The Dampness Of Mourning

by Lee Thompson

  Nutley said, “You creep me out, McDonnell.”

  I flinched, lost mental footing. I said, “What do you really want? To see the face of some creature you invented in your head? To have her hold you and tell you that she loves you, that she’ll never forsake you? That she won’t be like your real parents?”

  He said, “Come here or I will slit this boy’s throat.” He stared me down, amusement washed from his eyes. David trembled and ran his hands down his shirt over and over. His mother cried but her voice cut out as the machete bit into her neck a little and blood spilled onto her collarbone. Nutley glanced at her as he waited for me to follow orders. He said, “You know why I hate stupid bitches like her? They think they’re so capable. How many people do you know that ever do what they say?”

  I kept a tight hold on the pistol and crossed the empty space, figuring if nothing else at least I’d be close enough to do something, maybe even get David away from him. I stood three feet in front of them. Nutley said, “You know nothing. You are nothing.”

  “Same old song and dance,” Mike said off to my left.

  Nutley glanced his way. I punched him with the end of the barrel, my other hand grabbing his wrist as David ducked. Nutley laughed and wouldn’t stop and David’s mother screamed as Lucas let her go, and she had eyes only for her son, calling to him, until Lucas swung the machete and her head bounced off her foot and rolled across the grass, blood squirting from the stump of her neck, and she took several steps forward as if to chase it down so she could see her son again, gather him up in her arms, and flee. But her momentum faded and she hit the ground. David ran for her. Nutley grabbed my wrist. Mike pulled the trigger and a bullet whizzed by my head with the angry scream of a hornet and blood covered my face, and at first I thought he’d hit me, but Nutley let go and stumbled back. He tried to shake it off but part of his cheekbone had been torn away.

  Lucas threw the machete like a boomerang and burst into a run after it. Mike ducked the blade but Lucas tackled him. The pistol flew out of his hand. The machete swung back around in a sharp arc and slapped into Lucas’s palm. He brought his elbow down between Mike’s eyes with a sickening crunch.

  Nutley ripped the gun from my hand. He threw it to the side. He pressed his thumbs to my eyes and said, “You will walk me to the pinnacle.”

  I threw a jab up between his arms and felt my knuckles connect with his throat but he didn’t flinch. He pressed harder on my eyelids. Colors, natural and unnatural, burst in my head.

  A buzzing whine built all around us, the vibration rattling my teeth and the madman’s fingers against my skull, and we were all one, light and dark, good and evil, foolish and wise, as fire flared and rain fell and blood rose from the earth and wet our feet. David held his mother’s head by the hair and carried it toward Lucas, who looked confused, maybe seeing himself, an earlier version before this one Nutley had destroyed, and tears filled his eyes. Mike groped for the pistol with Lucas still on his chest, distracted, as David opened his mouth and screamed in his face with more rage than any of us were capable of. Part of Lucas’s face tore and peeled back beneath the force of it.

  I thought, Jesus Christ. Who is this kid?

  Mike grabbed the pistol. He jammed it beneath Lucas’s chin and pulled the trigger and a gunshot joined David’s primal scream as the top of Lucas’s head blew skyward, all red and black. Mike pushed him off and stood, hacking and gently rubbing his broken and bloodied nose, saying, “Shit,” knowing he had to get some ice on it to keep his eyes from swelling shut.

  Nutley gathered darkness around himself. He looked paler than before and I wondered if it destroyed him every time he watched his little servant boy die. I wondered what it cost him to raise Lucas from the dead, and if there would ever come a point when he couldn’t pay whatever powers granted him that ability.

  They vanished and the grass burned black where they’d been.

  Mike touched David’s shoulder gently and led him over to me. He said, “I’m not any good with kids. You look after him, okay?” He went inside and came back out a few minutes later with a sky-blue sheet in one arm and a dish towel full of ice pressed to his face. He covered Mrs. Sholes’s body but David wouldn’t let either one of us take her head.

