by Scott Hale
Filipa. There was Filipa’s. And there was Linnéa and Stephen. And under their names… one word: Unworthy.
“Lin,” Stephen whispered.
With such tunnel vision, she hadn’t noticed what he was holding.
In his hands, he had a thick bundle of vermillion veins. They writhed in his hands, and reached up to drink the tears from his cheeks.
But then she realized that wasn’t what he was talking about.
There was something else.
Someone else.
Someone standing behind her.
She spun around, knife out, slinging the evidence out in front of her.
Ved Matcira stood on the basement steps, both hands in his corduroy’s pockets, neither impressed nor surprised. A strand of blond hair swept across his face, catching on his thin, crooked glasses. There was a scar on his lips, and scars on his wrists where the skin was exposed. He stood to one side, not intentionally, but because one leg was shorter than the other.
When he opened his mouth, a few of his teeth were missing, and those that weren’t were stained red.
But before he could say anything, Linnéa and Stephen screamed, “Where are they? Where the fuck are they?”
“Where we left them,” he said, laughing.
Linnéa ran up to him, grabbed him by the shirt, and shoved the knife into his stomach, into his bellybutton, barely breaking the skin.
Ved winced.
“Where?” Stephen cried.
“At home,” he said. “There’s a child in every home now.”
Holding his arms behind his back, Linnéa shoved Ved out of the house, while Stephen led the way. He didn’t drag his heels or try to fight back; he went calmly, willingly—his pursed lips passing no protest. To Linnéa, his silence was maddening, and she made him suffer for it, by twisting his arms and applying a crushing pressure to his wrist. She drove the ceramic knife into his spine and made superficial carvings there. He bled, but he was not bothered.
“Are they okay?” Linnéa screamed into his ear. She noticed his truck wasn’t here. Had he parked it elsewhere? Did he have an accomplice?
Crossing the street, reaching the cemetery, Stephen wheeled around them like a caged animal. “Answer her!” he shouted, stabbing his finger into Ved’s boney side. “Answer her, goddamn it!”
“Yes,” Ved said.
Linnéa and Stephen looked at one another, their faces going red from holding their breath.
“They’re taken care of.”
Stephen wrenched Ved by the collar of his shirt.
Linnéa drove the knife deeper into his back, steering him across the grass and graves.
Stephen hurried to the car, opened the doors. “They’re still alive? They’re at home?”
Ved nodded.
Linnéa slammed him into the car. “Use your fucking words,” she said, pushing him into the backseat, going in after him. She pinned him, her knee in his stomach, the knife to his neck. “Talk!”
Stephen dropped into the driver’s seat and started up the car. The smell of burnt rubber poured through the vents as he peeled out of the parking lot.
Ved swallowed hard; the knife threatened to impale his Adam’s apple. “What do—” he coughed, “—want to know?”
“Did you touch them? Did you hurt them?” She drove her knee into his stomach, until he looked as if he might vomit. “I swear to god…”
Ved’s eyes shone vermillion. “You will, soon enough. And no, we did not lay a hand on them, except to take them.”
“We?” Stephen stared into the rear-view mirror. “We? How many?”
“Hundreds,” Ved said, laughing.
Linnéa spit in his face. “Don’t you dare.”
“Every one of you had it coming.”
Stephen jerked the wheel to the left, slinging Linnéa and Ved across the backseat.
Before he could think of going out the door, Linnéa was back on top of him again; this time with the knife’s blade bearing down on his cock.
“What do you mean?” she said, giving everything she had to stop herself from castrating him right then and there.
Like most men, the threat of losing his balls got Ved talking. “You weren’t good parents. You don’t deserve your children. You’ll turn them into you.”
The accusations hit Linnéa harder than she expected.
Honking horns blasted the car as Stephen sped through a stop sign.
“God will take care of them.”
Stephen cried, “Are you with the Disciples?”
“Absolutely.”
“Did they make you do this?”
Ved tongued the scar on his lip. “No one makes me do anything anymore. Not anymore. Not anymore. But they did ask. They asked a lot of us. Us like me.”
Linnéa pressed her weight into him. “Who? Who did? The people from your church?” She paused, overworked her brain. “The kids in the van? The police? The people coming in from out of town?”
“All of the above,” Ved said.
Stephen whipped around a corner. The entrance to Six Pillars was no more than twenty seconds away.
“The… other parents?” Linnéa whispered.
“In their own way,” he said.
She slapped him, stabbed the knife into his scrotum.
He whimpered and tried to shake her off, but there was a new fear that had a hold on him. A dormant fear. An unresolved fear. Not weakness, but instinct. His body went hard all over, and she imagined it a shield behind which his mind could hide. He’d been here before. She wasn’t the first mother to do this to him.
Stephen turned into Six Pillars and hauled it towards their home.
“I don’t think you’ll have anything to worry about,” Ved said, admiring the houses on the street as they ran past the glass in a muddled blur. “Filipa was the favorite.”
Stephen rolled down his window, shouted to neighbors on the street, “Get help! Call the police!”
Whatever hope Linnéa had felt before was gone. “What are you talking about?”
“They tried to tell you.”
