You have to see, you—you have to see who my little girl was.
Joel closed his eyes and was greeted by the VHS version of Cindy Mello as a little girl, tromping through wet beach sand and building sandcastles with her dad.
My…my baby…
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice quiet but carrying in the boundless silence, riding the breeze through the nearby trees. “To both of you, I’m sorry.”
“You did your best.”
Joel whirled around to find a woman dressed in black standing behind him. Her head was bowed and wrapped in a black scarf tied beneath her chin, and she’d aged a great deal, but he recognized her nonetheless. “Mrs. Mello…”
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said, still possessing a slight accent.
“It’s all right, I—I didn’t hear you coming is all.” He took a tentative step toward her. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“I come every day.” Her dark bloodshot eyes, saddled with heavy black bags, looked beyond him to the graves containing her husband and daughter. “Even if just for a little while.”
If they became widowed, many traditional Portuguese women wore black for seven years, or sometimes for the remainder of their lives. Particularly common among older women, it was a tradition Cindy’s mother apparently adhered to, as her dress, stockings, shoes and even her pocketbook were black. Joel looked around for her car, but his was the only one in sight. Had she walked from the street below? Why would she do such a thing, particularly in this weather?
“They’ve brought you back,” she said through a sigh.
“They?”
Rather than answer, she reached into her purse and removed a set of rosary beads. “That’s why you’re here.”
“A friend of mine was killed.”
She looked at him with sorrowful eyes but had no response.
“I came back to see what I could do to help,” he went on. “I wanted to visit your daughter’s grave because I wanted to talk to Cindy. I wanted to tell her I was sorry.”
“Cindy’s not here.” She gazed out at the rows of stones. “None of them are.”
“I know, but…”
“It was a horrible time.”
“No one involved was ever the same.”
“You did your best,” she said, her fingers nervously running across the beads from one to the next, then back again. “We always believed that. My husband, until the day he died, believed you were a good and decent man who truly cared about our daughter and what was done to her.”
It took everything Joel had to hold back tears. “Thank you, Mrs. Mello.”
“You told the truth, but people only want to hear truth for so long. Then, like all truth, it becomes…muddled…infected…and people no longer have any interest in it. They prefer lies.”
The snow kept falling all around them, graceful and alive.
“It was a terrible thing they did to our little girl. And a terrible thing they did to the rest of us afterward. You told the truth, as you knew it, about who hurt our daughter and why they did it. And people laughed.” Her bottom lip quivered. “They laughed. They laugh at God; why should we expect they wouldn’t do the same to us? Lucifer’s tail slowly wraps around them, his wings close over their eyes, and they don’t even realize it’s happening. They’re too busy laughing.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“A group of people took my daughter, tied her to an altar in a Catholic church, cut her open and played with what they found inside. Painted the walls and statues with satanic symbols and prayers and desecrated everything holy in that building with my baby’s blood and bodily fluids. They took the eyes out of her head…my little girl’s beautiful eyes…and had sex with her corpse.” Her hands, shaking now, continued to work the beads, but she shed no tears. “They were doing the Devil’s work when they murdered my Cynthia, Mr. Walker. The Devil’s work, just like you wrote. And people laughed. They still laugh, even all these years later.”
“Where was God that night, Mrs. Mello?” Joel said before he could stop the words from escaping him. “Where was God when they were slaughtering your precious child?”
Where was He when that black car took us?
“The Devil was in that church that night,” she told him. “But God was there too, holding Cynthia in his arms and crying along with her. Crying for all of us, Mr. Walker, all of us. While we laugh, He cries.”
“But He’s God. Why didn’t He do something?”
“He did,” she said. “He comforted my baby, took away all her pain and fear even in the midst of pure evil, and loved her more than she ever thought possible. Not just that night, but forever. What’s more powerful than that? God’s not an action-movie hero, Mr. Walker. He’s something much greater, so much so we can’t even begin to understand it. There is no hate there, no violence, anger or judgment. Only love. Love beyond anything we can imagine. All the rest are the weaknesses, the sins and the excuses of man.”
Joel wiped snow from his face with a shaking hand of his own. “I have those things inside me, Mrs. Mello…violence and anger…rage.”
“Do you think I’m unfamiliar with those things?”
“No, ma’am. But there are people who have hurt me too, and those I love. Not the same people who hurt your family, but they’re just as evil. That’s why I came here. I wanted to tell Cindy I was sorry and to ask for her permission to hurt these people. I don’t have a choice anymore, it’s about survival now, but I want—need—her to tell me it’s all right…even if it’s only in my head.”
“Why do you need this from her?”
“Because she was good. She was special. That’s why they chose her.”
“And what makes you think this permission is hers to grant?”
“I know it’s unfair of me to even ask, but I’m no action-movie hero either, Mrs. Mello. I’m just a flawed and damaged man, a husband, a small-town reporter.”
