"What's your name?" he asked.
"Ashriet," the boy told him, tipping back his straw hat.
"Sura," the girl said, and moved as if to embrace Mills.
The breeze rose. Each skirted around him, leaping with a child's joy, skipping and sailing through the air just out of his reach. If they were in a group they would've formed a ring around him and killed him with a thousand stones. Now, in the face of his purpose, they ran.
Mills took off after them, in the direction of Sweetgum Hill. It seemed they were willing him to imagine his seventeen year old daughter Jorie's body swaying in the smoke-laced wind. He reminded himself these weren't children at all, but minions of paradise.
Barely any pulse throbbed in his throat and wrists. Maybe he was already dead and this was a purgatory he was forced to relive without ever learning anything. Mills wished he had the old rage again, the self-righteous wrath that once called for murder, but in some strange way New York had weakened him. He'd learned to be more accepting and forgiving there--to be anything else would have driven him insane. He wasn't so sure he wasn't already crazy, but the boiling hatred just wasn't there anymore.
Still, he'd do what he had to do. This was his brood's damnation. He was beyond redemption because he had already been redeemed, thanks to his forefather who'd died on the cross beside Christ.
Two thieves were crucified on either side of Jesus, at the top of Golgotha, the Hill of the Skull. One denied him and laughed even as he himself was dying. The other--despite his own wounds and broken bones--felt pity and accepted Christ as his savior.
The damned fool.
Now, the shadow of the thief fell over Mills. He spun, wanting to face the man who'd accepted God into his heart that day. He imagined the thief's children cowering in the crowd, pressing upon the place of the dead, watching their father become blessed by Heaven, and found that they were blessed themselves. With a gift that made them recognize their own evil. To see the evil in themselves and in others with a hideously exquisite clarity. To recognize it, and in some cases, to skillfully excise it.
Sura cavorted, squealed in exhilaration and tried to lose him among the morass. Mills dug in and with a growl launched himself at a point three feet above her head. She began to rise just as he reached the spot and he clipped her hard, brought her down. Something cool, damp, and leathery slapped him savagely across the face. He saw she was unsheathing her stunted wings.
"Tell Him to take back his gift," Mills said.
"He'll never take it back."
"Then this will go on."
"So be it."
"I don't want to keep killing your kind."
"Then stop. Beg forgiveness for your sins. Fall to your knees and weep, oh man. For all your transgressions against paradise and the children of heaven. Praise your Lord."
"Not until He takes back His gift. And not if you keep murdering our children."
"It's not your judgment to make," she said sweetly. The Seraph, in all their supremacy and beauty, and following only the will of God, could not do evil, no matter how vicious and brutal they were. "We follow His will. You must be punished for your impudence and conceit."
Her wing snapped against his nose, brushing his cheek like a lover, then gouging. He yelped and fell back but didn't release her. He wanted to be her father, her lover, and her friend, to be welcomed by all that was love and loyalty.
He thought about how foolish it was that the Seraph and the sons of Golgotha had both wandered the world for centuries, only to both end up within spitting distance of one another in Cobb County, Georgia. He didn't understand why such damnation should follow him and his family despite what his ancestor had done on the Hill of the Skull. A malefactor should not be forgiven his sins for a moment of pity. Salvation wasn't so easily won. There was a vein of badness that must've run deep, to go on for a hundred generations worth.
"Will you leave my brood alone?" he asked.
Sura smiled and said, "What God wills shall be done."
"Does he want us all dead?"
She shook her head sadly. "You only wish yourselves to suffer. It's your sin of pride. You do not accept and so turn your hand against his armies. You call this down upon yourselves."
It was probably true but he couldn't accept it because he could not change what he was. "That's nonsense!"
"So you say."
"Leave us alone!"
"Stop hating your Father who loves you."
"Rotten bitch!"
He grabbed the guthook and opened her up. They were almost human inside but not quite. No threads of evil, no bile or acid. She never stopped staring at him with loving eyes, even after he hooked her innards and splashed her lips with them. The wings flopped and snapped against the dirt for a while and finally they stopped trembling.
Turning, Mills saw the boy Ashriet grinning at him through a mass of willow leaves. "Tell Him to take back his gift, you little bastard."
"He'll never take it back," Ashriet said.
"Why won't you let it stop?"
"Why won't you?"
He poured the gasoline over the remains of Sura and threw a match. The pyre she formed was no less pure than his own ego.
A man who is loved by God is just as damned as one who's hated. Ask Job. David. Saul. Samson. The martyrs. All of them blessed, and yet all of them living and dying in agony and despair.
He walked back to the skiff and stobpoled back out of the bottoms, then marched the eight miles back home and stepped into the cabin. Mariel stood at the sink, the same position she'd been in when he'd last seen her ten years ago. He'd had four children with the woman but didn't know a thing about her anymore.
Most of the windows had been broken and boarded over. A few rocks lay in the center of the floor. The walls were scarred with their markings.
She looked up without a hint of surprise and said, "Have you paid them back for Jorie yet?"
He could've made an argument that things had been in motion long before this, but didn't bother. "Yes."
"Good."
"Don't be so sure. It's going to get bad again."
