The Dampness Of Mourning

by Lee Thompson

  Jesus Christ, I thought. Get a grip.

  I summoned as much hate as I could to squash the fear, to kill the chill of spray misting from the falls. Anger warmed me but I doubted it’d be enough. I had little energy. Not enough to fight eight men. I doubted I had the strength or skill to even fight Lucas. I wished Mike was there. He’d tear through them with the ferocity of a fallen angel. I called for him in my mind, knowing how stupid it was, how hopeless. He was probably in the manor, lost in his thoughts, his fingers tracing his family’s history, its fortune and secrets.

  Something hard brushed my shoulders and I jumped but the sisters shushed me and led me back around the lip of the pool, to the place where a ledge ran behind the falls. All three nodded, urged me forward with their hands, their faces pale and thin. Following the ledge behind the falls, my hands on the wet rock for balance, I thought they were probably imaginary—some primal reflex that had heard of a cave behind the falls, suddenly recalled; a desire for companionship and warm flesh, or maybe just sanity.

  Inside the cave it was warm and a soft fire glowed, beds thick with rose petals surrounding it, and I wanted to weep because I knew none of it was real. I could die out here, for the others had to know about this place and now I was trapped. But the women touched my chest and they eased me back by the fire and I felt its heat warming my skin, watched the way their hair left wet trails behind as they looked from me to the entrance.

  They surrounded me with the heady aroma of sweat and damp skin, and a part of me wished this was the way I would die, in the arms of three naked women.

  They giggled as they pushed me onto a bear skin and even as it excited me, it terrified me. This was a moment any man should love, a fantasy, but my libido wasn’t cooperating. I mumbled something unintelligible—the garbling of an idiot—trying to keep my voice down in case the cult was close by.

  The women lowered themselves to hands and knees.

  The one on the left held out her fist and uncurled her fingers, revealing a spool of crimson thread on her palm. The one in the middle did the same and revealed a decayed wisdom tooth. The sister on the right smiled and showed me a small mound of sand. I looked from one to the next, wondering what it was they were trying to show me, or give me, until the one in the middle and the one on the left stood. The remaining sister inhaled a deep breath and blew the sand in my face.

  I thought I heard myself screaming—though it could have been Tripper, or the ghosts outside—and I remembered when I was a boy, when I’d climb to the tops of trees and let go, trusting I could catch a branch before I hit the ground, and it was exhilarating like that, but it was also peaceful, my skin numb as I sank deep into sleep.

  And that terrified me most of all.

  * * *

  I stand by a lake I’ve never visited in my life.

  The water ripples.

  Moonlight teems.

  Wind whispers across my clothing.

  To my left, from within dark woods, someone coughs and sticks break. Mike crawls from a hole in the ground. He is fit and healthy-looking, but filthy, and something is wrong with his eyes. As he moves closer, his hands clawing at the air, I see that his eyelids are sewn shut. He screams, veins pressing at the skin of his throat, but no sound bursts from his mouth.

  He stops in front of me. His pulse taps at his neck. The beach stretches off into the darkness, but three shapes kneel close to the water’s edge. One of the sisters holds a needle and thread. She stitches a rip where the lake meets the sand. The other two watch her.

  Mike collapses in my arms, and I barely catch him, a sharp pain flaring up my spine as his dead weight nearly knocks me over. I lay him on the beach, push on his chest, and blood bubbles from his mouth. Wylie Wright appears next to us and I want to yell to him, Get some help! But I can’t speak. My mouth won’t work because beyond him, beyond the sisters, I see a giant peeking over the mountain, its face pure light like the face of God.

  I weep. Mike trembles beneath my hands and hisses. I look down and jerk back from a pile of snakes slithering over each other, their heads burrowing in the sand, tails whipping.

  Wylie whispers, We’re in way over our heads.

  The sisters stand and their shadows stretch toward us, their arms extended.

