The sticker bushes broke his fall and the window screen stopped the worst of the thorns from plunging too deeply into his hide. Falling off the bushes to the ground, Rowley got up and shook himself all over. He was okay, time to keep running.
The Front Porch opened at ten, mostly to capture the nickels and dimes of the eighth graders who would race over from Woodrow Wilson Junior High during recess to buy candy. Adele was surprised and embarrassed when the big man named Gar came through the door that Tuesday morning, looking sort of debonair with a vintage fishing basket slung over his shoulder. She hadn’t forgotten the fool she had made of herself but he was relaxed and smiling at her like nothing had happened.
“Hey there Adele, you’re looking good this morning. Fresh. What have you got in your candy jars that’s really fun?” Gar asked
“Fun?” she repeated, feeling a flush of pleasure at his words, the embarrassment vanishing. “Well, how about some candy strips?” She pulled bright colored strips of paper off a roll, there were little buttons of cinnamons, lime and grape drops at intervals on the strips. “Kids love this stuff.”
“Give me a dollar’s worth,” he said as she unrolled and cut three long strips of the stuff in purple, green and red colors. He draped them around his neck like the kids did and threw her a kiss and was back out the door, with a dollar lying on the marble counter top.
Rowley had never run the streets of their neighborhood like a stray dog but today he didn’t care, he had to follow the man Gar, he was going for Marilyn with that basket. Crossing Wood Street was dodgy. Cars made no sense to Rowley and Marilyn always made the choice as to when to cross the street. He hesitated for a second not knowing why cars stopped and started. It all seemed random and unfeeling, with no connection to the natural world. Feeling reckless he decided it he would never know when it mattered, so he just ran out. Gar was getting out of sight. There was a screech and a big metal station wagon swerved as Rowley smelled burnt rubber. He didn’t look back even as the fear shot through him.
Marilyn was trying hard not to think about the strange call of last night as she walked to work. It was a prank from some kid or a wrong number it just had to be. Thank God, she would soon be juggling Walt, Amanda, Scott and all of the customers in her section, not to mention helping Betty and Mona if they needed it. All thoughts of Gar and the shattered mirror, the Map Room and sessions with Max, Gretch Wendell’s theories and most of all that stupid stupid prank phone call would be pretty much forced out of her mind, she knew, as the order-up bell was relentless. You could pour yourself into a lunch rush at the Surrey and if you worked hard at it not think about anything but the moment. So she was really taken aback when she saw Gar sitting on the Front Porch steps with colorful strips of candy pressed into brightly colored paper draped around his neck. He got up with that charismatic smile and gave her a two finger salute, an old trout fishing basket slung over his shoulder like you might see in a window display of Bachman’s men’s store with fishing reels and hunting jackets. It was a goofy, surprisingly sweet picture on a spring day to see a big man with golden eyes saluting her on her way to work.
“Milady, I beg a favor. I have a picnic but no one to dine with. Will you play hooky with me?” Gar asked.
“Hooky?” Marilyn repeated. She hadn’t played hooky in twenty years. “I’ve got work.”
“Not if you play hooky you don’t,” said Gar, twirling the paper candy strips like a kid.
“I’d have to call,” she said, feeling a daring come over her. It seemed like a God-send suddenly, not to be putting pats of butter out. This might be better than pouring coffee, it might really take her mind off things, and she just wanted to take her mind off things.
Gar hitched his thumb at the Front Porch. “Bet there’s a phone and I’m a very good customer,” he said.
He took her hand then and they walked into the ice cream parlor. It looked like what Marilyn had imagined: jolly, with big candy jars and a marble-topped counter. A woman with graying hair in her late thirties or early forties stood at the counter looking flustered as she and Gar came in.
“Adele, my girl needs to use your phone,” Gar said, as Marilyn felt a little thrill at the description and Adele felt like an idiot.
“Sure,” Adele said, just wanting them to leave. The girl was a beautiful woman in a cheap black waitress uniform that couldn’t diminish the glow coming from her as she stood hand in hand with Gar. She lifted the hinged shelf and let Gar’s girl come behind the counter.
Marilyn dialed the numbers in a dizzy state of guilt and desire. She hadn’t missed work but three or four times in eleven years. Scott answered and Marilyn made her voice sound like it was coming from beneath the ocean. “I’m sick, Scott. Migraine. Can’t get out of bed. Sorry. Yeah. Tomorrow. Sure,” she said, hanging up feeling like she was back in school and had just ditched class. Not that she had done that more than once or twice. Still, it was so liberating, she thought, I’m alive, not crushed by endless memories and oddities.
Adele kept her head down not looking at either one of them. Leave, Adele thought. Go away and enjoy your illicit coupling but a man that makes you lie, that’s gonna come back to haunt you, she said silently to Marilyn as a dog the color of caramels began barking in at them through the screen door.
