“No. It’s Jake.”
His thumbs slid up to the webbing of his palms in the minister’s cheeks. Whispering, “Shhhhh,” he took hold of those chubby cheeks and, as easily as you’d take the wrapping off a birthday present, ripped his face off in two runny handfuls.
“Hallelujah!” Jake cackled, flinging the scraps of face at the cross behind his coffin. “Let us pray.”
And they did.
Chapter Eighteen
Admiring himself in the full-length mirror in the workroom of the funeral home, Jake tried to keep his runaway emotions in check. His unbridled joy at the sight of his body was tainted; but all things considered, it was not so bad.
He tore off the suit, slitted up the back like a doll’s clothes, and ripped away the heavy plastic body-condom wrapped around him to keep drainage from staining the fancy display coffin. But his laughter died in his throat when the harsh embalming-room light revealed his naked body.
His skin was a mottled yellow-gray where it stretched taut over muscle and bone, but sagged alarmingly at his abdomen, where the puckered lips of the autopsy incision terminated at his groin.
His spine felt cramped. The stab wounds in his back and belly were not healed, but sealed with superglue.
Probing his head under the stiff, sticky mass of his hair, he found sutures in his scalp, a semicircle over deep grooves in his skull, where they cut his skull open with a circular saw and took out his brain. Maybe they dumped it back in, or sent it to a university for med students to jab with scalpels, but his thoughts of outrage and revenge had to be coming from somewhere…
His heart was not beating. His belly was emptied of organs, and filled with packing material, scarecrow stuff. Whatever was in his veins, it wasn’t blood. He felt a mild burning sensation, inside and out. Formaldehyde.
Rude holes had been bored into the base of his neck, upper arms and thighs, and a sliced and dilated segment of artery or vein peeked out of each, like the puckered neck of a deflated balloon, stretched out and bloated from where they pumped the shit into him.
To his delight, some things worked as good as ever. The shriveled club of his cock responded eagerly to his chafing hand, swelling to jut out like a riot baton, though the fumes from the amber droplets that oozed from his urethra made his eyes sting.
No, this wasn’t so bad. He’d never eat again, but he’d never need to shit or piss, or get sick or hungry or tired. He was remade better than before, reborn to spread the word and sow his seed, and woe to the sinners who defiled him as he slept.
He was not alive, but so far from dead. He felt the formaldehyde in his veins like pure grain alcohol, bathing him in that golden glow of invincibility that only a good, stiff drink can provide.
He felt good, but he could not forget, let alone forgive, what they had done to him.
They cut him up and filled him with weed killer to cover the stink, and they would have burned him if he hadn’t put his foot down. Dumped his ashes and gotten on with their lives, as if he had never been.
“Over my dead body,” he croaked, and made himself laugh again.
He noticed Gray in the mirror, hanging in the doorway with his eyes riveted to Jake. He held out another of Jake’s suits on a hanger. “She dumped a bunch of them here.”
Jake turned and strode across the tiled floor to take the suit.
“Where you want to go now?” Gray asked.
Jake caught him watching as he stepped into his slacks. Bitch couldn’t be bothered to send him into the fire with a decent pair of boxers.
But that could be easily remedied.
“Take me home,” he said.
Part V
Putting The Haunt Back In Haunted House
Chapter Nineteen
The way they dragged their feet as their sorry procession came down the hall, you’d think the party was over. But even if everything Esther thought she knew about her husband was turned on its ear to night, she was no idiot.
What she feared about him had been proven, and she knew that what ever force had raised him up, it was not concerned with any justice but Jake’s.
And nobody knew how to punish like Jake Connaway.
Jake led them at a lanky, halting pace, keys jingling in his hand like they would open a honeymoon suite. Esther and Evangeline came close behind him, in shell-shocked lockstep, like the brides at a polygamist wedding. Emmy and Mathias followed closely, clinging to each other like Hansel and Gretel, lost in the Black Forest.
