle in the doorjamb, either too stupid to care or too intelligent to argue. Gus sauntered forward to where the dead girl stood and sat near her, panting with his unseen tongue. She put her hands out to pat the dog’s head, but Gus turned his face with incredible speed, weaving between her hands so that no ghost could touch him.
Talk to me, Joanne. Who did this to you?
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
Who did this to you?
“Quit it. I have your name now, you’re not my master. I want to play with Ugly Gus.”
Gusto did not take offense as she tried to pet him but couldn’t quite make contact, his slobbering head slipping out of reach, her hands circling his snout. More of the living and dead commingling, their spheres crossing but not meeting. The dog could do what Matthew could not.
Who did this to you, Joanne?
“I don’t know! Stop asking me!” She acted as though in pain, but smiled through it. “She didn’t see the person. She was on her way to the bathroom and passed by an open door under one of the stairwells, the one that opens up onto the football field.”
Yes.
“There was just a whisper that made no sense, a whirl of black cloth. A hand touched the shoulder. That was all. The wire cut into her flesh and her body was being hauled upside down. Two slashes on either side of the throat that would deepen, and the pain began. She didn’t know who did it, even when the torture was at its worst. Now, shut up! Shut up! I can’t tell you any more than that.”
Where was she kept? She was missing for months before she was murdered.
“I don’t know!”
You must.
“Leave me alone!”
Tell me, Joanne.
“I’m not Joanne. It was a place, a room. Fevers. Festivities. No more than that, no more memories. She swam. Let me go. I want to go now, I want to be free of you.”
The returned dead, so resentful of the living. Her voice, no longer the poet’s, bled jealousy and malice. What is it you want to do?
“You just watch.” She smiled, not even bothering to disguise the malevolence now, eyebrows arching, leering, trying to sex and unsex him with the same lack of subtlety the Goat had shown before. Her hands moved down her chest, as if he did not know what had been done to her, what lay on the floor of the train station. “This dog is so ugly he’s beautiful. I love him.” And the smile widened further, until he could see every missing piece of her heart. “I enjoy her damnation. Leave her where she is, Galen.” Empty eyes watched him. “You’ll join her soon enough, you know.”
“I know.”
There was no proper way to talk to the dead.
With his hand on his blistered chest Matthew made the sign of the cross more for his own benefit than hers; those early religious observances stuck with him much longer than the religion itself had. His hands burned black and flashed, drawing intricate patterns and signs that flamed and rose before her, his voice now rising with ancient words that tightened his lips and bruised his throat.
The wind kicked dust up into Gusto’s nose and the dog went into another sneezing fit. Matthew held his hand out to the lie that was no longer Joanne Sadler, vestiges of her blood remaining on his fingers from when he had caressed her corpse.
The ghost sighed, grinning with malice but not quite sure of the evil inside, puzzled as to its own existence. Only in the last instant did she realize he wouldn’t release her back into the world as she’d wanted. Unbound, what would she have done out there in the dark beyond the site where she was murdered? She’d probably find and kill the sobbing deputy.
Instead he sent this fragment of the girl back to wherever the remainder of her soul resided.
“No, not this way!” she shrieked. “I said I wanted to be free, Galen! Let me go!” Screeching, she lunged at him, nails aimed to claw his face, opaque eyes blazing with antiquity.
Inches from him the shade of Joanne Sadler faded before the end of her scream as he moved toward her, almost seeking an embrace.
“Damn it,” he said.
Festivities? Bosco Bob’s parties?
Gusto followed him down the stairs, an urgency and meaning in his presence. The dog had a place here. When they reached the bottom Gusto took off through the front door, sensing what had to happen. Matthew took one last look around the house. He grabbed up a fistful of sticks from the broken chair and faced south, imagining fire, the athame, his witch’s knife here in his hand, the color orange, fire, representing the metal gold, molten, fire, until the kindling burst into flames.
He threw the burning wood into the four corners of the room and watched the house begin to blaze. He waited a moment longer, staring at the top of the banister, where the varnish of the center rail had been scraped away.
That spot where his father had double-knotted the end of a taut noose before hurling himself over the edge and breaking his neck, just as his nineteen-year-old son stepped into the doorway with hell in his heart and dirt from his mother’s grave beneath his fin
gernails.
Chapter Sixteen
There are minutes when you are out of contact with your skin.
