The Dampness Of Mourning

by Lee Thompson

  He said, “What the hell happened?”

  “She was there when I woke up. They left her on the front steps.”

  “So, they’re still around,” he said. “That’s good.” He looked like he might pull his pistol and start shooting at shadows, but he kept a tight rein on his fear, suppressed it with anger. David watched us from the field. I said, “Me and Mike aren’t going to do any good here.”

  McCoy nodded. “Are they operating on her now?”

  I nodded.

  He said, “Soon as she comes out I’ll give you a call.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You two going into the woods today?”

  I looked at Mike, then turned back to the old state trooper. “I’m going to find him.”

  “Good,” McCoy said. “If his beef is with you he won’t hide.” He glanced at the Emergency Room doors. “When he shows himself, rip his fucking heart out.”

  When McCoy walked into Our Lady, Mike said, “Let’s go visit this kid.”

  “His mother isn’t my biggest fan.”

  “Fuck her. This is bigger than any of us.”

  “He’s autistic or something. He can’t really communicate from what I gathered.”

  Mike shrugged and turned toward his Jag. “You’re not surprised by that out there, right? So he’s been communicating with you for a while now, hasn’t he?”

  I followed him back to the Jag, thinking, But I have no idea what he’s trying to tell me.

  Mike said, “I think shit is about to get crazy.”

  I smiled, thought, We can deal with crazy, can’t we?

  He smiled back as I stole one last look at the hospital’s doors and felt the cool black coil inside winding tighter.

  * * *

  Pig stood slightly behind Red, both of them staring at the sky as they stood on top of the hardware store. He said, “You’ve done the right thing.”

  Red’s eyes misted. “I hope so. The visions will come soon.”

  Pig moved to his side, such a little boy, but he placed a hand on Red’s shoulder and said, “This is the way it has to be.”

  “And now?”

  “And now we find Boom Stick.”

  “I can’t drive. I was going to call someone but…”

  Pig laughed, said, “There’s no one to call. All these years and you never outgrew being a dweeb.”

  Red elbowed him gently, warmth spreading through his chest. “I’ve missed you.”

  “I’m back, baby,” Pig kidded. He looked at the sky again. “You know,” he said, “you could always fly there. Take your gloves off, bend the laws to suit you. Make a cloak of midnight wind, a howling maelstrom that would frighten the devil.”

  Red thought of Amy’s sweet face from all those years ago, so grown up, yet so young, so much ahead of her that had been robbed because he’d grown proud, he’d been overconfident and as a result she died in Boom Stick’s arms.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’d like to, but I just can’t.”

  I’ve been humbled. I’ve been shown my place.

  The sisters slid around them, their eyes taking in the town below and finally settling on the Johnston Manor on the hill northwest of town. They said as one, “Into the trenches, where the blood flows. Death in all His splendor nears.”

  Red closed his eyes and shook his head, whispered, “I can’t.”

  The sisters touched him, one pressing fingertips to his forehead, while the others gripped his shoulders, and they kissed him, then threw him off the roof.

  SIXTEEN

  Mike hummed along to a Johnny Lang song as we cruised east toward LaPorte, but I could tell his mind was working over how David tied in, and he was preparing himself for whatever waited, for what we’d uncover. Or maybe he just flowed like water, ready to change course around debris, never thinking about more than what stood in his way at this moment. I didn’t want to ask him, so I kept my mouth shut and leaned my head against the headrest. My stomach hurt. Kim’s blood still coated my clothes, had dried upon my palms and they itched, and I thought I was going to look pretty damn horrible to David’s mom when we knocked on her door and I asked to speak to her son. I wanted to go home and change out of my pajama pants but Mike had said there wasn’t time.

  We whipped by woods.

  Sunlight glared from road signs.

  My hands itched and my mouth felt stuffed with cotton.

  I thought I was going to be sick, have to ask Mike to pull to the shoulder, but something else was happening, I realized, something deep inside. I glanced in the back seat, expecting to see Nutley and Lucas there, the machete driven through the driver’s seat and jutting from Mike’s chest. I blinked and wiped my eyes to clear my vision.