“Rowley!” Marilyn said and Rowley thought his heart would burst. She was safe. She rushed out the door, kneeling down, grabbing his collar, and put her lovely face into his furry neck. “What? How did you get here? How’d you get out?” She asked him, feeling him all over and finding the thorn that pierced his side. She pulled on it gently as he looked over her head into the deadly eyes of Gar shooting those golden sparks all over the porch of this sweet smelling store. “This has never happened before. I know I locked the door and Harry doesn’t have a key.” She held up the thorn in a considering way. “The only way out would have been to jump out the living room window into the sticker bushes. What in the world would have caused that, Gar? You don’t think there’s a fire, do you?” Marilyn asked, all the silliness of calling in sick collapsing like a sand castle under a wave of worry.
Gar wanted to kill the dog then and get it over with. “Harry, your damn neighbor. Probably had a fit over something and the poor mutt couldn’t take it any more, could you pup?” he said in a hearty confident way as he rubbed Rowley’s head.
“Well I’m going to talk to him. That just takes the cake. Come on Rowley, let’s go home,” Marilyn said as she pictured Mona and Betty in less than an hour running around the restaurant trying to handle the lunch crowd by themselves. Why had she done that to them? They’d get through it but it would be hell, what with Scott trying to help and just messing it up worse. Maybe she could “recover” and go in anyway after she gave Harry a piece of her mind.
“No!” Gar sounded angrier than he wanted to. “Come on, give me a chance. You can talk to Harry later. Let’s go to the cemetery.”
“But I don’t have a leash for Rowley,” Marilyn protested, the mood of playing hooky broken as she looked at her dog. He could have been killed.
“Here,” Gar pulled his rope belt out of the loops of his pants and gave it to Marilyn, “Use this. This day was made for us.”
Marilyn stood for a moment, confused and torn between wanting to take Rowley home and go into work like normal, and the idea of being with Gar away from the real world tempting her again. She just needed an escape to get her mind off things. “Okay,” she said slowly, feeling the moment take on weight like she was making some life changing decision.
Fairview Cemetery was deserted. Gar had fed her cinnamon candy all the way there and her tongue was red and hot. The day’s clouds had thickened but Marilyn didn’t care, her dog was safe and she and Gar were going to have a wonderful picnic, a real escape, down by the lake. He had a way of making her feel special but not in the way her mother had always talked about. They were walking hand-in-hand with Rowley on the rope leash in the older section of the cemetery where the grave markers we
re bleached and worn by time. Up on the hill overlooking the weeping willow-rimmed lake, the ruined mausoleum loomed with its blind and broken sentry angels. Marilyn gave it a quick glance as her stomach unexpectedly dropped like she was on the downside of a roller-coaster ride. “We’re going to the lake, right?” she asked with a little smile as she cocked her head.
“Ya, we’re going to the lake, that’s where papa’s goodies come out,” Gar said in silly old country accent flipping open the fishing basket lid and flashing the package of crackers, tinned sardines, and Red Delicious apple at her as he twirled the candy strips laughing.
Marilyn had the oddest sensation that she was looking through a kaleidoscope with Gar’s image on the background changing and coming back together. It was a split second but she thought she saw him in front of red barn doors, and then bamboo stalks, an azure sea and cliff, and now twirling the candy strips with the graves behind him. She shook her head feeling suddenly nauseous. Her sessions in the Map Room were playing tricks on her.
“You okay?” Gar said. Shit, her sight was working, he was sure: she looked white and shaken with the dark clouds behind her.
She nodded, hoping she didn’t vomit, concentrating on keeping from retching. Some date she was. Why couldn’t anything be easy?
Rowley looked quickly from one to the other. He had been playing along, being a “good dog” but it was animal cunning, a perfect disguise. He was getting ready to make his move, feeling the blood and fang instincts awaken in his bones, teeth, and muscle. “Go for the neck,” the instincts whispered from the wolves imbedded in his ancestry, “plunge deep and don’t let go.”
“But before we get papa’s goodies, we go exploring,” Gar said and grabbed the rope leash out of her hand with a quick lunge. With deliberate and cruel speed he was running Rowley towards the hedge tunnel that lead to the decrepit tomb. Marilyn would have no choice but to follow them.
Gar pulled the dog along, enjoying choking him. Rowley’s feet were not quite touching the ground as he yanked him hard up the muddy pathway with the dark hedges on either side. The black green leaves of the hedges winked and became rough hewn walls and the muddy path turned to a dark river of cobblestones in his mind. He flashed onto the original path, the one he had taken so long ago with the horse under him as he thundered up the stone paving to the famously cursed nunnery of the Castello Aragonese. . He felt an intense pulsating pleasure as he held both now and the time before in his mind. The nothingness would become a memory and he would emerge restored and even greater, with the source captured inside him. He would be refreshed over the coming centuries, as by a secret purifying potion that only he could drink from.
Rowley was trying to catch his breath; the rope noose burned into his hide as he was run up the hill towards the tomb. Marilyn was behind them calling, “Wait!” as she followed them. Gar wasn’t waiting, Rowley knew. He smelled the noxious odor in the hand that held the rope. It was stronger than ever. Gar was going to try to kill them both but he didn’t know that Rowley was ready too and didn’t mind dying protecting Marilyn. Rowley knew he had a wonderful life with his mistress from the moment she had found him in that alley and that their love would survive his death. It was a noble way to go, he thought, as he willed the fang and blood instincts to stop him from choking.
