It was time to go indoors but everywhere we went seemed to be filled with more people just like us. We finally decided on the sewers underneath the city because there were exhaust vents there that blew out gusts of heat. There was also a labyrinth of tunnels for us to get lost in and do our thing.
It was there, as Mossy cooked and I watched, that I first noticed that he didn’t look so sickly anymore. The sores on his face had all but disappeared. His stick limbs seemed thicker. I didn’t think to question why. I was too eager watching the little bubbles in his spoon.
Mossy sucked up the stuff in his syringe and handed it to me. Immediately I forgot that he started to look healthy—probably even healthier than me. I pulled off one tattered sneaker, a blackened sock, and found a nice place between my toes to prick with pain and pleasure. Then I lay back against the curve of the tunnel we were in and went soaring.
I flew above the city, out beyond the suburbs and over the mountains in the distance. I went even higher still, through the cloudless night, letting starlight bathe me clean. I climbed and I climbed until I was as high as the moon. I saw dragons there, breathing fire, flying in circles.
My soul seemed to separate from my body, but I didn’t care. It was magical.
Then I came home, down, down, down, to earth, and North America—to New England and Massachusetts. To Springfield and to the sewers where Mossy Green and I hid in the shadows and did our thing because nobody noticed and nobody cared.
My eyes fluttered open. Mossy was grinning his Mossy grin. He had placed his syringe on the cool ground between the two of us. His eyes were bright and he seemed happier than I had ever seen him. He was leaning up against the edge of the tunnel like me, but even in the fading dark I could tell that his skeletal frame was no longer skeletal.
He looked cleaner.
He looked healthier.
And he wasn’t alone.
Next to him was a large figure dressed all in black and wearing a hood. Whoever was there with us was so large, in fact, that I didn’t even notice him at first. He was more a part of the wall, or a part of the darkness.
“What . . . what’s going on?” I asked Mossy. The words came out like molasses between lips plastered together with peanut butter.
“I did it,” he giggled at me. “I finally did it.”
I shook my head. My brain sloshed from side to side because I was still hazy and trying to hold on to that wonderful, indescribable feeling of Heaven coursing through my veins and giving me purpose.
And just as that thought went through my mind, there was a leather rustling and the figure in black—the one that was impossibly large—flexed, and huge black wings unfolded from its shoulders.
“I did good. I did,” cried Mossy Green, who didn’t much look like the sickly Mossy Green anymore. He wasn’t talking to me, though. He was talking to the big, black thing.
“Yes,” it said, in a voice so deep and so foul that it didn’t even belong in the sewer that we were sitting in. It belonged someplace darker than that.
“What?” I murmured. I was convinced that it was the drugs talking and not Mossy, or the thing that was down in the dark with us.
Mossy stood and stretched his arms out wide. A haze, putrid and ugly, lifted out of him. It swirled in the air between us then quickly rushed into me. It came through my eyes, my ears, up my nose and in through my mouth. I could feel it twisting and turning inside of me before settling down in slimy curls just like the very first snake, the one that destroyed paradise with an apple. Some part of me even knew it was that very snake, from that tree, from that garden.
Immediately, a sickly, ancient pox popped out on my arms. When I reached up to my face, I could feel cracked lips and sunken, dried skin.
“What’s your name?” the black thing boomed at me.
I didn’t know what to say.
“What’s your name?” It bellowed even louder and all I wanted to do was clap my hands to my ears.
“It’s . . . it’s . . . ,” My eyes caught sight of Mossy’s syringe he had left on the ground between us, but it wasn’t a syringe anymore. It had turned into a bottle of pills—an endless supply that would surely be enough for me and enough for the rest of the world.
Slowly I reached for them and pulled them to my face. Only then did everything become clear. Crystal clear.
“I’m Mossy,” I whispered. “Mossy Green.”
“And so it shall be,” the creature told me, “You are now Mossy Green until you collect six hundred and sixty-six souls for me, just like the Mossy before you and the Mossy before him.”