“You’re a frightened child trying to find your way in the dark.” She continued running the beads through her fingers. “We all are.”
“They’re trying to kill me, Mrs. Mello.”
“You wrote in your book that the coroner stated Cindy fought back against her attackers with everything she had, that she fought them tooth and nail before they finally killed her.”
“That’s right.”
“Then fight, Mr. Walker. With everything you have.”
It wasn’t Cindy’s blessing, but it was enough.
“They brought you back here,” she told him, her eyes wandering across his bruised, battered and swollen face, and the remnants of bloodstains on his coat. “They brought you back here to die.”
“Who?”
She looked to the trees along the ridge above the headstones.
Joel followed her stare.
Things moved between the trees, but he couldn’t make out what they were or if they were even there at all. Small, dark forms, he thought, moving slowly but just barely discernible—visible through the curtains of snow, then gone—or was it only a trick of the light? Like the entities before, and yet this time there was something more. They seemed oddly familiar this time. He’d seen them before, not only in Lonnie’s apartment and Pete Fernandez’s cottage.
Joel had seen them in his dreams.
He turned back to Mrs. Mello. She was gone. He was alone in the cemetery, the freshly fallen snow all around him undisturbed but for his own footprints.
Profound silence filled the cold air.
Stumbling forward, he took a second look at the Mello family headstone, this time dropping to his knees, then frantically wiping away the remainder of the snow blocking its face.
Cindy’s mother’s name and dates appeared before him.
She’d been dead more than two years.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The ey
e. It blinks. Slowly. Watches him. Stares at him through the strange keyhole shaped like a pyramid. Fading…blurring…the keyhole vanishes little by little until it has dissolved into nothing, revealing two dark eyes and a woman’s face. She stands watching him, adorned in an unusual but striking piece of jewelry strewn across her face like a web, all of it black and connected, a single piece. As she moves closer, the thin chains and small stones, circles and triangles and complex butterfly wings just above either eye come into clearer focus.
Her eyes, heavily made up with black liner and shadow, only add to her wildly exotic look. Her beauty is as startling as her sudden presence in the room, and leaves him breathless and uncertain. There is something at once alluring and frightening about this woman, something not quite…right…about her.
Voices…so many swirling around him at various volumes. Human voices, yet they sound robotic and monotone, as if they’re reading from a previously prepared text. One male voice in particular is the loudest. It sounds as if the man has swallowed crushed glass or hot coals, his words too grumbled and distorted to understand. The voice circles him, as if from everywhere and nowhere, blending with the others…
At the very edge of his hearing, the gurgling voice becomes clear enough for him to finally understand, albeit only in short spurts.
“Sexual abuse is paramount, as it breaks the subject down and brings about the compartmentalization. Once programmed to forget such abuses, subjects can be more easily programmed to forget other things as well…”
And then he’s running. He’s running as hard and as fast as he can across an open field, the sun on his back and dark clouds gathering up ahead, just above the trees in the distance. Free of the strange, dark room and the woman, he can smell the air and feel the warmth of the sun, the scratching of the grass as it brushes against his legs. There appears to be nothing chasing him, but he runs as if there is.
“What we’re talking about is a type of structural dissociation where the occult is assimilated into the equation in order to bring about compartmentalization of the brain. During this process, satanic rituals must be performed so that specific demons may be attached to the subjects and alters as well.”
By the time he reaches the trees, the sunshine is a memory, back there in the field. Here, just beyond the tree line, it is darker and colder and frightening, because these are not friendly woods. These are deadly woods, haunted woods like in the fairy tales his mother used to read to him.
“The shattering of a personality brings about compartmentalization of memory, of trauma too horrifying to grasp or process. The result is dissociative identity disorder.”
Disoriented and alone, he stumbles about between the trees.
“All it’s about—all it’s ever been about—is harnessing the power of darkness.”
Where are the voices coming from?
“Our darkness…and theirs…”
And then it is quiet…too quiet for any of this to be real.
A forest is never this quiet.
Unless there is a predator nearby…
Horrible screams shatter the silence. Cries—the cries of children—send him running again, deeper into the forest until his foot catches on something and he vaults forward, free of the earth and soaring through the air, the forest around him rushing by in a blur as the screams fade, swallowed again by eerie silence.
He lands hard, on his stomach and chest, knocking the air out of him. As he lies on the ground, writhing about for breath, he sees the others standing between the trees up ahead.
Lonnie. Sal. Dorsey. Standing in a line, staring at him with blank expressions. A fourth person, partially obscured by the trees, is there too.
They’re nude—all of them, nude—but why?
He crawls toward them but the forest falls away. Like a painting rinsed from canvas in the rain, it all slides off into oblivion and becomes a long, narrow alley, dark and filthy and dangerous. Water drips from somewhere overhead—from rusty fire escapes and battered drainpipes—mixing with a steady downpour of dirty rain.
