It was that doofusness that had finally crept into their Hollywood bungalow after eight years and placed a pillow over the marriage’s face. One day Loraine just woke up and realized that out of that funny sense of novelty she had allowed herself to be packaged into a life that didn’t feel right. She still did her work and made her living, she had her son and he was the light of the world, but at the end of the day she felt like she was Mrs. Terrance Howard, not Loraine. She’d allowed Terry to put her in a nice pink dress, pearls and heels, and stick her in a corner with a smile and a pitcher of martinis because it was funny at first. But eight years of the same joke will kill any punchline no matter how good.
Quick fade and here she was in the middle of nowhere Kentucky, raising her son and emailing screenplays to her agent, Charlene McGiveron back in Hollywood. The move had been a fantastic decision. Her work had improved not only in substance but volume as well; with almost nothing to distract her, Loraine was turning out a new script every other month. Charlene was selling them as fast as she could churn them out, and the money was better than it ever had been. Childe’s college was already in the bag and if she sold another couple of screenplays by December, she’d take them on a month long tour of Europe or maybe Australia. Kiddo loved those that great big flying fox bats and they were supposed to be like pigeons over there.
All in all she was happy as she’d ever been, but the novelty of this situation, as great as it was, was beginning to wear thin and soon so would she. Loraine new herself well enough to expect that thinness of the soul that comes when tedium sneaks around the corners of life. Much like the yellow wolf of fog sneaked around the corners of London houses in The Love Song of Jay Alfred Prufrock. Had that also been Browning? “Nope,” she said aloud. “That there’s an Elliot if I ever heard one.” The signs of that wolf’s predation were already showing. She’d put on a few pounds in the last month or so and her concentration was slipping at the keyboard. That special window past the LCD flat-screen and into the scene itself had been fogging up a bit lately. Even Childe, her precious boy, was beginning to get on her nerves more often. Some of that had to be her insistence on him staying closer to home after their experience in the woods.
The memory of Darwin suspended in that gigantic spider web tumbled Loraine out of her mind and back onto the trail. Since that day, she had come a long way around to the explanation the good Constable gave them about the mind’s tricks and the local orb weavers, but goosebumps broke out on her arms nonetheless. And speaking of the sneaking of carnivorous canids, these woods were full of freakin’ coyotes. Was she being a doofus herself, taking a walk on her ownsome, or was this a formula for a bad retelling of Lil’ Red Riding Hood? Perhaps a B-movie plot wherein our heroine—a frightfully sexy MILF in her early forties—finds herself attacked by a giant cross-dressing coyote-spider on a path in the deep, dark forest only to be rescued by a handsome lumberjack. Coyote-spider? No thanks. Lumberjack, yes please—preferably one bearing a resemblance to Hugh Jackman… Or, just Hugh Jackman. He didn’t have to be a lumberjack.
Loraine sighed deep and long. This was her brain telling her it was almost time to leave Shard. She’d never really had the notion that they were going to say all that long in the first place—just a few months, a year at most. Their time in Shard was to be something of a transitional sabbatical between their lives in Hollywood with Terry and their lives…where? Now, that was rub: how should she choose where to end up?
Finding Shard had been easy. Loraine smiled as she passed through a bar of slanting sun, the light illuminating a halo of her curly blonde hair. Shard had sort of found them when she thought about it. She been putzing around with the idea of a project on Harriett Tubman, and was digging around on-line looking for a town in West Virginia called Sharp Creek that had been a stop on the underground railroad. She mistyped Shard instead of Sharp and was about to start her search over when a headline from an old news article caught her attention: “Seventy-Five Dead in Mine Explosion.” She read on and learned the story of the ghost town with the fire under its streets.
Loraine spent the next hour digging for more information on this funny little boomtown gone bust in coal country. The computer screen glassed over and soon enough she was looking through into a strange, empty place with abandoned Victorians that bled smoke from smashed out windows. To her surprise she uncovered that there were actually people still living in Shard and that a person could get a ridiculous deal on a nice house in the woods as long as said house was on the right side of the fireline. By then she was ensnared. Shared was caught between poles, life and death, creation and destruction, suspended. It was that feeling of suspension that resonated so powerfully with her and moved her hand to pick up the phone and call her realtor.