Marilyn was cold all over as she climbed after them in the hedge tunnel leading to the big medieval-style tomb with broken windows and the stone blind angels. Gar was pulling on Rowley too hard but the cry to stop died in her throat as silver white spots of light burst around her head. For some, ‘seeing stars’ was a sign of faintness but for Marilyn it had always served as a warning, as clear as spoken words, it meant she was in danger, physical danger. From the time she was three and nearly drowned in the bathtub, or when she was nine and things had gone bad with J. J., or at sixteen when a cretin had followed her home, when the bursts of light circled her head she knew to be on high alert. Her life depended on it. The miniscule firecrackers showered around her as she ran after Gar and she thought back to all of Gretch Wendell’s and Max’s warnings.
Gar was kneeling by Rowley, wrapping the rope around the hedge, his big hand pulling it snug. The rope in his hand made Marilyn think of another time, a time where she had been looking at a man in an outer coat holding an ox as she watched him out the window, but it wasn’t her and it was her, her being in another body. Marilyn transported herself back to the second session in the Map Room, where she had been looking out the second floor window to the barn with the stranger holding the axe and oxen cart. As the Shaker Sister Ellen she had wanted the man who had come into their community to look up and confirm the spirit warning: that she had met his evil before in another life. Look up, Marilyn mentally willed Gar, feeling the other woman in her at the same time, older and just as desperately attracted and afraid of the man at the same time.
Gar looked up with a strange half smile, half grimace and that’s when she knew. He was the same man; he was the one who pursued her. She had been hiding it from herself, fixated on wanting to feel the way he made her feel again despite the danger. The tunnel seemed to widen then and she felt it not as a hedge but as carved stone. Another glimpse of a life where she had been with Gar? This one not explored by her and Max. But now the truth was before her, she was drawn like a moth to light to the one that would take her own soul from her. Why hadn’t she listened to the warnings? The mirror breaking, Max, the migraine, it was now plain to see. She was repeating the pattern of the young monk Khandar and the Shaker Sister Ellen. She had become entranced with the one that hunted her. The sessions in the Map Room flooded back as her ballerina flats slip-slid on the muddy path now strewn with the candy strips fallen from around Gar’s neck.
He doesn’t know I know unless I signal it, she thought. He’ll kill Rowley now if he thinks I know. Rowley had intuited that Gar was the creature that Max and Gretch Wendell had learned of in ancient texts when she and Father W wanted to pretend it was all in the professor’s overworked imagination. Gar was a soul hunting vampire on the hunt for her as he had been those times before in Attayhuya and Hancock Shaker Village - and Ischia where it all began. Her heart constricted like the rope around Rowley’s neck was tied around it as well. In her skin, a thousand layers deep she felt some quivering wild abandon of desire, the fossil-like memory of a girl leaning out to her love, like a flower to the sun. Then she flashed on rows upon rows of ancient glass vials lining a rock wall then, and then another vial, this one full and in her hand. The vision she had when coming through the beaded curtain at the fortune tellers.
The clouds had massed over the tomb that seemed like a medieval castle now as she neared the top of the tunnel. The eyes on the broken winged angels were wide and staring witnesses. I have to make him think I don’t know who he is, she thought. She ran forward to him and threw her arm carelessly around his neck and leaned in to kiss him, feeling the dark pull of his mouth as he gathered her into himself, kneeling on the pathway.
The smell of her cinnamon candy breath couldn’t mask the perfume of the source’s essence and its headiness almost knocked him over. She didn’t know; her sight had failed her, and now she was his. Her red lips and tongue were breaking into the cavern of his emptiness and he had to suppress the urge to plunge all the way into her and lift out the silvery skein of her innermost being woven around her like incandescent chain mail. He was drunk with desire, desire about to be fulfilled. Her tongue in his mouth would be too much and he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from taking her right there. He would take her in the tomb where it would be most like the Castello. It would be in the end as it should have been in the beginning. He buried his face in her shimmery essence as he knelt, darkly adoring.
Rowley couldn’t get a bark out, the rope was so tight around his neck. Marilyn was kissing Gar’s closed lips but she was holding herself away from him; in a subtle secretive way she wasn’t really letting herself go but pretending to. But you’d have to love her the way Rowley did to noti
ce. Then there was her left hand; her right arm was slung around the unnatural man called Gar but her left hand was feeling behind her where Gar had knotted the rope. She moved her body adroitly like she was cuddling him but what she was really doing was untying the rope that held Rowley prisoner. The noose loosened around his neck but she looked at him and Rowley knew not to move. Her beautiful dark eyes told him to stay still and wait for the right moment. They were going to run at the first opportunity. She knew who Gar was now. Rowley felt an invisible bond flowing between them. He wouldn’t let her die.
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