“I’m not constipated,” Tobias said again. “I needed a moment to clear my head is all.”
Gary narrowed his eyes, a shrewd, amused look coming into them. “Right, right.” Gary mimed jerking off and winked at Tobias. “Clearing your head. I used to clear my head a lot, too.”
“Good God, Gary,” Tobias said. “I wasn’t doing that either.”
“Uh-huh.” Gary tipped him another wink and tapped the side of his nose. “Gotcha.”
“Yes, of course you do,” Tobias said.
He opened the bathroom door and stepped into the hallway. He could hear Dawn Marie’s husky laughter floating down toward him, Mooncricket’s mingling with it. He could imagine her hand on his arm, her smile a touch too big, her eyes dancing and full of promise. She hadn’t even made it a day after breaking up with Mike before she was on the prowl again. Tobias would never understand why she did that just as he would never understand the faint little twitch of hurt it caused him; the feeling that he was being left out. Or maybe it was overlooked.
Then again, maybe he was just being an idiot. A lonely idiot.
“Everything come out all right?” Dawn Marie asked. She swayed slightly in place, booze fumes wafting off of her in a not altogether unpleasant fog. Tobias was like Gary in that regard: He loved the smell of good whiskey.
“Just splendid,” Tobias said.
“Cool,” Dawn Marie said.
“Yes, delightful,” Tobias said. “Are we ready to go? We really should be on our way.”
“You talk, like, really old-fashioned,” Mooncricket said.
“So does Hylas,” Dawn Marie said. “But with more of a southern stoner drawl.”
Tobias suspected he and Hylas both talked the way they did because of the books they had read as children; Wuthering Heights, The Collected Tales of Sherlock Holmes, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It had been early in their development and some of the speech patterns from those old books had stuck. Though not all of their speech was like that; Hylas was prone to saying things like, sweating like a whore in church and Tobias was fond of saying over yonder and back directly. Their good ol’ boy father’s way of speaking had rubbed off them as well. Hylas said they were both somewhat anomalous and Tobias tended to agree.
Tobias waited them out to see what they would say and finally, Dawn Marie snorted. “Yeah, fine, we should bounce.”
“Yeah,” Mooncricket said. “Jeremy’ll be worried.”
“You’re not gonna get in trouble are you?” Dawn Marie asked. The second she said it, she realized her mistake and slapped her hand over her mouth.
Mooncricket looked down at the scuffed toes of his boots and shook his head.
“No, man, of course not,” he said. “Jeremy’s great.”
“I’ve known great guys like Jeremy,” Dawn Marie said. She touched her own bruised cheek and looked angry all over again. “They’re super swell.”
“He’s not like that,” Mooncricket said. He still didn’t look up from the toes of his boots. “I told y’all I fell and I did. So, like, lay off.”
“Okay, honey, sure,” Dawn Marie said. She gave his braid a playful tug as she tipped her head to the side. “Grandma Tobias is going to drive us home now.”
“Stop calling me that,” Tobias said mildly as he took his keys from his pocket and passed them to Dawn Marie. “You two go on out to the car, I’ll shut everything down in here.”
Dawn Marie nodded and walked out with Mooncricket weaving along behind her. At the door, Dawn Marie stopped and said, “Goodnight, Gary.”
Mooncricket looked over at her and then shrugged. “Yeah, ‘night, dude.”
“Goodnight to you both!” Gary called cheerfully, from right behind them. They both jumped and he laughed.
Dawn Marie flipped him off then opened the door to go outside, Mooncricket following along behind her.
Tobias took care of all the things left to do in the funeral home; he turned off lights, made sure all the doors were locked and gave parlor number three one more look over to make sure it was prepared for Mr. Jackson’s wake first thing in the morning. He went back through the preparation room and flipped on the radio as he walked toward the door.
They dropped Mooncricket off at a nice house way out in Stony Point, a good twelve or thirteen miles from Sparrow Falls. Mooncricket bumbled his way out of the car, nearly fell down, but then he was up and off again, saying, “I got it, I got it.”