Now that sense of floating between lives was leaving her and a feeling of being drawn onward was beginning to rise in her middle. But where oh where to go with herself and her lil’ boyo? Loraine stopped on the trail and put her hands on her hips. Didn’t matter. The universe would send her in one direction or another, just as it had when it sent her here.
She took a good look around and got a faceful of late summer forest. Dark tree trunks swayed in the evening breeze, deep green leaves (reds and golds soon enough) shifted and splashed heavy sun dapples at her feet. God damn but it was pretty here. Wherever she and Kiddo ended up, trees would have to be part of the bargain.
The breeze brought a tang of sulfur. A change came over Loraine’s round face, a furtive sort of hardening. Her eyes slotted left, right. She dug into her pocket and pulled out her dirty little secret: a pack of Marlboro lights. She lit up and took a drag on her cigarette like a man crawling out of the Mohave would take a pull on a canteen. The smoke stung her throat a bit at first—she only smoked about a pack and a half per year—but then the nicotine hit and her shoulders relaxed. Every pore in her skin seemed to open up a bit. She smiled and shook her head. Retarded habit, but mizz Looraine Howard did love her smoky-treats. And to hell with anyone who said it didn’t make you look a million times cooler. Not that she’d ever let anyone see her doing this, especially not Childe. He’d caught her a couple of times in the past, but instead of nagging or clipping articles about lung cancer he just shook his head and walked away from her. Oh, and hadn’t that stung like a sonofabitch, those little shoulder blades moving away from her, the sweet neck stretched a bit because of the dear head that hung low.
She took another drag and looked around. That was one of the wonders of smoking, it gave you almost nothing to do—sort of forced you to stop and smell the roses, even while you were poisoning their air. At least she didn’t feel so horny now. A few minutes ago she was ready to hump the nearest most likely looking tree trunk. Now, she was merely considering how embarrassing it might be to get caught jerking off (jilling off if you went to a wymyn’s college) in the woods. She was in Appalachia—it’s not like it would be the first time someone got off in them thar woods. There was an entire sub-genre of bad jokes about the very subject.
Loraine laughed out loud and scared a bird from its perch in the corner of her eye. She turned to look and caught her breath. The leaves of a small scrub maple had turned arterial red. She blinked and realized they weren’t leaves, but hundreds, maybe thousands of cardinals perched in the branches. “Holy crow,” she whispered around her cigarette and giggled at the unintentional pun. A shift rippled through the crimson mass as if her laugh were a stone dropped in a pool of blood. A rain of black beaded eyes watched her. Loraine had of course seen a flock of sparrows dense in a tree before. Had the misfortune of parking her car under one as a matter of fact, but she had never seen cardinals like this.
She wished she had a camera. Childe would freak out if he could see this. If she had her cell phone on her she could have at least taken a crappy shot from its little camera, but you couldn’t get signal anywhere in Shard so she’d become used to leaving the house without it. Wow, though. She just stood and stared and they just perched and stared, another f
locked ripple moving over the surface of the blood sphere every now and again. She smoked and remembered that flock of sparrows that had rained shit down on her car during a fifteen-minute stop into a drugstore. She’d come out to find her Acura with a new paint job and those little sparrows just cheep, cheep, cheepin’ away… That’s when it hit her: the cardinals were silent. They hadn’t made a single peep.
Loraine glanced around again. The evening sun was rolling down the other side of the ridge. The sky was still bright, but the forest floor was dipped in purple shadow. It had crawled halfway up the tree trunks, contrasting the brilliant red of the birds that much more. The brilliant, silent birds that were just watching her and that she hadn’t noticed on her way here; the brilliant, silent birds that didn’t startle when she tromped her way into this part of the woods. Loraine grimaced at the smoke from the end of her cigarette. She put it out on the bottom of her shoe and then stuck the butt in the cuff of her slacks. (Her dad had told her they’d done that in the Air Corps and she’d picked it up. Trashing one’s lungs was one thing, trashing the rest of the planet was something else.) When she looked up the birds had moved to another tree. A closer tree.