“But . . . but how?” I stammered. “With what?”
“I used a needle,” said the healthy black boy. “The Mossy before me used drink. You’ll use pills because pills are the new temptation.” And just like that, the creature in black engulfed him in his black wings and faded into the darkness, leaving me alone in the sewers.
“Until next we meet, Mossy Green,” I heard its final words echo in my head. I heard its words, and I knew every syllable to be true. I was the new Mossy Green because the old Mossy Green found a boy named Gil, alone, angry, and unhappy, and murdered him with his needle as a final tribute to Death. He had done it six hundred and sixty-five other times, and I was his last.
Now it was my turn to go out into the world and find others like me, lost and alone.
Afraid.
I would find them, one after the other, hundreds upon hundreds of times, and lead them to their demise with only a grin, and an endless supply of pills.
For now I was Death’s minion.
Me.
Here.
Mossy Green.
Finally, finally happy on the north side of Hell.
H is for Hope
Gone Ice Fishing for Crappie
“YOU GOT FIRE in you,” my father growled at me after we got out on the ice. He was angry. I guess he hoped this day would never come.
You can’t fix stupid.
The frozen lake was quiet in the fading light. The sky burned orange.
His words slapped me in the face. I was both mortified and embarrassed. I had dreaded the change, and for a while, it stayed away, longer than my sister’s and longer than my mother’s when she was young. Christ, I was almost seventeen.
Now I had fire in me and nothing would ever make it not so.
My father and I held our little winter rods as I squatted on the uncomfortable upturned bucket he gave me while he lounged in his fold-up chair. He kept the good fish-finder for himself and gave me the old one. I barely understood how to read the little blips on the screen to tell which ones were the crappies below and which one was my line, but he didn’t care.
Although the temperature was starting to plummet, the cold barely touched me. I wore the lined winter boots my mother found used at Three Pennies over in Apple and the coat that my older sister, Mandy, gave me when it no longer fit her. He was wearing his new, thick overalls and that ridiculous hat that Uncle Richie sent him from Wisconsin—the one with the flaps.
Right now I hated my dad.
There were others ice fishing on the lake. We had all driven our cars onto the frozen water, almost a mile out from shore. I winced every time I heard deep cracking beneath the wheels of my mother’s minivan as I followed my father’s old, red pick-up to his favorite spot. The ice never broke. People just innately knew to stop driving on the lake by the end of February and stop ice fishing all together by the end of March.
I parked the minivan about fifty feet away from his truck.
The closest ice fisher to us was Pastor Roberts. My father didn’t like Pastor Roberts too much because he was a different color than us, even though being Asian seemed like the same color to me. The Pastor was closed up in his portable fishing shack behind a zippered door. My guess is he was drinking brandy in there, or something even harsher that burned its own fire in his gut. Everyone knew Pastor Roberts liked to drink. That didn’t make him a bad Pastor.
That didn’t
make him a bad anything.
“You got fire,” my father hissed again. No one could hear us.
“I guess,” I whispered as I pushed my long, blond hair out of my face. I could feel my cheeks turning cherry.
“What?” he snapped. He was sitting too far away from me to warrant a flinch, but I knew things could change with him in a second.
“Yes,” I whispered a little bit louder. What did he want me to say? Yes, I have fire? I barely wanted to admit it to myself, let alone to him. It was stupid of me to think I could ever dodge the change. My life had been fine. Why was this happening today of all days?
Earlier at school, during lunch period, Parker Thoreson gave me a cigarette and said he wanted to get to know me better. I don’t even smoke. Boys are so dumb. I don’t know why he couldn’t just ask me out like a normal person. I guess he was probably afraid of my dad because everyone was, but Parker was tall and broad. What did he have to be afraid of?