  The sisters whisper, Listen. Learn. Become. Know.

  I stared through eyes not my own and they possessed memories full of blood.

  Light explodes in my head, shoots from my eyes and I blink against sudden pain, thinking I should wake up because I’m extremely vulnerable, thinking that maybe it was already too late and this was my mind’s way of dealing with Nutley taking corkscrews to my temples and opening me up to drink deeply.

  I listen and flinch as teens laugh. I’m a teen too, and a mediocre drummer in a band with my best friend Lucas and a wire-thin shithead named Jesse Wietzel, a kid who buys second hand clothes as a statement and who sings in a nasally manner, his voice thin and lacking power. We call ourselves Acid Reflux, which fits our music, and if it wasn’t for the reward that comes with girls too drunk to know better, or girls who don’t care, or girls who only see bright lights and think there might be something in it for them, I’d never enjoy myself. I’ve almost fooled myself into believing this existence has some kind of meaning.

  Most times at gigs I keep a simple beat because anything complex is beyond my ability and I love the power in a rat-a-tat-tat march beat. I want to be someone special, to have someone adore me, but I am far from skilled and don’t stand out from any other musician with a thimble full of talent. I’d learned that early on. So I took to daydreaming while we rehearsed, and later at gigs in dive bars on the outskirts of towns long gone to seed, all of us high as kites and thick in the middle of what we called a revolution. We were going to make shitty music popular. Lucas said Punk music already did that.

  I hear my mother speak. She whispers in a sultry voice, “Attend my needs…”

  I have a hard-on. Jesse sings a fast version of a Hank Williams song, not even coming close to an ounce of the sorrow the old country singer had, because Jesse hasn’t lived it, he hasn’t lived shit, he doesn’t know pain.

  Not yet, I think. And I realize then that I hate him, not just because Jesse thinks he has talent, but because he thinks he has everything else too.

  Later that night, all of us stand by the lake with some stoner girls dressed in black fishnet and I say, “You guys want to see something cool?”

  Jesse offers a smirk that says, Like you have any fucking idea what cool is…

  And I pull the boot knife I’ve stolen from the general store in town and laugh as I drive the blade into Jesse’s chest. The other kids gasp. Jesse laughs for a second like he thinks it’s some cheap parlor trick, some crappy sleight of hand I pulled off, maybe a little bit of pride in his eyes because this time the trick looks so real, until blood coats his lips and I jerk the blade from Jesse’s chest and touch the tip of the blade against the crown of his head.

  I say, quite loudly, thinking all the world should hear, “I dub you Sir Nobody.”

  Jesse squeals, tries jamming his finger into the hole in his breastbone but the hole is too narrow.

  Lucas moves toward him and I raise a hand and say, “Don’t.”

  Lucas stops, his face pale and drawn.

  The girls huddle together as if planning their next move, both of them squeaking like mice. I approach them and they stumble back, trapped between the car and water. I ask the fat girl to dance because this is a night for dancing but she shakes her head, and I say, “
What the fuck? You’re fat and I’m doing you a favor, you dumb bitch.” I kick her in the knee and she falls but I grab a handful of her hair and jerk her to her feet, a vision of dancing with corpses beneath a full moon playing through my head and I think, I’m losing it. Really fucking losing it here. But I can’t stop, find part of me doesn’t want to stop, because I’ve never felt so much freedom, never felt so important. Something inside me is sick of the bullshit, of strutting people, the angles they pulled, the raising of their goddamn noses.

  I say, “Okay, you’re too good for me, right? So it’s okay to rub my nose in it?” and I am speaking to the fat, trembling girl, and her friend, and Jesse who stumbles around looking for help and still none of them hear me.

  I pull the stoner bitch over to the hood of the car and whisper, “All I ever wanted was to get to know you, and have you be curious about me, right? I might be nice, I might be the best thing for you, but you ruined it,” then I jab the blade in her forehead and her friend screams. The blade comes out of her skull with a sickening pop and some weird vibration is working its way up my throat until I burst out laughing because I’d never have guessed, not in a million years, how easy this is.