Dawn Marie laughed from the backseat and Tobias smiled and when Mooncricket waved over his shoulder, Tobias tapped the horn once lightly in farewell. The crow moved from the center console to take Mooncricket’s recently vacated seat and shook itself off. It pecked the dash and cawed as they waited for Mooncricket to make it safely inside. Not many people were simply dropped at their door in Sparrow Falls; it was a long-standing community habit, some kind of unspoken agreement amid most of the town’s residents. With all the high strangeness that went on there, to just drop a friend or relative off and drive away could mean they were never seen again. In Sparrow Falls, the possibility of being eaten on your way to the door was a real one.
Tobias reached out to turn on the radio as he backed out of the driveway. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the song on the radio as he drove home with his best friend passed out in the back and a crow riding shotgun.
8
Jeremy sat in the dark and listened as Mooncricket bumbled his way across the porch and into the house. There came the light honk of a horn then the purr of a well-tuned engine fading away again. Jeremy rubbed his fingers together, grimy from charcoal dust and pastels, while he waited. He had been drawing all night, caught up in the fever that sometimes overtook him. The hours passed and he hadn’t noticed, hadn’t even stopped to get a drink of water. When the fever had at last burnt itself out, it was late and Mooncricket still wasn’t home. Jeremy had dropped him off in town not long after sundown; he should have called a while ago. He’d thought of going into town to look for him, but then his roving eye had landed on an unfinished piece and once more, the fever seized him and he went to get his pen and inks.
Now that the fever was well and truly gone, Jeremy was tired and felt emptied out, like he had poured all of himself onto sheet after sheet of drawing paper. It made him irritable with depression, his fingers itching to draw something, but his mind empty for the moment. It would come back, it always did, but in the meantime he would be lonely without the colors and lines and faces bleeding out of the pages.
“Hello?” Mooncricket called. He was slurring, Jeremy realized. His little Mooncricket was drunk. “Jeremy? You up?”
Barghest lifted his head from Jeremy’s foot at the sound of Mooncricket’s voice, but when Jeremy didn’t move, neither did the dog.
After a time spent in the kitchen rummaging around in the fridge, Mooncricket found his way into the living room. He spent a good couple of minutes feeling for the light switch just inside the doorway, but when he didn’t find it, he gamely carried on, content he knew the house well enough by then. If only he had remembered that the light switch was on the other side of the doorway, he would have seen Jeremy sitting statue-still on the sofa and the drawings scattered all over the living room, left where they had landed when he tore them from his pad and tossed them aside.
But he didn’t and when Jeremy grabbed his wrist in a tight grip, he screamed like he’d been shot.
“Where have you been?” Jeremy asked as he stroked his thumb over the rabbit-fast pulse in Mooncricket’s wrist.
“Out.” Mooncricket’s swallow was audible as he flexed his wrist in Jeremy’s hand, testing the grip. Jeremy curled his fingers a little tighter to let him know he wasn’t going anywhere until Jeremy said so.
“And what did you do while you were out?”
“Had some drinks with a couple of friends,” Mooncricket said.
“Friends. How interesting. Do these friends have names?”
“Tobi
as and Dawn Marie,” Mooncricket said. His voice had the faintest tremor in it. “We just hung out and talked and drank and shit like that. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“I’ve heard of them,” Jeremy said. “The undertaker and the slut.”
“She’s not like that,” Mooncricket said. “Seriously. People say shit that’s not true all the time.”
“That they do,” Jeremy said. He squeezed Mooncricket’s wrist again and kept his grip on it as he stood. “I bet that’s true though.”
“So fuckin’ what if it is?” Mooncricket asked with a defiant tip of his chin.
“So… nothing.” Jeremy’s smile was quick and full of teeth. “Nothing at all. We all get a little slutty sometimes. I think it’s sweet that you’re taking up for your new friend.”
“Jeremy, let me go,” Mooncricket said. “Baby, please.”