  The god rises to full height. Its body is water and wind, sun and night. The elements are stitched in place, showing scenes from my childhood, that first kiss when I was a teen, the darkness that had come only months ago when Proserpine held my face to her body and nearly suffocated me behind the police station. I step back. Wylie is coiled tight, his muscles bulging, and I wonder if he misses working in the woods, or if he is happy working the job of the man he killed. I taste our secrets like honey one moment, like vinegar the next, they cling to my tongue and I cough and it echoes off the trees and lake.

  The god touches the sisters even as their shadows grab my ankles and jerk my feet from beneath me and the world fills with the sound of suckling.

  * * *

  I woke to a sloppy wet sound. Felt pressure on the tip of my penis, waves of pleasure cascading up my back and down my chest. I groaned and looked down, expecting to see April there, her hands wrapped around me, that glint in her eye when I’d wake to her giving me head by the light of the moon with all of Division quiet and still around us. But looking down I saw a young naked girl, one whose chest was barely blossoming, and my heart slammed. I thought God’s Lost Children had found me. That this was the way they’d want to wake me up before they tortured and sacrificed me to the darkness they worshipped. I kicked her back, screamed as her teeth scraped me and she tumbled over. The falls roared and the cavern dimmed, the soft pulse of red coals glowing. The sister with the tooth stood from where the young girl had fallen. I thought, They’re only trying to shame me. To destroy me. They’re no different than the others. Death wore two faces like a harlequin. Without moving her mouth the sister whispered, You don’t want me to please you?

  My clothes lay in a pile against the wall. I covered myself, blushing as I gathered them and pulled them on quickly. I wondered where her sisters were hiding, uncertain if I’d been caught in the spider web of nightmare or if I was still struggling to find my bearings in a harsh new reality. And I remembered what Uncle Red had said months ago, how nothing would ever be the same once my eyes were opened. You can’t unlearn things. You never forget what’s scarred you.

  I swallowed, my throat dry and skin clammy. The sister took a bowl to the falls and returned a moment later, offering fresh water. I took it and drank greedily and it hurt my stomach.

  I said, “Who are you?”

  She smiled and the cavern grew warmer. A trick of mind, yet convincing in my weakened state. I said, “Are you one of them? One of the invisible?” With visions of Proserpine’s nude form dancing through my head, seeing her play among the trees, remembering her strength as she’d nearly broken my nose while pressing it to her cleft. The sister studied me a moment, comfortable with the power she held. Nothing frustrated me more than not having the truth and I wanted to grab the club from the wall where one of them had rested it and bash her skull to mush. She licked her lips, ran her hands down her thighs and sauntered off into the thick shadows around the entrance. She disappeared—I knew things like that were supposed to be impossible, but it happened right in front of me. I swallowed again.

  I grabbed the club and left the cave. Stars burned bright. The mist rising from the falls clung to my face and hands. I stood listening for any sign of a threat, expecting the sisters to stop me, molest me, tell me that I owed them my soul because they’d saved my life from Abraham Nutley.

  But I was alone and surprised by the loneliness I felt. It sat heavy on my heart, made my limbs stiff and inflexible. It was the first time I really had trouble separating the two. But April was on my thoughts—I felt her flesh beneath my fingertips, the tickle of her eyelashes brushing my neck.

  FOUR

  Sometimes, when I was a boy, I’d sneak out my bedroom window to
walk the woods because the fresh air was nice when I couldn’t sleep and the stars seemed closer when you knew few other people were looking at them. I’d traverse the rough edge of the Loyal Sock River, follow its twists and turns, never realizing how they would later mirror my life. Sometimes things go in unexpected directions. Sometimes the current grabs us and all we can do is try to keep our heads above water. I’d pause during my nightly travels then because I knew that I wasn’t alone. I could feel something else out there late at night and knew it was watching me.

  The same feeling fell over me outside the cave. A malignant premonition that raised gooseflesh upon my arms and back as I stood with the woods only thirty yards south and the hills rising in the north. Something crept through the darkness. It quieted night birds, other predators, made prey raise their heads to watch its passing. I gripped the club tighter, thinking that gods sometimes walk among us. Only time would tell how they chose to reveal their faces.