So I took the cigarette and told him if he wanted to get to know me better then he should ask me to the junior-senior Winterfest dance. He smiled and said maybe then disappeared into the cafeteria sea. After school, I went out behind my parents’ barn, put the cigarette between my lips, and lighted it with the tip of my finger like the fire had always been there and was just waiting for that cigarette to kindle it into life.
I was shocked, amazed, and afraid all at once. I had fire. The change had happened.
Fire.
Unfortunately, I didn’t even have a chance to take a drag on the cigarette before I realized I wasn’t alone. My father had been watching me from the corner of the barn.
He was pissed.
“Put that cancer stick out, witch,” he snarled at me. “We’re going out to the lake now. Get your mother’s car keys and follow me.”
Now, an hour later, it seemed childhood had finally closed on my life.
“It just happened,” I squeaked. “I would have told you.”
“Don’t lie to me,” he growled. “You’re almost seventeen. Do you take me for a fool? How long has that fire been burning?”
“It hasn’t,” I cried. “Honest. It just started today.” Oh, why couldn’t I be having this conversation with my mother instead of my father? Why here? Why now?
“Don’t try to keep secrets from me, girl.”
“I’m not. Can we not talk about this?” I can’t even believe I had the courage to ask my father that. Children in our household were meant to be seen and not heard. Children in our household never questioned why. Children in our household just did what their parents told them to do, no matter what.
Once again I wished I was having this incredibly awkward conversation with my mother instead of how it turned out. Nobody wants to talk about this sort of personal stuff. So what if I had fire? No one needed to know. It wasn’t a big deal.
I guess to my father it was.
“So now you think you’re better than me, don’t you?” he muttered as he pulled up a puny crappie, rudely yanked the hook from its upper lip and threw it on the ice. The fish flipped over once or twice than lay still. What an awful way to die, wet and frozen.
I tried my best to change the subject. “Winterfest is next weekend,” I told him. “I think I need a new dress.” We lived far up in the hill towns, almost to Florida—not the state, but the dinky little nothing of a place at the top of the Mohawk Trail. I don’t know why it was named Florida. It seemed like a cruel joke.
“Witches don’t go to Winterfest,” he snapped.
I wasn’t a witch. Something icy gripped my insides. In retrospect it was probably hormones mixed with embarrassment at getting snagged because of the fire, and maybe just a hint of defiance. After all, I was of age.
“This one is,” I grumbled, barely loud enough for anyone to hear.
Something frightening flashed across my father’s face and I immediately turned away from him and stared at the black hole in the ice.
He picked up his Styrofoam can holder and took a big swig. I hated when my father drank. I hated it even worse when he was drunk. Beer only fueled his anger, and he almost always felt sorry for it the next day.
Bruises and dislocated shoulders don’t know a wit about being sorry.
Besides, having fire wasn’t any sort of witchcraft, just like being able to slide a dish across our kitchen table without so much as blinking wasn’t witchcraft to my mother, or Mandy being able to hear other people’s thoughts.
We were just special like loads of people on my mother’s side of the family. Auntie Myrna read tarot cards. Uncle Eddie knew what was going to happen before it happened. My cousin, Charlotte, talked to dead people.
We weren’t witches.
Off in the distance, Pastor Roberts unzipped his portable, stumbled out, peed against the nylon wall like we weren’t sitting near him on the lake, then fumbled with his kerosene heater. My father and I both watched him. I was thankful for the distraction. My father took another swig of beer and shook his head.
“You ain’t going to no dance,” he said to me.
I stared at my hole in the ice, not even caring that I could see the tip of my rod dip a little because a crappie was probably nibbling at bait on the other end of the line.
“Yes I am.” I said. I didn’t raise my eyes to look at him. I just said it, and that was all.
He was so quick. One moment my father was sitting in his chair, the next he was looming over me and I fell off the bucket I was sitting on. He reached down and grabbed my coat and hauled me to my feet, shoving his face right into mine. His cheeks were covered with graying stubble and his breath smelled something awful.