"It's always been bad. I want them all gone. Every last one of them. You shoulda done it a long time ago." He saw her evil in her pumping blackness into her heart, and he knew that she could see the exact same thing in him. "I consider and find you lacking!"
"This serves no purpose."
"You can't say for certain. And you're in no position to argue with the ways that be. You do as you must. Even if you do think you can shirk your responsibilities and go have fun up there in the north."
"It wasn't so fun."
"It wasn't your place to be."
He looked around the dusty room hoping to find a photo of Jorie or Billy or the other children someplace where he could see them. But the room was empty. It always had been. "You could've come. I wanted you to come with me, but you wouldn't leave this place."
"Why should I leave?" she asked. "It's my home."
"You wouldn't even let me take the children. Jorie would be alive now!"
"Mayhap. And mayhap she'd be here with us if you hadn't run off in the first place."
"There's no end to it."
"Did you think there ever would be?" she asked, and she was serious. Malice swirled in her eyes like ripples in the catfish pond. The thief's shadow rose against her, buckling on his twisted legs.
Another giggling Seraph went by the window and threw a rock. Mills picked up the hatchet and followed.
Introduction to "These Strange Lays"
by Ray Garton
If you've already read Tom Piccirilli, then you know what a great writer he is. If you haven't, then "These Strange Lays" is a good place to start. It is not only a wonderful story, it is a perfect example of why Tom is such a great writer. Tom knows how to make characters live in breathe. In this story, he brings to life a character who's already dead and doesn't even appear in the story. Holder's late father could have been nothing more than a character's memory, but
Tom wouldn't be satisfied with that. Instead, he brings to life a character who is only a part of someone's past. Holder's father is vivid and memorable, and only a number of lines refer to him. I'm not even quite sure how Tom did it, but the dead father lived in my imagination while I was reading as clearly and with as much focus as the living characters who do appear in the story.
Tom does not confine his writing to the horror genre -- he's too good to be held down by only one -- but we fans are infinitely lucky that he does write horror fiction. He's so damned good, he could write anything he wanted and it would sing in a sharp and silver voice. Read "These Strange Lays" and you'll see what I mean.
–Ray Garton, author of LIVE GIRLS and SEX AND VIOLENCE IN HOLLYWOOD
These Strange Lays
Holder's father had been in the ground for almost four months and he figured it was about time to see the grave, say whatever he had left to say.
Woodland Cemetery sat out on Route 9, bordered by a high school soccer field on the south and deep woods behind Fall Gardens, a psychiatric hospital, to the north. Holder sped down the back roads as the afternoon sun settled in the horizon, with that vicious autumn glare cutting down like a cleaver. He'd never been inside the Woodland acreage before and was surprised at how large and well-kept it was. He parked in an empty lot, puzzled that the place didn't have more visitors, considering all the dead.
It was a good thing the old man was under six feet of dirt. The well-trimmed lawns, carefully pruned hedges, neat rows of graves, and methodically placed trees would've driven the old man berserk. He would've torn up the place in his 4x4 on general principle.
Dad had some issues but he liked to laugh, especially when cops or security guards were chasing him. Holder could see it now-the truck tires spitting grass and topsoil, looping around the place in wide circles and crashing through the freshly planted shrubs, with the wild drunken guffaws booming over the fields.
A shard of sorrow worked loose in his chest and Holder chewed back a groan and let it slowly shift to a sigh. It took him almost fifteen minutes of hunting along aisles before he found the right grave. Somebody had left a Bible, a pint of whiskey, and a slice of cheesecake half-buried in the loose dirt. It gave him pause, thinking about which of his old man's girlfriends might do something like that.
None of them had names in his mind, just vague descriptions as they flounced around his father in the bars. Chubby chick with the rose tattoo on her neck whining about dental hygiene night class professor. Way too young Latina mama with the horse teeth pawing bucks for baby food. Black leather micro-skirted, mother-daughter tag team bottled blondes hunting eight-balls at four a.m. Holder wondered which might be the Bible-toting, cheesecake type.
He had the same name as his father and seeing it carved into stone made Holder grimace. On occasion you came face to face with your fate all on your own, and sometimes they sort of threw it up at you. He thought about what he wanted to tell his Dad now--how much he missed the man already, and how he wanted to hear that robust laughter again--imagining him down there with a grin, his eyes only slightly-hooded, peering into the dark.
Everybody dealt with the devil in his own way--you cut and ran or maybe you had the guts and faced up. You dodged the pea soup and sat in the first pew, ogling Christ on his cross and standing in line to dig up some kind of confession. You beat your lust out of yourself and tried not to buy too much filth on the Internet. Or, if you were like Dad, you slid a half-pint of shine Nick's way and offered a cigar. Then you pinned his hot, pointy ears back to his head, took a gander around your particular corner of hell, and decided what the fuck to do first.
A sound tugged Holder's attention aside.
His father's voice was so loud in his mind that it took a moment to realize someone else was singing, high and resonant, almost like a hymn. He wagged his chin hoping to dislodge his thoughts. That song had an edge to it, drifting through the trees and up the cemetery's promontory. He turned and scanned the area.