  Jesse hits the ground before he ever reaches Lucas. A pool spreads beneath him and the moon’s reflection stamps a portrait in cooling blood.

  I turn to the other girl.

  I say, “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

  She shakes her head and turns to run. Lucas grabs a rock and looks as if he might actually chuck it, bounce the stone off the back of her head, but he doesn’t have to because I say, “If you run I’ll have to chase you.”

  The girl stops before she even gets started, and it teaches me something.

  I tell Lucas, “People quit too easily.”

  I grab the little crying bitch and pull her to the lake’s edge and hold her head under water and let her thrash against me until she stills. Then I pull her clothes off and Lucas watches, his pulse crackling the skin against his neck, his eyes lit by moonlight. I follow my heart, letting inspiration take me, and play a lousy drumbeat on the dead girl’s bare ass.

  I smile at Lucas. “What do you think?”

  Lucas smiles nervously. “It has something.”

  “You going to tell anyone?”

  “No.” He shakes his head, says no again. He has a hard-on straining his pants. He keeps staring at the girl’s ass.

  I say, “There are a lot of new rhythms I could play on a set like this.”

  And inside I feel wound too tight, and so loose at the same time.

  * * *

  Mike parked in David’s driveway. I didn’t remember telling him how to get there. He stared at the Sholes’ house and said, “It’s funny how we can think our families are the only messed up ones and that perfect ones exist.”

  I broke out in a cold sweat. His voice was there, but growing farther away by the second.

  * * *

  My family always reminds me of living in a bomb shelter, my father hunched over the kitchen table, hands wrapped around his coffee mug, shoulders hunched; my mother always staring at the ceiling as if she expects German mortar rounds to pierce our dirty little house and ruin the meatloaf. She sighs a lot. I hate that, and by the way my father always tenses further, though he says nothing, it seems he does as well.

  We have no religion, no tradition to bind us, no common ground. I watch other kids at school talk about picnics, about go-carts, about dressing in stuffy black suits to sweat out sermons, and though the kids were laughing or looking disgusted depending on what they talked about, I felt nothing, could barely imagine my family doing anything. My dad was laid off, and when he went back to work he hurt his back and drew a measly wage that amounted to little more than a steadily climbing debt, while my mother, as beautiful as most movie stars to me, yet paler, and somehow more real, and unafraid of her blemishes, worked on painting dark canvases that usually had a lot of red in them that reminded me of blood. I liked to sit and watch her. I’d hide in the closet, and mesmerized, whisper to myself excitedly, I want to do something like that, as her brush flicked and stabbed and images of fallen angels took shape over quiet, ignorant towns full of frail, gray people.

  She whispered to herself too, words I didn’t understand—Spanish maybe, or French—that sounded exciting to my young ears, and moved me in ways I didn’t understand until I figured out she was praying to something. Or pleading. Or both.

  I often wondered what she saw in my father.

  I wondered why she didn’t love either of us and barely loved herself.

  I wondered if everyone felt that way and if so, how to fix it.

  How to fix it, I thought. How to fix it. Words I’d found great meaning in, hope, and when Sonnelion came to me in a dream she’d whispered answers, her hands stroking my cheeks, eyes so close to mine that I had to restrain from closing those few inches and kissing her. But I was scared of frightening her away, or making her angry, and at first, when I’d had my band and she’d begun to whisper, I thought of her merely as my muse, then later, as meaning.

  Mike said, “What’s wrong?”

  My vision cleared slowly as if a heavy fog had lifted and sunlight cut gashes into the curtain between past and present. I shook my head. “I think Nutley is trying to show me something about himself.”

  Mike said, “Focus on what you know. We can’t let him hypnotize us.”

  I nodded and stepped from the car. The gravel in the driveway cast a coldness that numbed my feet. I stared at the window, saw David inside, peeking around the curtain. I said, “That’s the kid.”