Twilight and the cold breeze further insulated Matthew as he rested on a park bench and watched Gus play at the side of the lake. The faceless dog stuffed his snout under the water, blowing bubbles. A middle-aged couple holding hands strolled along the cobblestone path. The lanterns brightened as darkness settled, and the neon of the Krunch sign flared on the Avenue. From where he was seated, he could look through the far-off brush and make out the corner of the high school and see the sweltering cube of the wrestling room where A.G. had pinned dozens of opponents. Matthew craned his neck farther and sighted the spot where Joanne Sadler had been attacked, near the only outer door in a stairwell opening onto the football field. The field ran into the knolls and slopes of the park, borders of the school yard determined only by the end of the bleachers.
Behind the bench the couple spoke quietly, and he heard the woman gasp and whisper about the dried blood on him. The man replied, “Shhh, Miranda, don’t cause any trouble now.” Gus yanked his head out of the water and swung, barking playfully. The man and woman walked away with a brisk stride. Gusto came back dejected and lay at Matthew’s feet, dripping and panting, then rose and waddled off again, sniffing at bushes.
A lot had gone on in these fields besides the daily afternoon practices and the famous ninety-nine-yard run. He and Helen had made love in the ravines like a couple of raccoons. Once he’d very nearly wound up atop an entangled Jazz and Bobbi May, all four of them deaf to any noise besides their own, tumbling through the evergreens until Matthew felt a different kind of chill as he looked over his shoulder straight into Jazz’s surprised smirk. “Caught me again, huh, Mattie? Hey, at least you’re a friendlier face than those uptight National Guardsmen. Hi, Helen. Peace.” Bobbi May had hidden her face in the leaves.
On summer mornings they’d played two-hand touch and Frisbee tag, him and the rest of the cast: A.G., Ruth, Helen, Jello Joe and Jelly Jane, Jazz and Bobbi May, and several others who shuffled in and out depending on their patience and tolerance. Helen was fascinated with abnormal psych and played at being Freud too often for anyone’s good, especially his own. Occasionally and unknowingly she tore the hell out of their most tender areas.
On the flip side you had Ruth doing charcoals of A.G. on the field, or on the wrestling mat. She was so introverted she rarely met your eye, usually regarding her feet without a sound, so that after only a few minutes you found that you couldn’t force a word in edgewise between the crashing cymbals of her silence. She’d repressed her memories of what had happened back in the caves, but he saw hints of her childhood power still. Talking to Ruth could make you feel like you were swallowing glass.
Jello Joe had this annoying habit of never taking anything seriously, laid back and so relaxed all the time it actually got on your nerves. And Jazz just couldn’t help but be discovered with his Fruit of the Looms around his ankles, like some insane creature in heat that couldn’t control himself no matter where he might be, and Bobbi May or some other cute chick clutching at him and laughing at his frenetic humor.
A.G. would read to Ruth more often than join in on the games, sitting on a picnic blanket and occasionally flicking spells across the grass that would either let you spot Spanish doubloons that vanished in the dirt or tadpoles that slipped out of your nostrils—it all depended on his mood and need for mischief.
Jelly Jane ate bushels of raw onions, and thought it was sexy for her not to wear a bra. Matthew knew it was more of an act than anything, her insecurities forcing her further and further into her own self-effacement.
The other kids never came back.
Among her other wonts, Jelly Jane also tried to jump Matthew’s bones every chance she got. Jazz once wildly tossed a Frisbee so far out of range that Matthew had to scamper through the woods in order to chase it down. Two hundred and eighty pounds of Jelly Jane followed and leaped onto his back, her knees digging against his ribs, holding him facedown in the dirt while her hands reached around trying to untie his sweatpants. “Screw me,” she snarled into his ear. “Now, damn you, do it now.”
It was all another way for her to hate herself. He never found a way to let her down easy when she got like that, and he sometimes wondered if the book dealer had handed over the love potion made from Matthew’s three pubic hairs to Jelly Jane, binding them like that together forever. She cornered him in the halls of school, got him in a headlock, and threatened to wring him into a piece of modern art—lots of laughter and smile, just a game, but an ugly one. The rest of the football team would laugh themselves into tears when they saw how easily Jelly Jane could beat him up—but none of them ever tried to help him. No, they knew she’d walk over them just as simply. Unlike Jello Joe, who took everything so casually, his sister was so pent-up you could see it even when she wasn’t on the attack. Even with the weight problem she remained extremely attractive, with luring eyes and an enticing grin, but for all her beauty and Bosco Bob’s wealth she was probably the unhappiest person Matthew had ever known, besides his father and himself.