  Ghosts gathered behind me and peered over my shoulder. My heart broke for the kids at Nutley’s compound, and rage warmed my chest as I searched for the answer to how many kids were starved and beaten and murdered in the name of love and obedience. How many were unloved in life and forgotten quickly in death?

  The forest sighed.

  The darkness beneath the trees thickened.

  I knew Lucas was out there. He was toying with me. The others might need rest but not him.

  I stepped away from the rock wall and glanced over my shoulder at a dim path running up the hill to the north. If I followed it I’d hit Cold Run Road. It wasn’t far from the falls. I’d get on the phone and I’d have the police here in less than an hour. I breathed through my nose, directing my attention, attuning it to the sounds around me, the scents, the way a hunter must. I crept through the woods as soundlessly as possible, hating how long it took, being because I was a bit of a goon and so used to thrashing into things blindly.

  I found my Jeep where I’d left it. The tires weren’t slashed like I’d expected, but I approached it cautiously, thinking about poison spiders and snakes left under the seat. I wished I had a flashlight in the glove box—I’m sure some people carry them in case they blow a tire late at night or something, but I’ve always been a bit lax, maybe even enjoying the challenge of things gone wrong and the uncertainty of limited resources.

  Tripper’s Pathfinder wasn’t in the woods where he’d left it. I might have been in the cave longer than a day. I shivered at the sweat cooling on my back, and at the thought that the cops may have already come looking for us. And what would they find? I doubted there was even anything left of Tripper or the boy they’d tied to the totem. I pulled my cell from my pocket. As long as it still held a charge I could use the light it cast to search the floorboard, check beneath the seat, check the back. The screen showed I had a few bars on battery and one on signal.

  Thank God, I thought. I scrolled through my contacts until I found Duncan’s number and hit send.

  Duncan answered. He said, “Christ, McDonnell. I thought something had happened to you. Where—”

  “Something did happen. Listen to me, okay,” I whispered, hoping that Lucas was hanging back, just keeping an eye on me for now, so confident I wasn’t going anywhere. “I’m out on Cold Run Road. I need you to get out here as quickly as possible. Bring other state police with you. This is bad.”

  Doug grunted, still sounding half asleep.

  Something fell and hit the ground not far from the road. I jerked my gaze in that direction, and looked over the hood of the Jeep. The forest’s darkness was too deep to penetrate. I smelled oil and sweat and at first it confused me after being among God’s Lost Children and privy to the secret knowledge contained in caves long forgotten. I thought, Christ, a day in the woods, away from anything mechanical and coming back to it shocks me.

  Brush gave way and snapped back into place with the sound of someone’s passing.

  I said, “I’ll leave the Jeep’s headlights on. Hurry up.” I closed the cell and slid it into my pocket. My shoulders ached under the weight of the club. I felt like I stood there for hours as I waited for a blur to fill my vision, to taste blood on my lips, the satisfaction of facing Lucas and seeing him at my feet, groveling, ready to spill his guts to Duncan and the other state troopers even if he had to do it in a notepad because he was a mute.

  But the moment didn’t come and the minutes hitched by as I grew more exhausted until lights filled the road. I’d forgotten to turn on the Jeep’s to mark my place, but the cops saw me and eased over to what little shoulder there was. Doug was in the lead car. He huffed as he marched and I wanted to hug him and tell him that Tripper was gone and even if I didn’t know him, it was a shame. Tears burned my eyes. Doug stopped in front of me, his face lined, headlights at his back. He said, “What the hell happened?”

  I didn’t know where to start. I thought it’d be easy to explain. All I could say was, “Murder. Have your men grab their Maglites. We have to hurry.”

  He gripped my shoulder before I had a chance to step into the woods and find the original trail I’d traveled with Tripper and Lucas. Doug said, “What’s going on, John? Is this like that other thing?”

  I nodded.