  SEVENTEEN

  McCoy didn’t look happy when he parked in the Sholes’s driveway, two other state cruisers behind him, and an ambulance roaring to a stop on the shoulder of the road. There was blood everywhere. My eyes ached. Mike sat on the hood of his Jag, drawing shapes in the dust on the hood and making David laugh. It seemed like the kid had already forgotten his mother was dead, but I knew that was probably bullshit. He knew, he had to.

  McCoy and the other cops moved around Mrs. Sholes’s corpse. One of the medics crouched near her severed head. He looked up and frowned. Everyone crowded us and I felt claustrophobic, though I’d never really had an inkling of it in my entire life, except the time when Proserpine pressed my face to her breast in a car behind the police station.

  McCoy said, “This shit is getting old. What happened?”

  I knew he wouldn’t like the answer, that he wouldn’t believe it, not in a million years. He was fine with thinking that he hunted just some deranged mental patient; it made it an easy, if elusive, target. I swallowed and my throat felt dry. He asked me again, closer now, his hands on his hips.

  I said, “Nutley and Lucas.”

  “Well, no shit.”

  Mike said, “They were waiting for us. How did they know we’d come here?”

  That was a good question. It made me wonder if they’d put a tracking device on our vehicles, but that seemed way beyond them. I thought, They used other means. Ancient ones. I shivered and one of the medics came over carrying a blanket, which he draped over my shoulders, and said, “It’s shock. Sit down.”

  McCoy pointed and I walked over to his car and sat on the hood. He looked at Mike and said, “You sure you don’t want a blanket and a seat too?”

  Mike said, “We didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  McCoy let out a sudden blast of air. He said, “Kim might not make it and you two almost got a kid killed. Jesus Christ.” He turned to the medics who were idling around, jabbed a finger in David’s direction, and said, “Did anyone inspect him and make sure he’s okay?”

  One of the medics, a burly guy with mutton chops, shrugged, his face pale. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-one. He said, “It’s a crime scene, isn’t it? We don’t touch anything at a crime scene.”

  McCoy turned to me and said, “I’m going to knock him the hell out.” He turned back to the young EMT, his arms crossed over his chest. “You don’t touch the dead. You help the living. Move your ass.”

  Mike smiled a little. I couldn’t. I thought of Kim in constant pain, or lost in some dream world beneath a cloud of sedatives as the doctor worked laboriously over her with tweezers to extract an endless quantity of glass needles. I nearly vomited on my shoes. McCoy sat next to me, unphased. He said, “What’s really going on? You don’t think I can handle it, but I can.”

  “They’re not a cult. They’re the real deal.”

  “They worship the devil and bathe in the blood of infants?” He was being sarcastic but kept his tone flat and neutral.

  I said, “I don’t want to imagine what they do.”

  McCoy glanced Mike’s way and said, “What about you? You imagining what they’d do?”

  Mike cracked his knuckles. “Every time we kill them they come back.”

  “Got the better of them again, did you?”

  “What’s your problem, officer?”

  McCoy and Mike stared each other down and it could have gone on forever if the young medic hadn’t said, “I think you guys better come here and look at this.”

  * * *

  It took a moment for Red to realize he’d been thrown off the roof. He batted his arms for a pump or two, but the concrete below was rising fast, so he screamed instead and ripped his gloves off and blue light arched
from his hands and his fall slowed and he drifted to the sidewalk light as a feather.

  “Shit,” he said, disgusted with himself, but at the same time feeling more alive than he’d felt in decades. He glanced up and saw Pig’s grinning face from over the edge of the roof. The sisters weren’t in sight. He looked up and down the street, glad no one was out, thankful he lived here, in this nowhere where there were only ten or so buildings crowding each side of Main Street and most of them getting long in the tooth because their businesses had dried up since most everyone went to LaPorte nowadays to shop at Walmart.

  Pig appeared at his side. He grinned wider. He said, “I knew you wouldn’t keep your gloves on.” He held them out between them. Red snatched them away and slipped them back on and as much as he hated to admit it, they made him feel safe.