The shadows, she realized.
“A month is a long time,” Ved said. “I would know. God, I would know. But I wouldn’t worry.”
The car bounced up. Stephen hopped the sidewalk and drove through half their neighbor’s yard before screeching to a stop in their own driveway.
“Wouldn’t worry?” Linnéa’s throat constricted. Her mouth filled with spit. “Wouldn’t worry?”
Stephen got out of the car, opened the rear door.
“Your house does smell, though,” Ved said. He started to laugh. “Do you think something might’ve died in the walls?”
A child in every home.
Linnéa grabbed him by his throat and backed out of the car, dragging him with her. When he hit the ground, she kicked him in the face. His lip popped open; a bright geyser of blood shot across the driveway.
Leaving him there, she grabbed the keys from Stephen, unlocked the trunk.
Seeing what she was doing, Stephen grabbed Ved underneath his arms, barely lifted him to his feet.
Together, they pushed Ved into the trunk, slammed it shut, and locked it.
From across the street: “What’s going on?”
Linnéa turned around. Bethany Simmons was standing at her front door. Ellen and Richard Cross were next to their car, about to leave. And Trent Resin was checking his mailbox.
“Did you hear about Brooksville Manor? It just collapsed out of nowhere!”
She tried to tell them what was going on, but the words were lodged in her throat, held back by their impossibility.
“The kids,” Stephen cried. “The kids are in the houses!”
While the other parents stood there dumbfounded, Linnéa and Stephen rushed into the house. Hand shaking, it took Stephen a good ten seconds to unlock the door. When he did, they spilled across the threshold—an avalanche of scrabbling desperation—and bounded up the staircase.
They ran down the hal
l, into their room. Linnéa jumped onto the bed, outstretched her hands to the two black smudges on the ceiling.
“Filipa? Filipa? Baby?”
She stood on the tips of her toes. She focused as hard as she could on the smudges.
A gust of wind. That foul smell of rot. And a fleck of plaster.
The smudges weren’t smudges, but tiny holes.
Peepholes… for the person on the other side.
“No, no, no!” Stephen ran out of the room, came back a minute later with a mildewed 2x4 he’d used to line his garden. “Watch out!”
He stumbled onto the bed.
“Filipa, we’re coming!” Linnéa said.
And then he drove the 2x4 into the ceiling, bashing through the eggshell-like plaster. It slipped into the darkness inside the walls, came back out covered in a black, viscous material.
“Honey!” Linnéa dropped off the bed, ran into Filipa’s room, grabbed the stool from in front of her vanity, and came back in and dropped it on the bed, so she could get closer to the ceiling. “You have to move. Daddy’s going to get you…”
Stephen, grunting, crying, rammed the board into the ceiling again, faster and faster, harder and harder, carving it away with a frenzied intensity.
First came the cloying smell of decay.
Then pieces of ceiling covered in piss and shit.
“I see something,” Linnéa said, on top of the stool. She reached for the gap in the ceiling, sinking her hands into the fleshy mush that rimmed it. “I see…”
The ceiling buckled, and in a cradle of rot and ropes, Filipa fell through. In that morbid moment, time slowed to a stop, as if to taunt Linnéa and Stephen, to show them what couldn’t possibly be.
To show them their daughter’s raw, meat-red body, bloated and dried-out; to show them where the hair had fallen from her head, where the teeth had dropped from her gums; to show them the flesh and muscle ripping away from her bones as she plummeted to the floor; to show them her empty eye sockets, and all the times she must’ve watched them at night; to show them her twisted mouth, and all the times she must’ve wanted to call out, to tell them how close she was, how easy she would’ve been to save.
And then time was done with them.
Filipa’s body burst apart when it hit the ground. Putrefied organs leaked out of her orifices in a rancid stew. Her flesh pulled apart and her bones drifted. She split down the middle, like two continents separating, and between them, an ocean of gore in which only Linnéa’s and Stephen’s images were captured.
Shock sent Linnéa careening through the house. Off her rails, she was out of her mind, screaming and beating her chest as she ran, crawled, and ran down the hall, down the stairs.
She cried out with words that weren’t words, making silent sounds only the loneliness of stars might know. She threw herself through the front door, tripped, and fell onto the stone walkway. The rocks bit her knees, bled her hands. She vomited all over herself.
She rocked back and forth, back and forth, grinding herself harder and harder into the stone, searching for some horrible sensation to steal away this inhuman feeling inside her.
Back and forth, back and forth, she heard Ved in the trunk, trying to kick and punch his way out.
Back and forth, back and forth, she heard Stephen coming down the stairs, wailing so hard he might never speak again.
Back and forth, back and forth, she began to lie to herself about the body in the bedroom, about having had a daughter at all, about—
A gunshot exploded through Six Pillars.
Linnéa reared back and fell on her haunches.
Trent Resin lay dead on the front lawn of his house, a trail of smoke pouring out of the hole in his head. Before him, the body of Charles Resin lay, all bones, but for the face attached like a mask to his skull.
Then she looked to the Simmonses’ house and she saw Ellen sitting on the porch, a cigarette in one hand, the blue baby blanket of her son, Jimmy, in the other. Everything she held was covered in blood, and she was smiling.