  Yes, I thought. It’s like Proserpine and her brother. It’s life and death and the gray murk between.

  I said, “Tripper was investigating them, building a case, because the adults out here may have been torturing the children, though they blamed the kids and the kids won’t talk or rat each other out.”

  I watched sorrow play across his face, swim in his eyes, imagined him stepping into the woods again, every time he came out here, and feeling his daughter’s severed limbs in his hands, the near weightlessness of them, as he tried to piece her back together.

  He said, “They hurt their kids?”

  I nodded, said, “And worse. They murdered Tripper right in front of me. If we wait until daylight they could be long gone.”

  He nodded, his face growing grim. He said, “I should call this in.” He did and let the state police post dispatchers know what they were dealing with. They gave him the green light to move forward.

  Duncan’s men didn’t like me, or maybe it went against their natures and training to follow, but they respected and obeyed him when he said to listen to me. Flashlight beams cut through the foliage. Duncan gave me a pump action 12-gauge even though his eyes said, We both know guns are useless against shadows…

  He was right, but men were involved here too. They’d talk or they’d bleed.

  The other two cops kept asking questions, wanting to know what the objective was, but Duncan shushed them and told them to keep their eyes and ears open. Exhaustion came and went as shots of adrenaline pumped, making my limbs feel like bowling pins as we neared the last ridge. I hadn’t seen any sign of Lucas, but I didn’t expect to.

  Sweat glistened on darkened faces when we stopped at the steps carved into the hill leading down to the compound. Candles flickered behind grimy windows, but there was no one outside roaming the grounds. It hurt to swallow. Hurt to walk down the stone stairway with the wind whispering through the saw grass, bending it like a thousand arrows directed at the makeshift hovels. We crossed the field, clutching our weapons, and I wondered if Duncan and the others sensed the evil here. We stopped at the corner of the nearest building. Doug whispered, his breath hot on my face, “What are we up against? What’s your plan?”

  He placed a lot of trust and faith in me. I whispered, “They’re murderers, all of them. We’ll have these two watch our backs and stay outside but we’ll have to go inside and bring everyone out of each house.” I looked them all in the eye in turn and said, “Keep watch for a young blonde guy carrying a machete.”

  The wind sighed.

  The ground trembles in anticipation for blood...

  They all nodded. His men were big and strong. They held guns. They could easily underestimate Lucas. Or even the women.

  Everything seemed so peaceful. Du
ncan followed me around the corner of the building, both of us raising our weapons, headed for the door, gazes flicking left and right. My gut knotted as I eased up the steps.

  I thought, They’re not going to be inside. They were never here. I imagined it all. And it hurt to think like that because April had once thought I was crazy, right there near the end, before my uncle showed her the magic he possessed and she killed a man before succumbing to the weight of her guilt.

  I grabbed the knob and twisted it slowly, holding the shotgun tight to my chest.

  I thought, They’re waiting in the dark. They’ve already got us surrounded and they still have my pistol.

  Duncan’s breath grew ragged and I feared the old man was going to have a heart attack as I pushed the door in with the muzzle of the shotgun and he shined the flashlight past me and swept it about the room. There were twelve beds along the far wall. They were all sleeping. If we fought like them we could kill them in their sleep. The thought kept trying to gain traction and I shook my head to clear it, thinking about how easy it was to become something you hated even if you brandished your own motives pure.

  Doug whispered, “What now?” I saw his point, we wouldn’t be able to wake them all up and get them outside without them warning the followers in the other buildings.

  I shook my head. I didn’t have a clue how to go about it.

  Story of my life, I thought.

  I stumbled blindly into everything and learned as I went, and there were scars I wouldn’t have had if I’d been a smarter man. We should have waited until daylight.

  The candles went out. Bedsprings squeaked as women and men and children shifted their weight, attuned even while lost in dreams. I tried to put them in a box, something I hated when people did it to me or someone I loved, and I thought, They’re not really people. They serve dark things. They killed Tripper and the boy on the totem.