As the others walk away, through the alley, he follows, crawling on his belly.
The alley empties into a long street, dark and filthy, with fires burning in the night from barrels, spraying sparks to reveal condemned buildings falling apart all around him. A war zone, he thinks, an apocalyptic warzone.
To his right is a large lot surrounded by chain-link fence, but he cannot see beyond it in any detail. Something moves behind it, but he can’t quite make out what.
There are others, more children scattered about the street and lots, all of them terribly filthy and neglected, dressed in grubby rags and looking as if they’ve lived under these horrible conditions for a very long time.
Sitting in a diseased puddle, the rain falling all around her, a sad little girl he doesn’t recognize paws dirt and rainwater from her face with equally wet and dirty little hands. “No one will ever come, will they?” she asks, her big brown eyes blinking slowly at him, eyes that were once innocent and adorable.
He keeps crawling, and though he wants to stand, he can’t. He barely has the strength to drag himself across the slick and slimy cement running with rainwater and trash and debris.
“No one’s even looking,” says the little waif. “Are they?”
“What am I doing here?” he gasps. “What are any of us doing here?”
The little girl places a hand over her left eye, then presses the index finger of the other to her mouth. “Shhh.”
He crawls through another puddle as the rain continues to pummel him. Such filthy water everywhere. To his right, someone or something grabs hold of a length of chain-link fence, shakes it violently and lets out a guttural growl.
Light from a nearby fire reveals more hopeless children huddled in the darkness, watching him. There is a particular kind of evil in this horrid place.
And it is pleased.
More screams of agony echo through the darkness and rain.
The others—his friends—are still there and still nude, but they stand at the end of the street now, wearing intricate and frightening headpieces depicting odd hybrids of animals and demonic faces.
And they are all covered in blood.
From somewhere behind him, a voice whispers a single word.
“Rebirth…”
Joel saw him well before he’d reached the car. Fleeing the grave and whatever was watching from the forest, he was halfway down the hill when he noticed an aged and rugged-looking Jeep Wrangler parked behind his car. A thin man in a long black duster, boots and a black knit hat leaned against it, arms folded over his chest, dark clothing standing out against the sea of white.
Joel was still several feet away when the man raised his head.
Trent.
Gone was the Mohawk, piercings and punk fashion, but the face and sad blue eyes were the same, only older and harder. His skin exhibited the tan and leathery look of someone who spent inordinate amounts of time in the sun, and the lines in his face were deeper and plentiful, the pain in him more profound and obvious than in his youth. Sprigs of hair protruding from the bottom and sides of his hat had turned mostly silver.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” he said in the same soft-spoken voice Joel remembered.
“I’m beginning to wonder if we ever did.”
“How’s the shoulder?”
“Hurts.” Joel moved closer. “That was you?”
Trent looked past him at the hill.
“You were the one who saved me in the rain?”
“I kept my distance until then, but they would’ve killed you.”
“You some kind of a badass now?”
Trent pushed away from his Jeep and, without a word, wrapped his arms around Joel and pulled him in close. It took Joel by surprise, but he went with it, hugging his old friend in return. There was nothing el
se to do.
“Why didn’t you come to me sooner?” Joel asked.
“Time had to be right.” Trent released him and resumed his watch of the hill. “You weren’t ready for me.”
“What are those things up there?”
“Fuck you think they are?” He started for his Jeep. “Come on.”
“What about my car?”
“Leave it.”
“But—”
“Leave it.” He looked back, expression stoic. “We have to move. Now.”
“Where are we going?”
“Right now.”
“My apologies if I’m not in the most trusting mood,” Joel said, shaking from the cold, or perhaps something more. “But I just had a conversation with a woman that died two years ago.”
If this information fazed him, Trent gave no indication.
“So I’ll ask again. Where are we going?”
“Little deeper down the rabbit hole.”
“Straight on to Wonderland, huh?”
“Not exactly our first trip,” Trent said, “but you need to know what I know.”
“And then?”
“The Devil needs killing.”
Joel searched Trent’s face for some sign of irony but came up empty. Without response, he walked around to the other side of the Jeep, pulled open the passenger side door and climbed in.
They left the cemetery, Trent driving as fast and erratically as Joel imagined he might. The ride was anything but smooth, the old Jeep bouncing them both around and reigniting the pain in Joel’s shoulder. The interior was bare bones, hadn’t been cleaned in ages and smelled like stale fast food and booze. Whatever was behind the seats was covered in a dark wool blanket.
“Heaters broke,” Trent mumbled, eyes manically alternating between the windshield, rearview and side mirrors. “Sorry.”
“That explains why we can still see our breath.”
The Jeep rocketed through city, which had fully awakened now, and despite the snowfall, the streets were becoming more congested. Trent said nothing else as he drove into the south end.
Orphans of Wonderland Page 22