Loraine jumped. “Jesus,” she whispered. What the fuck was going on here? She was struck by the idea that it might be fun to watch them explode out of their roost in fear of a primate waving her arms and shouting. Loraine did just that. “Hey!” The flock rippled, but stayed put in a tree about twenty feet away. “You lil’ bastards ever work with a guy named Hitchcock?” She took a step closer, feeling better to be on the offensive, better to just be moving instead of standing slack jawed. She raised her voice, not digging the shrill edge she heard, but forgiving it. She was scared and wigged out after all. “He’s something of a portly fellow! Very DISTINCT shadow!” The birds stared at her, a thousand tiny black eyes like a mist of oil droplets. Loraine stopped. “What the hell?” This was getting beyond a little creepy and into extra creepy.
The birds fluttered in perfect unison and shifted from their roost to another tree without a single peep. In spite of her fear, Loraine gasped, “Wow.” They moved more like a crimson fog than a flock of birds, floating into the branches and settling right away. Those oil-drop eyes reflected a thousand tiny Loraines. She lost the urge to frighten them. In fact, she lost the urge to do much more than get out of there. Loraine backed up a step, then another. A stick snapped under her heel and enough adrenaline dumped into her system to make her fingertips hurt. She stumbled and the stumble became a pivot and she had her back to them and she was running, running, her feet skimming over the ground, her breath coming in locomotive chuffs.
She ran this way for as long as her lungs would hold out. Embers flared in the pits of her chest behind her lower ribs. A spear point dug into her side. She didn’t know how long she’d run, probably not far but she recognized this part of the woods. She’d come this way before. Yes! That was the trail that led back to her yard. She was only a quarter mile from home. Little black spots squirmed in her vision and her heart began to take on a stony quality she didn’t care for. Loraine made herself slow to a shambling fast-walk, her hand pressed to the stitch in her side. A minute later, she saw the fallen log with the lichen where she sometimes stopped to tie her shoelaces before beginning any walk in earnest. She was almost home.
Loraine slumped down onto the log, put her head between her legs and just breathed for a few minutes. She didn’t want to go back into the house in a state of panic and scare Childe. She wasn’t even sure what she was so afraid of in the first place. A flock of quiet birds? How do you explain that one? Yeah, I got really freaked out by a bunch of cardinals that didn’t make a lot of noise—scared they were going to poop on me, you see. She shook her head and drop of sweat tumbled off her nose and shattered at her feet. Had she had some kind of a panic attack? God, she was spending way too much time in her office.
“Mom?”
Loraine let out a little yelp and turned to see, “Kiddo. Whatcha’ doin’?” He was walking up the path toward her.
“It’s getting dark.”
“Yeah.”
“I guess I got a little worried.”
“You did, huh?” Just being around him was calming. Her heart had slowed and the evening chill had doused the heat of fear from her skin. She smiled and he smiled back, but it was sheepish. “You got a little freaked out from readin’ Harry Potter again, didn’t you?” She pronounced “Harry Potter” with a heavy British accent, dropping the “H” and emphasizing the “Ts”.
The Kiddo looked at his feet. “Yeah, a little. It’s those Dementor things, they’re scary.”
Having read all the Harry Potter books, Loraine remember the Dementors well—terrifying mixtures of the Grim Reaper, zombies and cops. She always thought part of Rowling’s genius had been her ability to take pieces of the everyday and mix them with the magical. The Dementors were just to the left of everyone’s age-old vision of death. They didn’t have the scythe, but they had the same tailor. They also had the same interest: your soul. Sometimes Loraine wondered how parents could let their younger children read those books. Rowling got pretty damn dark between mugs of butterbeer and teenage witch crushes.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “They are pretty scary.” She patted her thighs once and stood. “You wanna’ go in, make a frozen pizza and watch Indiana Jones?”