And then she looked to the Crosses’ house, where at first there was nothing, and then, there were three men coming up to it from the down the road. In their hands they held multi-colored stones and necklaces. When they reached the house, the front door opened and Ellen and Richard Cross emerged, their hands folded in prayer, their eyes cast to the ground. They were shouting about something, but Linnéa couldn’t make sense of the English language anymore.
At least, not after what she saw; after what came behind Ellen and Richard. A frail shape. Bound in rope. Covered in blood. A little girl of eleven or twelve. She wore a cloak of vermillion veins and walked upon a carpet of them, too. They moved when she moved. They were her, and she was them.
Before Linnéa and Stephen hanged themselves in their living room, they watched the news report on the whole thing. Darlene Lillian Cross claimed to have survived only by listening to God’s will. She told the reporters she would only answer to the name Lillian, and that she would only listen to the word of the true God.
For she was the only one on this world who could hear Its message, and for this world, It had a message.
TRAUMAS
Judas remembers more than he should, and no one else can know that.
He remembers Lillian from the television; all the fire and brimstone she spewed; all the fire and brimstone she’d brought.
He remembers when the ground opened up and out of Hell, Heaven came—a winding maelstrom of veins and blasphemous germinations.
He remembers the well-dressed corpses in their gleaming coffers; the lies they told, the lies they sold; the parishioners they purchased by the millions, while they salivated over the property and prospects in the loaming Deep.
He remembers when the bombs fell and the bullets flew—a unified wave of killing hate stirred and sown and grown to drown the discord and discontent that surrounded Lux, Earth’s self-proclaimed last hope and savior.
He remembers, as he looks to the horizon, that once there’d been a God, and now It is no more.
Abandoned by his Creator, he remembers no greater pain.
That is, until that dreaded day, when everything was taken away.
11
Judas has been following this river beside him for as long as it’s been here. He knows its every bend. Though the water changes, the river remains the same. Its history is in the soil, and in the shape it has taken, despite the shapes it might take. Judas admires this about the river. He sees himself in its waters, hears himself in the strange syllables they speak. If others were to stand beside him and see him reflected as he does, they would understand. But along this river, he walks alone, for he is a needle passing through the fabric of time, undoing what others have done, sewing himself in where he does not belong.
Ahead, ruin. Against the smeared horizon, a piece of a town stands. Uprooted, overturned, and hurled into these wetland wilds, jagged shards of cement protrude from the ground. Beyond them, at their center, two homes have been fused together by Heaven’s heat. There is also half a bakery. Having been there before, Judas knows there is no food to be found—only the remnants of those who might’ve tried to steal it. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the bakery are caked in large, dried explosions of gore, as if the building, when it had been picked up, had been shaken violently, the same way a child would shake to snuff a box of bugs.
Judas is not here for the ruins. He is here to eat.
He takes the knife out of his belt and goes quietly towards the wreckage. The slippery mud of the riverbank gives way to gurgling grass. Skinny mosquitoes looking to get fat fly about his head, but he doesn’t dare swat them away. He knows better. Everyone in these parts does.
At this early morning hour, the clouds appear curdled, but for a moment, as Judas approaches the ruins, they loosen and part. Not much light comes through—the sun is slow to wake, and most days has its back to the world—but there is something. A glimpse of the sky, and the landmasses in it, weeping rubble. From t
he underside of raw earth, massive vermillion veins hang; some are even long enough to reach the ground. People are said to have had climbed them, and gone with the islands into the stars. Judas has had people try to tell him that the landmasses are from Europe, but he’s never left this country before. All he knows is that everything is coming apart; nothing wants to be here anymore.
The distraction disappears. Judas puts it out of his mind. He hurries to the cement shards and passes between them. The smell is strongest at the fused houses. Like most these days, he follows his nose as if it were the Word of God. At least when it came to the syllables of starvation, they didn’t need an interpreter like Lillian to tell them what it all meant.
Minding the rubble, Judas moves to the houses and presses himself against the charred seam that’d brought them together. God’s unification hadn’t been of people, but of the things they’d created. That which hadn’t been swallowed down Its throat had been smashed together. Even the continents were changed. This world hadn’t been good to God, so God had Its way with the world and molded it into something that it might be in the eons to come. But like the river behind Judas, this world was still the world he knew, unrecognizable as it might; somewhere beneath the scar tissue, the rotting flesh, the putrefying organs, there were bones.
The smell makes Judas’ stomach rumble. Battling with his hunger, he twists his body until he looks like a twisted tree. He squeezes the knife, catches his reflection in the rusted blade. He was a tree, wasn’t he? Skinny, bare. Pale, coarse; sad. He’d ignored his roots for so long, and kept them moving when they needed to take. But things were different now. He can settle, and settle in for the long nights to come. He doesn’t have to go at it alone.
Salivating, Judas climbs into the house through what might have been a window. He crosses what might have been a living room. If he has learned anything from all this, it was that everything you could ever need could be found in the dark. The shadows were small sanctuaries. If the Lillians had ever taught him anything, it was that Heaven was in the low places.