“My wife’s the kind of person that likes to keep up appearances.” Jake chuckled, percolating phlegm deep in his chest. “Doesn’t do such a great job of it, these days. But it’s what she likes to do…”
Eddie and Christian dragged Jasper’s dead body behind them, which left a wide trail of blood, like a carpet of crushed roses, in its wake.
Gray came last, kicking at Jasper’s heels and wistfully twitching his trigger finger.
It was a slow death march down the corridor, but Jake the jocular host had forgiven them for leaving him behind, and didn’t rush the tour. Nobody else dared to speak.
Jake paused before a door at the end of the hall. Making a little show of finding the right key, he unlocked it, turned and favored them with a sly grin. Hard to tell if he was breathing, but the formaldehyde fumes were a miasma around his head.
“So that was her nice little side of the house.” He tipped them a wink. “But this is mine.”
Jake threw open the door, or maybe the cold wind sucked it out of his hand, pulling the heat and light of the house into the empty darkness. Silly, but that was what it felt like: not just cold, but a perfect vacuum.
The knob hit the wall hard enough to punch a hole in the Sheetrock.
Once, this half of the rambling ranch house had been the free school. The hall opened into a communal classroom space, with satellite rooms and another hall branching off it. Once, the walls had been plastered with hippie artworks like God’s eyes and macramé tapestries, and children’s finger paintings of Jerry Garcia and the Dalai Lama.
All of it so long gone, now, it was retroactively undone. This place could never have heard children laughing.
Darker and bleaker in here, even when Jake pawed the light switch, but the room almost glowed with the reflection of his savage intensity. The décor was stark and modern, smoked glass and chrome, and a convincing cast of office furniture, like a diorama of the habitat of the Successful American White Male. Esther hadn’t found any genuine records of her husband’s “business” here.
The art was apocalyptic with a dusting of religious imagery to sweeten the raw carnality, and set the right context for Jake’s favorite artwork: the many, many mirrors.
Jake prowled the room, taking in the hidden details in sweeping, jerky arcs like a falcon, and finally nodded, smirking at Esther as if to say, Nice try, bitch.
The computer was on and running a screensaver, and the file cabinets were rifled. A few of the open ones were filled with sealed reams of blank Hammermill typing paper, for heft.
Esther flicked her tired eyes at the faces of the other women whenever she could avoid locking eyes with Jake, looking for traces of things better left unsaid. She’d barely ever gone into this room once Jake settled in and laid down the law, and never any farther into his domain, unless he carried her—practically hooded like a kidnap victim—to his bed.
Emmy looked more lost than ever, and seemed to want to wilt into Mathias’s arms, if only he could hold her up.
Evangeline was cagey, looking from the empty cradle of the cordless phone to the chairs and tables, all the while seeming to chew her lip and try not to swoon.
Jake looked around at each of his mourners, as well, seeming to swell up with the old time evangelical spirit, his eyes to gleam brighter, as if he sucked something vital out of each of them.
“You wanted to know, so now you will. And then everybody will. Now get your asses in here.”
They didn’t hesitate, but every step Esther and Evange
line took was half the length of the one before, like that silly old paradox, so they might never make it at all.
Both kept their eyes on the floor and their hands crushing each other at their waists. The sight of it made what ever Jake was using for blood these days flush his pale face. If only he could have had them both…but to night, he could have much more. All of it.
Gray herded them in with judicious pokes at Eddie and Christian and kicks at Jasper’s corpse. The picture window in the dead man’s back slurped and dropped a flapping lobe of lung, shredded by shattered ribs, dragging behind Jasper like a loose shirttail.
Christian, towing his best friend by one hand and trying to see only the floor in front of him, bit back a searing heave of undiluted alcohol puke. If he so much as dripped on the rug, he sensed that Jake would put his fist through his face, never mind what the wreck of Jasper’s torso was doing to the ghastly deep-pile shag.
He wiped his mouth with the velvet sleeve of his wounded arm, and kept his mouth shut.