There was a flinching in Mooncricket’s entire stance, punctuated by a tiny little tremble to his bottom lip. His pupils had grown large and he was leaning back as far away from Jeremy as he could without putting any strain on his shoulder—yet. He was afraid of Jeremy, it wafted off him like perfume. That fear took away the irritable hollowness inside of him when all the art had run out of his fingers, out of his mind. Already, new pictures had begun to form, but they were blurry, shapeless blobs of light and shadow. They weren’t enough. But Jeremy thought he could fill himself up with Mooncricket; positively gorge on him.
He told himself not to. He called himself a monster for it because it was truly monstrous, breaking a beautiful boy to satisfy his own whims, to silence his never-ending sadness and loneliness. It was not the bodies in the barn—his sacrifices, his necessary offerings—that made him a monster; Jeremy had to do that. With Mooncricket, he could walk away, he could stop. He could take him to bed, shoot him full of pretty poison then do himself. When it was all done, they could fuck like a train wreck in slow motion.
Jeremy saw the instant when Mooncricket realized that he wasn’t going to let him go. He slapped him with his free hand and only when the blow connected did he release Mooncricket’s wrist. The smack of skin on skin was loud, a single premature clap in an empty theatre. Mooncricket stumbled backwards, a tangle of limbs, long braid whipping around like the body of a snake as he hit the floor, hands out to catch himself against the carpet.
Jeremy understood how Mooncricket felt; he had been the one bleeding on the floor before many times. One of those times, his name had been Adama and she had been as beautiful as her name suggested. Dark skin, luminous eyes, white teeth that flashed and winked in the merciless African sun. Then she had married Beluchi, a handsome man with cruel eyes who had frightened her from the first moment she laid eyes on him. At Beluchi’s hands, Adama had not stayed beautiful for long.
Jeremy drew back and kicked Mooncricket in the ribs to hear his breathless, pained cry. Then he knelt and wrapped his long braid around his fist, winding it tighter and tighter until Mooncricket had to stand or have his hair ripped out. Beluchi had often done the same to Adama, punching her around the head and shoulders as he’d dragged her from the floor, crying and begging just as Mooncricket was starting to do. In his head, he heard Adama sobbing in the darkness, listened to the night sounds all around her as she lay in the dirt, the bloody shreds of her three-month fetus oozing out of her. Beluchi did not want children and she feared the day her monthly cycle did not come because though her husband wanted no children, he could not get enough of her.
When he was released, Mooncricket ran straight for the back door and into the night. Jeremy went after him. As he sailed through the night, Adama ran with him, glad for once to be the predator and not the prey. She had killed Beluchi one night with a long, sharp knife that the handle had broken off of many years ago. It was a blade made of bone, but it was hard and it was lethal. She cut herself as well, but did not feel it, only laughed as her husband—her tormentor—fell to his knees in a tangle of his own entrails.
“Free at last, free at last,” Jeremy called through the night. They were his words, but he could have sworn it was her voice.
When he caught Mooncricket, Jeremy took him to the ground with his arms around his waist. Jeremy grabbed him and turned him over to look down into his face.
“Where are you going, my little Mooncricket?” Jeremy asked.
“Please, Jeremy, please just let me go,” Mooncricket said. “We can go inside and talk and I’ll suck you off, baby, you know you like that. Then you can fuck me, huh? We’ll have a party, just you and me. You don’t hafta hurt me none.”
“I know I don’t,” Jeremy said, hands knotting into fists. “I know, I know.”
“Then don’t, okay? Just don’t,” Mooncricket shivered beneath him. “Just lemme up and then we can—”
His voice cut off with a grunt when Jeremy popped him square in the face. Mooncricket thrashed beneath him, got one arm free and covered Jeremy’s face. He shoved him hard and the heel of his hand pressed against Jeremy’s nose at the wrong angle. It didn’t break, but it still made an unhappy sound as the cartilage was mashed and a second later, it began to bleed.
After that, Jeremy really was mad and he didn’t stop until Mooncricket’s face was black with blood. Sometime or other, he had to have gotten away again though be damned if Jeremy could remember that. He was too close to the back of the house though for it to not be true. He was unconscious, left arm twisted at a strange angle that made Jeremy feel a little queasy to look at.