  Mike moved around the front of the Jag. I followed him, wondering what I was supposed to say to the boy’s mom. We rang the doorbell and the door creaked open but there was no one there. Mike stepped back, his gaze jumping to the window, and I didn’t have a chance to move before the heat hit me full in the face. I stumbled back, blinded, blinking tears from my eyes. Mike cocked a pistol. A woman screamed. David made little noises like a wounded bird.

  I wiped my eyes and a dark haze enveloped the house and shadows moved in the doorway. Mike said, “They’re here,” and I thought of some old movie, and my head hurt, knuckles aching from holding the pistol so tightly. I didn’t remember pulling it. I said something but it sounded garbled, foreign. Nutley pushed the mother down the steps and she fell. She tried to rise, one moment alone and helpless, the next with Lucas at her side. He placed the machete against the side of her pale neck. Nutley led David outside, his hands placed on the boy’s tense shoulders.

  I said, “Let them go.”

  Nutley frowned. He said, “You came upon me unexpectedly. I was in the middle of a ritual.”

  “What ritual?”

  “Does it matter?” he asked. “All rituals serve the same purpose, to prepare the heart, the soul and spirit for what’s to come.”

  “And what do you think is coming?”

  He glanced down at David. He said, “Hell, kid. Glory. Beauty and madness.” He looked up and met my eyes. “I’m just shitting you. The only thing I care about is doing what you’ve done. I want something greater than this. Remember when you were little and life had magic? There was meaning in everything, and joy, so many things.” He shook his head and squeezed David’s shoulders, his knuckles turning white. David cried out and his mom followed suit, and Lucas just watched us all, his hand steady.

  I could have told Nutley that I hadn’t done anything, not a goddamn thing, nothing that mattered, I’ve experienced nothing greater, but that’d be a lie. I’d known love and betrayal and touched a bit of the unseen. But it wasn’t great. There was nothing even remotely wondrous about it.

  He said, “You surprised me in the forest. I wasn’t prepared. I was searching for you, though I didn’t know who you were, and then there you are and they all felt it and I couldn’t contain them.”

  “Where is Doug?”

  He smirked. “In a safe place.”

  “Let them go, the
n I’m going to kill you for what you did to Kim.”

  “Only one of them is leaving here alive, and you get to choose.” The spider on his forehead glistened with sweat, burrowed deeper into the wrinkles lining his brow. He said, “I don’t care about much, but I don’t want to hurt you. I might be a little jealous, because I still don’t understand who or what you are, but we’ll get into all that later.” Nutley kissed the top of David’s head. The kid tried to pull away from him, shivering, and the madman whispered, “Going to find out why you’re involved too, kid.” He looked back to me. “We’re all here for a reason. It can’t be coincidence, right?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “So, is this fate? Or has someone been pulling our strings all along? Someone none of us has met, or maybe someone all of us has?”

  “I don’t know. Let them go so we can bleed and see who’s left standing.”

  Nutley grinned. “You two are determined. I like that.”

  Mike had slipped further to the side, planning something, and I wished I could read his mind so that I’d be ready to help when he made his move. Nutley raised a hand and shook his head. He said to Mike, “We know all about you, but don’t think you can change a damn thing.”

  Lucas muttered something, or maybe it was David’s mother.

  Kim’s bleeding body filled my vision and my arms, the weight of her nearly pulling me down, but she was there only in spirit, fueling the hate, the disgust, because I needed it, we all did, to kill what wouldn’t fucking die. I said, “You’re not making it through the night.”

  Nutley glanced back at me. He smiled, brow crinkled up. “I don’t think you’re in any position to call the shots.” He pulled a knife from behind his back and placed it close to David’s ear. I stepped forward, then stopped myself. The boy closed his eyes. I still didn’t know why he followed me, if some part of him existed separately, maybe more alive than the shell that Nutley held. And wouldn’t that be a trick, I thought. For this kid to hypnotize the hypnotizer, leave him holding shadows?