“Listen, witch. I’ll see you burn before you step one foot into that dance. I run this house, not you. I make the rules, not you. I HAVE THE POWER. NOT YOU.”
And there is was. My impotent father who married into our family without a single special gift was useless. The mere fact that he had to claim power when he had none, spoke volumes.
“Get your drunken hands off of me,” I seethed, and steam began to rise off of his gloves. For a moment, I actually thought his hands might burst into flames, but I wasn’t like that. Everyone knew never to abuse their gifts. That’s why they’re called gifts instead of curses. Our gifts were private and intimate—not something to use like some crazy kid in a horror movie.
He let go of me, pushing me back and staring at his steaming gloves. He had a crazy look in his eyes like maybe he suddenly realized that he just played with something that might actually get him burned.
“Everything alright over there?” I heard Pastor Roberts say. It was almost dark and some of the other ice fishers on the lake had packed up their cars and were driving toward shore.
“Yes . . . yes,” I said quickly, trying to kick ash on top of a combustible situation. My father, however, had beer in his belly and an ignited temper.
“Mind your own business,” he snapped at the round, Asian man, who had come into town just three years ago and taken charge of our church.
Pastor Roberts, drunk in his own right, took a step back and shook his head. He was probably thinking that he heard my father wrong. After all, who talks to a pastor like that?
I quickly rushed over to the Pastor and took his arm. “My father’s not feeling well tonight,” I heard myself say. “Why don’t you go back to your portable? I see you got your kerosene heater going. I bet it’s really warm inside.”
“You’re a good girl, Hope,” Pastor Roberts said to me. “Such a good girl.” He let me turn him around and sort of guide him part way across the ice toward his set-up. Meanwhile, I could feel my father boiling at my back, but I didn’t care anymore.
I didn’t care at all.
I let the pastor go and watched as he stumbled off to his portable, then turned and faced my father. “I’m going to that dance.” I told him. “You can’t stop me.”
“You’re a witch,” he growled. “You’re nothing but a goddamned witch.”
The words glanced o
ff my cheeks and this time I did wince. That hateful, five-letter word was loathsome and foul. My father was loathsome and foul. At that moment I hated him more than I ever hated anyone or anything in my life.
As I stared at him with daggers in my eyes, I saw his face start to glow, then get brighter and brighter and I heard something. I thought it was the wind, but there wasn’t any wind on the lake. It was a scream—a gut wrenching, terrifying scream.
My father’s mouth dropped open. His face was bathed in firelight. Quickly I turned around and saw the worst thing imaginable. Drunk Pastor Roberts had tripped over his kerosene lantern and had fallen into his portable. A huge plume of fire billowed up off the lake and all I could here were screams as the pastor burned, melted plastic sticking to his skin, roasting him alive.
“You did this,” my father screamed, his arm stretched out and his finger pointing at me. “You did this, you witch. You and the fire inside of you. You’re damned to Hell for all eternity.”
Frankly, I barely even registered his words. Pastor Roberts was burning alive and someone had to go get help. My father was clearly drunk and filled with rage, and no one else was near. I reached inside my coat for the car keys and ran for my mother’s minivan. I’m not sure I even knew what I was doing. All I knew was that I had to save Pastor Roberts, even though the rational part of my brain realized he was probably already dead.
I fell once on the ice before I got to the door, but quickly got up, reached for the handle and scrambled inside. I shoved the keys in the ignition and roared my mother’s minivan to life.
Only then did I notice a flyer for WinterFest that I left on my mother’s passenger seat.
Parker Thoreson gave me a cigarette.
He said he wanted to get to know me better.
I was going to get a new dress.
Without even thinking, as the glow of the horrible fire bloomed in my rear view mirror, I threw the car in reverse and pressed my foot to the floor. The last thing I thought as I simultaneously heard the cracks of the ice beneath me and the loud thud as I struck my father and sent him sailing into the air, was that now there were two deaths on the ice. Not one, but two.
Little Killer A to Z Page 6