The last time he and Helen had made love it was in the park, near the sandbox. Gus pawed at the ground there now, his tail brushing back and forth against the wooden corner of the box. Matthew tried not to think about how much she must hate him, even in their connected dreams, the silver chord of her spirit coupled to him by the nightmares of what their love had become.
He recalled everything of that last time, and could find no room left inside his head to keep it all stored away, like one of his plays spilling into the open: how Helen laced her fingers with his and gestured for him to grab her breasts, up and down strokes the way she liked it, tracing her large aureole slowly. His palms were almost painfully electric against her smoothness. She dug her nails in, shoving the heels of her hands against the sides of his face, angling his chin up and forcing him to stare directly into her soulful, understanding eyes. She knew nothing of him. Her slick hair swung down on him like a slicing pendulum slipping across his flesh, keeping to the beat of her bucking, fronds from the brush raining down.
He eased her legs farther apart, and she gasped getting to her knees. Helen shifted onto her side, arms draped over his neck, tugging him closer, always closer, and closer still, moaning in his ear and nibbling on the veins that bulged down his forearms. She bit his cheek and said viciously, “Love me,” as if there were any chance he didn’t, as if he wasn’t. She laughed at the look on his face. “Love me. I love you.” He kissed her, raw and thirsty, as though their first kiss had followed them through all their passion and needs. His bad ankle, as it sometimes did, throbbed dully with his pulse, with the three-quarter time of Helen’s groaning, her furious breaths. She tried to touch the scar on his chest, but he gripped her hands and held them to her own breasts where she tugged at her nipples. The blue of the Krunch sign blazed even more brightly in her turquoise eyes. She grinned her askew grin, and it hurt him to see her as beautiful as this.
Afterward, he was startled awake by the moon. When he got home his father was lying on the porch soused out of his head, each hand twisted around a bottle of whiskey. As if the man couldn’t get deranged enough as quickly as he wanted, already more doomed than Matthew’s mother had been. Matthew helped his father to the bathroom and watched Dad kneel at another of the gods to vomit painfully. The man gurgled like an infant and Matthew carried him to his room, undressed him and put him to bed, waiting until Dad’s shallow, erratic breathing became regular.
It was almost a blessing to know that his father had folded under the same kind of horror. Matthew tore hell out of his father’s study until he found his mother’s birth certificate and Social Security card cleverly hidden in his yellowing eighth-grade report card envelope. He left with a flashlight and a shovel, to visit her grave for the first time that night, and talk aloud to her about everything that had happened in the seven years since he’d last seen her.
He returned
home to find his father hanging, the empty envelope on the floor.
He’d acquired the second mark of the Goat that night, knowing, even then, how stupid it was to run to his dead father as the man twisted in the air, and pull the power from inside himself as if by instinct, wanting to bring Dad back but hating him too much to resurrect him properly. He’d failed, of course, and lost another part of his soul for it.
Tears wouldn’t come, they wouldn’t ever come. There are minutes.
The night of his father’s funeral, he left town without a word to anyone.
The park emptied by the time the sun fully set. Slivers of swift clouds tinged with silver streamed in from the north, threatening rain. The neighborhood grew frigid. Salamanders crawled into the black lake. A half-moon hung low in the sky, and the lanterns were just bright enough that their pale illuminations lit the paths. Thin trails of smoke rose at the other end of the park, where his house burned. No one would even notice.
Matthew watched the shadow of Panecraft, his father’s other son, rising up against the skyline, inadequate coils of barbed wire twining atop the high fences. It waited for him, and A.G. laughed, or wept, or did nothing, within. Gus looked up. The ocean was out of earshot, but it could be heard anyway, pounding as it had pounded against the walls of the catacombs.
His chest had completely healed. He touched the rise of the third scar through his shirt. Gus trotted to the bench, prancing and jittering excitedly—if he’d had a mouth he might have wanted to play a game of catch or chase a stick. Matthew stood and said, “C’mon, gorgeous.” It was time to borrow a suit and go to Bosco Bob’s party, and discover what lay in wait for him and the rest of those he loved. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They walked along the lake path, heading for the shortcut that would bring them out on the Avenue near the Krunch. Barking happily, Gusto bounded ahead past the children’s water fountain, leaping over a boy’s forgotten toy truck, racing and returning to prod the toy with his nose, shoving it across the grass. Matthew didn’t know why Gus followed him, or what it meant when attempting to decipher these incidents. The dog, too, had been tied to him.
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