“Oh no, no, no,” Jeremy said.
In his mind, Adama was no longer cheering him on, she was wailing for Mooncricket. Jeremy felt ill, so ill that his stomach heaved and he had to stumble away from Mooncricket’s body so he didn’t vomit on him. Adama had never been cheering him on; that was only the lie he told himself. All of the souls stacked in him like dominoes, some abused and others the abusers, were forever at war. That was what really filled the spaces when the art drained out of him and he had spent his life trying to find ways to breech the flood of memories, names, birthdays. One of those ways, it seemed, was hitting Mooncricket who was sweet and still innocent in a strange way for a boy who had spent so much time with a needle in his arm and homelessness one lost friend away.
All of the black eyes and broken bones, the bruises and lies to cover them up, jeered up from the well inside of Jeremy and Adama cursed and spat at him for the cruel thing he had done.
“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said as he lifted Mooncricket from the ground. He was tall, but thin and light; easy to carry as a sack of feathers. “I’m so sorry. I’ll stop, you hear me? I will.”
Jeremy bundled him into the car and drove away, muttering to Mooncricket to please wake up, to please say something. Halfway to the hospital, he began to stir and by the time Jeremy pulled into the emergency room parking lot, he was awake. He was groggy, but quickly becoming alert, cradling his fractured arm against his chest. He made a soft garbled sound as Jeremy parked the car and hunched in on himself.
It took Jeremy a moment to realize Mooncricket was weeping; raw, soft sounds coming out of his throat. Jeremy’s stomach lurched again and the beaten down souls inside of him rose up in a tornado of pain and misery. How could you? They all wailed at him, beating at the inside of his head. You know, you know and still you hurt.
“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said, laying his hand on the back of Mooncricket’s head. He jerked away from Jeremy with a low sound of fear and Jeremy took his hand away. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’re always sorry,” Mooncricket said around his bubbling sobs. “You always say you’re sorry then you just do it again.”
“I won’t anymore though, I swear,” Jeremy said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“You’re fucked up, Jeremy!” Mooncricket’s yell was loud and sharp in the confined space of the car and Jeremy winced. Mooncricket realized what he had done and he pulled away, pressing himself against the door. “Fucked up,” he said again as though he couldn’t help himself even though he pulled his sh
oulders up and hunched down in the seat, already trying to make a smaller target of himself. That he never stopped and thought of opening the door, getting out and running far, far away from Jeremy said a lot—said too much and none of it good—about the pattern they had already established.
“I know,” Jeremy said. He gripped the steering wheel hard and stared out the windshield at the side of the pharmacy next door to Sparrow Falls Memorial. “You need to see a doctor.”
“Because you broke my arm,” Mooncricket said. He sniffed and flinched again. “And my nose, I think.”
Jeremy could hear the stuffed up, clogged way he was talking; he knew Mooncricket’s nose was broken, but he’d let the doctors tell him that.
“You’re going to tell them you got in a fight,” Jeremy said. “Say some guy jumped you while you were out walking in the park. They’ll believe that.”
“They’d believe you beat the hell out of me, too,” Mooncricket said.
“Yeah, they would,” Jeremy said. They both knew that Mooncricket wouldn’t tell them that though. “Now go on. I’ll wait here for you.”
“You’re not even gonna come with me?”
Jeremy showed him his bloody knuckles, the splits in the flesh and gummy scabs that had yet to fully dry. He gestured at the blood dried on his face from his busted nose.
“I think they’d know you were lying then, huh?” Jeremy asked.
“Shit,” Mooncricket looked away from him, covering his bloody face with his good hand.
“Go on,” Jeremy said again.
Mooncricket didn’t move immediately, but after a couple of minutes he sighed and it was watery and sad as he opened the door to get out. He stood on shaking legs then paused, staring over the roof of the car.
“You know, this was such a good night,” he said in his snot- and blood-clogged voice.
Until I came home to you, went unspoken and inside, Jeremy cringed. He said, “Don’t slam the door.”
Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2) Page 11