  Pig said, “You need to use that gift you have to help your nephew.”

  Red’s bones ached. All he wanted was a nap. He said, “That exhausted me. That little bit.”

  “It’s just a rusty wheel. It’ll get easier as you use it.”

  The last two times I used it bad things happened.

  “Really?” Pig said. “Like what?”

  Red sighed. He pointed at the door of his store and said, “Get inside, you little bastard.”

  Pig laughed. “I’m as old as you are.”

  Red walked through the door and Pig followed him and Red thought it crazy how such a little thing like that could bring back so many memories. He leaned against the register and stared at his hands, and remembered how he’d taken those gloves off not too long ago and shown John’s girlfriend things he had no right showing her. He shook his head. He whispered, “It’s my fault she went crazy.”

  “Whose?” Pig grabbed a lollipop from a clear plastic tub and unwrapped it.

  “John’s girlfriend.”

  “You drove her crazy?”

  Red nodded. He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

  “Then you owe this to him, don’t you? You can make it right.”

  Red studied him a moment. He shrugged. “I do.”

  “Then do something about it and quit moping around in all your self-pity, goddamn.”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  Pig laughed. “You never liked cursing.”

  “I still don’t.”

  “If the situation calls for it even?”

  Red nodded. “This is a goddamn burden I don’t want to carry. Like that, you mean?”

  “Exactly.” Pig smiled. He looked like a fat little cherub.

  Red said, “Go find Nutley and report back to me, Sergeant.”

  Pig threw the lollipop aside and saluted, fat jiggling, his eyes narrowed and ready for his mission. “Yessir. Just like old times.”

  “We’re going to war.”

  Pig nodded, said in the most grown-up voice he could muster, “We’re going to war.”

  * * *

  We moved as one, as if we shared a larger body, imbalanced and unsymmetrical and wholly unnatural, yet determined to stare our worst fears in the face. David knelt on the ground. He dug patches of sod free, his brow scrunched and lips working silently. I’d thought he’d somehow known that Nutley would come for him, and that his mother would die and further cement more pain, more questions. But with things like that there was nothing to prove, and even less to understand.

  I placed a hand on his arm and stopped him from carving the grass. He jerked away and looked at his mother and cried. McCoy knelt next to me and Mike said, “This is something.”

  As David pulled away, I let him, everyone let him, because we didn’t want to scare him and nothing is as scary to a child as being restrained by adults they don’t know. I glanced at what he’d cut into the soil, slowly grasping the shape until I thought of apocalypse, of God’s wrath, born of our foolishness. The world floated there at our feet and it was on fire, and one man stood atop, as if on the North Pole, a rod held firmly in one hand and a fistful of serpents in the other.

  McCoy said, “Kid’s got talent, but that’s a creepy image.”

  Mike said, “He’s telling us something.”

  I said, “He’s telling us to quit standing around and to stop this sonofabitch before he gets what he wants.”

  McCoy scratched his chin. “He’s far from ruling the world.”

  I thought about what Nutley had said, how they were all handpicked, and shook my head. He didn’t just mean the patients from the nuthouse; like Proserpine and her brother, he was talking a much larger scale, speaking of things beyond our understanding. Things unseen. Powerful things. Demons or gods. Some All-Mother who held the wicked and wonderful and lame to her breast and slowly weaned them, each to their own purpose.

  I said, “If he gathers what he needs he can do anything he wants.”

  Mike said, “His doctor said Lucas was one of his keys. But there are three.”

  McCoy said, “What are the other two?”

  Mike shrugged. “He said Nutley wouldn’t tell him.”

  McCoy glanced at the sky, which had grown darker with rumbling thunderheads. He said, “What if it’s you two?”

  Neither of us answered him.

  I looked at David. The boy’s eyes filled with tears. His hands looked like tree branches scraping the ground, fashioning more images from earth as we stood by, confused and ignorant.