They followed Jake through the office down the far corridor. They could see a picture of Jake on the wall at the end, but it seemed impossibly far away. The light sconces flickered and cast long shadows, added years to sunken faces. But it all seemed horribly by design—as if the place sucked the life out of everyone it touched, just like its master.
Jake led them, shivering, to another odd dead end. Straight ahead stood a pair of doors, both padlocked, flanked by another pair, both standing open. To the right was his bedroom. The bathroom was to the left.
Jake’s expansive gestures seemed like an attempt to hold up his surging ego, or just to contain it. Jerky with rogue impulses chasing across his face and down his massive limbs, he had some trouble snapping the key into the lock of the closed left-hand door. Honeymoon jitters, heh heh…
Gray pressed closer, crowding them into a tangle of limbs so they’d trip each other up if anyone tried to bolt.
“This,” Jake said, “is where the magic happens. This is the Church Of Eternal Life. And don’t you fucking forget it.”
The door squealed when Jake threw it open.
The whole back end of the house was Jake’s studio: a DIY video production facility, with computers, monitors, lights, mics, cameras, a green screen that covered one whole wall, shelves containing hundreds of archived VHS tapes and DVDs, a rollaway pulpit with a sampling keyboard hidden behind it, and a rough-hewn wooden cross on wheels, big enough to crucify Hulk Hogan.
To the untrained eye, the setup would look pathetic: the lowest rung of religious entertainment, ground out by a solitary crank too unstable to face—or too cheap to pay—a studio crew, let alone a live audience.
But as they entered the room, wary of traps, the selfish ingenuity of it soaked in. Jake would sometimes use burnouts from his church to come and do the grunt work, but the beauty of the setup was that he didn’t need anyone to tape his show.
The cameras were trained on the green screen in an adoring semicircle, and a live editor control board had been set up on the floor beside Jake’s duct-taped mark on the floor (a cross, naturally). It looked like a guitarist’s effects pedal rig, but with it, Jake could direct the show as he performed, cutting it live with his toes.
Clearly, all those years of playing in crappy, overblown rock bands had finally paid off.
Jake did not enter, but ushered Mathias and the women inside. They took it all in, becoming more frightened than ever, pressed in a row against the heavy, movie palace drapes that covered the wall nearest the door.
They could feel this was the worst room in the house.
In the hallway, Jake watched the men drag Jasper’s body toward him. Gray cocked his head like a dog hearing a whistle. Jake tossed him the key ring and waved at the bathroom.
“Okay, you,” he sneered. “Tinkerbell.” Pointing at Christian. “Drag the body in there. Pool boy, you back off.”
Christian and Eddie looked at each other. If anything passed between them, an invitation to do something stupid, it didn’t get far.
Gray raised the gun and looked like he was the one holding it back, when it couldn’t wait to introduce their faces to the wondrous innovation of lead-projectile dentistry.
His smile almost bit Eddie’s nose off. “I don’t ask twice.”
Eddie backed off. Christian dragged Jasper one-handed into the bathroom. Gray took out his keys and locked the door behind them.
Chapter Twenty
Christian let go of his dead friend’s wrist and looked hopelessly around the flickering bathroom, nursing his fucked-up hand, which was painfully twitching in time with his galloping heartbeat.
He never—almost never, anyway—cried in front of Jasper. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to cry on him, if it wasn’t going to fix anything.
He was doing fine, running water in the sink to sluice off the blood and trying to make sense of his right fist, which felt like a beanbag filled with hamburger and smashed breadsticks; if not for the jolt of transcendent agony when he prodded or tried to move it, he would not believe it was a real hand at all, but a cheap prosthetic from a joke shop.
All right, fuck it, he’d cry.
The door was a stout one, the walls solid enough that nothing the Wrong Reverend Connaway did in here would upset the help. You’d never have to turn on the sink to cover the sound of your clinkers hitting the bowl in here, for sure.