He half-expected to see the chubby chick with the rose tattoo on her neck to come stumbling along. She had enough meat in the keester to suggest she enjoyed a cheesecake or two now and then.
Flitting through the thickets bordering Woodland was a girl, sort of prancing in the steady breeze, doing the kind of Irish jig you did when you were too drunk to realize you weren't doing an Irish jig at all. He tilted his head and watched her rushing across the graves the way you weren't supposed to do, stepping on all the heads, where the earth was always a little soft. It took him back some and made him curious. She glanced up the hill and saw Holder there and made a sudden looping arc towards him, capering without a care.
She waved to him and he raised his hand in return, thinking, All right we're about to get into something here.
A few things through his mind at once, including the possibility that this might be one of his father's other kids that were undoubtedly running around out in the world. Tadpoles that had turned into people, looking for what? Money? Vengeance? It made Holder a touch wary, imagining her coming up, grabbing him by the collar, slapping him around some and then throwing herself down in the dirt, wailing. You had to be ready for just about anything.
When she got up to him she said, "I'm Megan."
A melancholy but compassionate face, with crows feet at the corners of her mouth from smiling too harshly, for too many hours at a clip. He kind of liked the wrinkles there because she was young, mid-20s maybe, and it gave her a little extra touch of the exotic, as if she'd seen more than she should've and had a hard time handling it. Jesus, maybe she was his sister.
She wore inmate togs. Light gray jammies and her feet were bare and stained green and he got to thinking how he'd like to wash them for her, the water warm and plenty of bubbles around on her slick skin. Tussled blonde bangs framed her heart-shaped face, and she clawed her hair off her forehead, pursing lavish bee-stung lips. She breathed deeply, on the verge of yawning, like she'd just gotten out of bed.
Some girls had the kind of look you wanted without having to do a damn thing for it. Nature set it up inside your head and you couldn't fight it no matter how you tried. Holder felt his throat closing up, his breath growing rapid.
"Hello Megan," he said, and his voice was thicker than it should've been.
He took a step forward and saw that her eyes were hazel with bits of gold in them, and now she gave a grin that made him step back again. He had no idea exactly how he should handle the devil. Do you offer up your throat or do you back off slowly, try to get to the car without making much of a fuss? She looked behind her at the hospital buildings maybe a half mile away, then checked in the other direction towards the high school. And then she angled herself to stare beyond the fields at the rest of town, where flawed denizens returned home now after work to ooze into couches while the television ranted and laughed hollowly.
Holder decided to hold his ground. He could always dash for cover later, crawl on his belly through the woods to get away if he had to. Maybe he had more brothers and sisters shambling towards him at this minute, babies creeping along the tree line. Megan pirouetted past and sat on the soil, digging her heels in deep, wedged against the stone.
"Lady, that's my father's grave."
"Do you think he'd mind? I mean, really?"
Holder tried to imagine it. A lovely young woman's ass perched over his Dad's dead face. This was the sort of thing his old man would've gotten a serious kick out of, always telling Holder to get out and enjoy life, have some fun, get laid more, do something a bit crazy.
She went for the bottle of whiskey and he said, "Don't."
"He isn't going to drink it, is he?"
"It's for him anyway. Leave it."
"Okay. Can I play with the Bible?"
"No."
"Did you hate him?"
"No, I loved him more than anything."
It seemed to surprise her, like he had all the wrong answers. "Really? Why?"
"He made life interesting and he laughed
a lot."
"Oh."
There it was, another tiny temptation that worked through his veins, the right neuro-chemicals slithering around inside his mammal brain. It slipped in like a blade under the heart. Holder liked the way she made the sound. Damn near an 'oooh' but not quite. He didn't want to think about what kind of a home life she came from where loving your own Dad was so alien an idea.
Leaves spun past in the growing wind. Her hands moved as if making charms, dirty feet leaving marks against his name on the stone. You could read symbols into so much around you that if you didn't let it all go at once you'd spend the rest of your life chasing after it, studying false signs. He had a tendency towards that sort of shit.
Her frown softened and eventually faded until she let loose with a soft giggle. "Spank me."
The words slid into him. He realized they were both stuck in other roles right now and didn't know what to do about it. He wondered which bastard he was supposed to be in her head. Prom date gone awry? Greasy-pawed Uncle Freddie? Or could you actually find a part of yourself adrift in somebody else?
"Sure," he told her.
He was his own father, who used to enjoy situations like this, and she was the naughty child she'd once been, going all out to get under the skin, and both of them were this close to letting loose with screams for the hell of it. You cut loose once in a while and bled the steam off, if you could.
Megan didn't help him and that was all right. He wanted to touch her but didn't want to be touched, really, and the thought bothered him. Funny the things that could trip you up. He couldn't have that dirt on him so he pulled her up by the wrists and drew her against the stone. Some of your craziness was okay depending on its position. She slipped out of her pajama pants, arching herself over the gravestone. Dad had to be scratching at the coffin lid by now. She pulled her blouse open and Holder moved to her, her nipples in his hands as he finally leaned in to taste her tongue and kiss those pouting, pulpy lips.
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