  I said, “Nutley knows this kid has something special about him.”

  I looked at David and thought, You can see the future, though it’s murky sometimes, can’t you?

  David watched me. I held his gaze for a moment but it was so intense I had to look away. Mike shifted his stance and said, “If you destroy what’s most important to someone you can test their reserves.”

  His eyes shone with memories I’d probably never be privy to. Actions and choices he’d take to the grave because some things are private and cling to us, living in the recesses of our minds like shadows, no matter how hard we try to draw them forth into the light so we can examine and understand them.

  McCoy said, “I’ll take care of the kid. You two find this motherfucker and end this.” Saying it without saying it…

  Whatever it takes.

  A smothering sensation roamed through me, spreading out until I sucked in a cold breath and shivered.

  Mike said, “I’ll go get things ready. We can explore whatever lays hidden behind the falls.”

  I agreed, uncertain what I should do. I wanted to protect David, for him to be my little brother, to tell him that everything would be okay, it’d work out, even though when I looked at his mother’s corpse I knew it’d never be right. Even if we overpowered Nutley and found a way to kill him—which I doubted possible, and Mike too, it seemed—Kim would sustain the agony inflicted upon her nerve endings until her last breath, David’s mother would haunt us, this sad and stubborn and angry woman who deep down thought she never loved her oldest son enough, that she hadn’t heard him crying out, and I wondered if she moved through fog even now, like April, searching for her one great failure in hopes that she could somehow right it.

  McCoy said, “McDonnell, go up to the station and talk to our friend. Maybe he knows where Nutley is hiding. We can’t hold him forever without any evidence and he’s tied into this somehow, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What’s your gut tell you?”

  “He knows him. He knows a lot more than he’s saying.”

  “Then move your ass. Daylight’s burning.” He turned back to the EMTs and the state troopers who stood by, looking as confused and serious as I felt. He said, “Let’s wrap this up.”

  Me and Mike headed for his Jaguar. As we climbed inside he said something I didn’t hear because my stomach clenched and my palms started sweating and blackness slithered across my vision like a snake…

  I’ve built a small altar in the shack behind my dad’s house. It should be shameful, but I’ve built it in love…and hope. Sonnelion squeals in expectancy and pleasure, her lips brushing my neck as
I put the final piece in place, the meat of Lucas’s tongue between two ivory candles burning bright.

  She whispers that secrets are important and I believe her because to doubt is to question, and there is no room for anything but commitment. She holds my hand as I kneel before the throne constructed of bones—children who were evil and destined to pollute the world with madness as they grew into their existence and knowledge of pain and satisfaction; men who had sucked dry the lives of those who loved them through violence and uncertainty and remained unrequited; women, like my birth mother, who gave a little of themselves to take in trade the hopes and dreams and will of others.

  Sonnelion studies the altar, pleased, and whispers, You have done a great service for the balance. You are my brave warrior, and I am so very proud.

  I blush, but warmth spreads throughout my body and resonates in the tips of my fingers. I close my eyes and hope that Lucas will be okay, that he has learned his lesson for bad-mouthing things he doesn’t understand. She whispers, close to my ear, No worries, he will never speak with a vile tongue again…

  Part of me hurts for him, but I think, He knew better. He should have trusted me.

  But he hadn’t, and he’d paid the price for such arrogant stubbornness.

  Sonnelion says, It’s just a start. My vengeance burns.

  She teaches me.

  EIGHTEEN

  I sat down in a small concrete room in the back of the LaPorte Police Station and braced my arms on the table. McCoy was right, Jake was ready to talk, his brother was still missing, and the charge they’d used to hold him wouldn’t hold much longer. I didn’t like him much, but I doubted he was an accessory to Nutley’s brood. He’d seen Duncan before and he had his problems like anyone else, but we were basing so much on his appearance. I thought about how I’d react if someone came to my house snooping around and I found them leaning over my bound brother. I’d draw a gun on them. I’d tell them to get the fuck out. I’d do whatever it took.