Alive, alone with his best friend’s corpse, Christian let himself come a little unzipped. He cried, but he’d be damned if he’d kneel down and pray.
Christian didn’t need to believe in God. He wasn’t one of those burned-out Bible-humpers or recovering Catholics who, deep down, were really just mad at God, and trying to get his attention by ignoring him.
For Christian, this life—such as it was—was still chock-full of miracles, both authorless and by human hands. In those moments when, for instance, he sank a triple-bank shot and shut down a pool shark with the whole bar watching and three pitchers under his belt—or when he rode behind a motorcycle with a guy, and pressed against his back until he felt his heartbeat, and breathed in the emerging scent of his skin and hair, and knew that tomorrow he’d be making his infamous Clamato omelets for two—he knew there was no other life behind this one, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
And when the realization was driven home by a death in his circle of friends or even on the side of the highway, he did not get sucked down into despair, or entertain thoughts of committing to putting only one Jewish carpenter’s body and blood in his mouth for the rest of his life.
Christian fumbled half the contents of the medicine cabinet into the sink, but nothing stronger than Advil turned up. There was nothing useful among the skin cleansers and rejuvenating scrubs, Grecian Formula and Old Spice (seriously? What the fuck?), to fix up a mangled hand.
Okay, he relented, breathless with agony. Maybe one little prayer, just in case.
His grandmother was the only person of faith he never found utterly ridiculous, and she told him it was stupid at best, prideful at worst, to ask God to do something, or ask for something. You could only ask for strength and guidance, and pledge not to get upset if neither ever arrived.
Okay, God, guide me through this. Why is there eternal life, but only for him?
Oh, and some of that strength would be swell…
Amen.
Chapter Twenty-one
Jake came into the studio as if trying to ride out gales of thunderous applause. Eddie and Gray followed. Eddie tried to hook Esther’s eyes with his, but she seemed to have drifted into shock. The others stood right where they were. Waiting for direction.
Jake crossed the room to snap up a remote and turn on the huge flat-screen TV. Flicked through channels, until he found the local news.
“…a massacre at the Alta Vista Funeral Home in Joshua Tree, leaving four dead, and one body missing…”
“Woo-hoo!” Jake popped like a champagne cork. “They’re playin’ our song!”
&nb
sp; Gray did not seem nearly as delighted, but he never blinked. Lighting a cigarette off his tarnished brass Zippo lighter and holding the smoke in, he looked like he’d just drunk boiling water on a dare.
“…Funeral services for popular local cable televangelist Jacob Connaway, whose shocking murder last weekend provoked controversy when he was found in the desert outside Riverside County…”
Jake leaned in, fascinated. Finally, recognition! This was better than a mirror, bigger than his own show. Everyone else watched, too, as crime scene footage from both the desert and the funeral home took turns across the screen.
On the TV, a grizzled, fiftyish, hard-assed cop made the most of his close-up. The text crawl labeled him as SHERIFF BILL LeGRANGE underneath.
Gray wheeled and aimed at the screen. “God, I hate that piece of shit…”
Jake cut him off. “Shhh!”
“This is the second batch of murders in the last three days. And the theft of Pastor Connaway’s remains…well, let’s just say that there’s harsh justice to be dealt. We will find them, believe me.”
Gray flicked his cigarette at the screen. “You know damned well who he’s lookin’ for…”
“Ssssh!”
Both Esther and Evangeline were sneaking glances at the sliding glass door behind them. Emmy’s gaze was riveted on Jake and the screen. Mathias was looking all over the place, and taking comfort in none of it.
“A $10,000 reward has already been offered for information leading to the return of Connaway’s body…”
“Who did that?” Esther wanted to know.
Emmy looked, if anything, more horrified than before. “I swear to God, I didn’t…”
Gray’s gun chopped their conversation off. Just the little click of his thumb on the safety was enough.
“Meanwhile, some local residents blame the church itself for this wave of terror, citing the pastor’s history of apocalyptic statements…”
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