A sly smile spread on Kiddo’s cheeks. “Can Darwin have a piece?”
“Only if you scrape off the sausage. I really don’t feel like wearing a gas mask.” Her boy—the light of the world—laughed and the last bits of stone cladding fell off her heart. “C’mon then,” she said, throwing an arm over his shoulder and turning them back toward the house. “Let’s devour el food de junk and raid us some lost arcs.”
“Ooh, not that one. I like The Last Crusade better. It’s got Sean Connery.”
She threw on another bad British accent. “All right, Moneypenny. We’ll watch that one, but I’ve got to get M’s approval first.”
“What?”
“Oh,” she squeezed his shoulder, “you’re cinematic education is woefully incomplete.”
The walked back up the path and disappeared into their cozy rancher as the sun disappeared around the other side of the world. A large holly bush standing just off the path shimmered in the gloom. Eight long branches burst from its middle, kinked and curved down to the ground. The branches slimmed and sharpened at the ends. They pushed against the earth and uprooted the body of the bush. Each waxy green leaf turned black as coal and flattened, merged. The great spider, Yïn, stood and considered the boy and his mother. This place in the world had worn almost through. A bubble that was a mix of the world above and the world below was expanding out from the portal in Dampf’s lair, creating a zone where reality had begun to splinter. The woman had almost crossed out of it on her walk, so Yïn had become the birds and stopped her. Another quarter mile and she would have walked back into the solidity of the world above untainted. Yïn didn’t know what might have happened if Loraine Howard hadn’t then turned. Would she have seen a difference in the air behind her, sensed something off? She might have, and then she might have braved the weirdness to come back for her son. That could not be allowed. The boy was necessary as was she. Everyone left in Shard had a part to play, even if it was just to die.
A raccoon strolled by in the dark, oblivious to the motionless spider. Yïn speared it with her front leg and pulled it in. She injected her venom and began to take the animal apart, contemplating its flesh with her mandibles. Yïn didn’t need to eat, she just liked to. Warm yellow windows reflected in her eight black eyes. Inside the house, she could smell the oven warming up. The dog barked once, muffled and playful. Yïn liked Darwin. Perhaps she’d keep him as a pet when this was all over. She chewed through the raccoon’s ribcage with a sound like a wet wicker basket being crushed. Maybe she’d just eat him.
Chapter 26
T.R.’s mother smiled, which was really kind of amazing considerin
g the hole in old Jean’s head. The other leg in Shard’s famous pair of Jeans couldn’t smile or frown. His face was pretty much gone.
T.R. had spent most of the day waiting for them to come home crouched in the upstairs hallway under the wall of family portraits. Every time he looked, they showed a trauma from his childhood. The time he’d walked in on his parents having sex and his father chased him from the room with a giant erection. The day he pooped his pants just before leaving the house for his first day of school and how his mother made him go anyway with a full load in his trousers. Each of these lovely memories was captured for the ages with the magic of KodeCOLOR. And like the extra photographic touches you could get for a few bucks more at the Sears—an airbrushed zit here, a gauze filter for grandma’s wrinkles there—these images had their own special something. The lines next to his mother’s screaming mouth were deepened, her brow sharpened. The pearl of pre-cum at the end of his father’s turgid cock caught the light just so. It resonated nicely with the fat tears on little Tommy Ray’s cheeks.
And they came with their own soundtrack, too: the buzzing.
The fucking buzzing in his head had been unendurable. At one point he drew a cold bath and dunked his head under, hoping to drown the wasps trapped in his skull. The acoustics had changed, gone all deep and round, but it was just as bad. For a moment, T.R. considered just leaving his head under the water until he ran out of breath. In the end, he reeled back against the wall tiles, panting, his tears of pain and frustration mixing with the bathwater. Not long after, he got his father’s deer rifle from the closet.
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