by J. D. Horn
Probably just a fat squirrel or some other animal hopping around. If it stayed up there and left him alone, he’d stay down here and return the favor. The place wasn’t haunted. Any ghosts around this old house now, Elijah had brought with him. He cast one final glance around the room, then returned to the porch, pulling the door closed with as much vehemence as it took to yank it open.
The floorboards squeaked as he turned around, sounding for all the world like they were asking him where he’d been all this time. He’d spent a good part of his teenage years right here on this very porch. Memories of those days, really not that long ago, passed through his mind. Layer over layer of his past crowded in on each other. So many twilight hours spent here passing the jar, talking about the world and what they believed should be their place in it. Shame crawled up from the small of his back, passing between his shoulder blades and reaching up to tickle his scalp. A lot of what they got up to—a lot of what they had planned sprawled out across this porch’s warped boards—he knew now was wrong. Hell, he knew it then, too. They’d hurt people. Good people. Just because they’d been born different. Dowd used to run on at the mouth about the natural order, the rightful position of the white man at the top of the ladder of races. Elijah had never really believed any of it himself, but he went along with it anyway. Maybe someone had finally fought back. Maybe Dowd and Bob had earned their end.
Still, Dowd and Bob were dead. Walter and Wayne—the sheriff felt odds were good they were dead, too. And then there was Ruby. These men he had been so close to. The girl he’d loved. All these people who’d gotten themselves caught up in the same bundle of lies that had sent him running off to get himself shot in Korea.
Dowd had sworn to him, sworn, that Ruby had come to him. Like a bitch in heat, he said. And he’d had her. So had Bob.
Elijah had beaten the hell out of Dowd, despite the difference in their size. Bob had stood back at first, seeming confident that Dowd could hold Elijah off. But Elijah had never felt such rage in his life. It had been like everything anyone had ever done to make him feel bad, to feel weak, boiled up all at once. By the time Bob joined in, trying to restrain him, Elijah had pretty much taken the bigger guy down. Elijah got a few good licks in on Bob, too, before leaving the pair to patch their wounds and their pride.
He’d gone straight to Ruby’s, straight to the Judge’s house, but Ruby wouldn’t see him. The maid, Lucille, met him at the door, placing a firm hand on his chest when he tried to push past. “She said she don’t want to see you,” Lucille said, pleading with her eyes. “You just go on home now, sir. You don’t want the Judge to hear about you showing up like this, and if you force your way in here, I ain’t gonna have no choice but to tell him.”
He didn’t resist her surprisingly strong backward force, but he still called out. “Ruby! Come talk with me, girl. I don’t believe them. I don’t.” No response came, though he was sure she must have heard. He waited, craning his neck trying to see into the hall. His heart began pounding, breaking. Doubt crept in. He didn’t have any money. Not the kind that Ruby should find herself marrying into. He was handsome, by Conroy’s standards, but he knew anywhere else Ruby’s beauty would place her far out of his reach. He knew the stories about her. How sadistic she could be. But he had never believed them. Now he wondered.
Had their time together been nothing more than a cruel and heartless prank? She’d ignored him for years while they were growing up. He might as well have been invisible to her. Then all of a sudden, she sought him out. Then they were together, and he was in love. He’d never let himself wonder what had turned her attention toward him, but he sure spent plenty of time going over why she broke his heart. Had she tired of him? Had she given herself to Dowd and Bob? Had she lain with his friends just to drive him away? “Ruby, please,” he had said, his voice no longer loud enough for anyone other than the black maid to hear. “Come tell me it ain’t true.”
He didn’t resist when Lucille pressed a bit harder, causing him to take a complete step back over the threshold. Before she closed the door, he caught an odd look in Lucille’s eyes, one that combined sympathy and caution and the sharpest of hatred all in one glance. In that moment, when his pain had made him human, he realized that she knew him for what he was, a weak and cowardly boy who needed to believe the color of his skin made him superior, ’cause he knew deep down he had nothing else. If his whiteness didn’t lift him above others, he was at the bottom. And so he left. He left his buddies. He left his family. He left Ruby. And he went into the army hoping to prove to himself he was somebody, or to die trying. In the end, he’d done neither. Getting shot by a sniper at the side of a garbage ditch hardly made him a hero.
He came home, a gimp in his leg and a promise from a girl he liked a lot, a woman he was really fond of. He didn’t love her, though. Not really. Not like he had loved Ruby. So he resigned himself to limping through what was left of his life, with Corinne by his side, a woman he respected, until his clock stopped ticking, and he could move on to whatever came after this life. He hoped it would be nothing. For him, Heaven would be nothing.
He’d resigned himself to the future open before him. But not long after he’d made it back to Conroy, the Judge tracked Ruby down in California and had her brought home. She wasn’t well. Not at all. But she was home, and the Judge sent along a message that she was asking to see him, if he was willing to come.
If he was willing.
He nearly flew to the Judge’s door. This time Lucille had welcomed him, and she continued to welcome him every day after that.
What Dowd and Bob had said, it was all a lie. She had been too ashamed to face him for fear he’d believe them, even a little bit. For a while there, it seemed like they might find a way to start anew. That’s what she wanted. She swore it was so.
Her health varied greatly day-to-day. Sometimes the things she’d talk about seemed crazy, but McAvoy reminded him that she might still be imagining things due to her illness. Elijah suspected it might have had something, too, to do with the drugs she’d taken in Hollywood, and the doc was too kind to rub anybody’s nose in it. But on the whole it seemed like she was getting better; then she took a sudden, unexpected turn for the worse . . . and died.
That night while Ruby lay cold at the funeral parlor, Elijah went home and read the pile of unopened letters from Corinne that had been collecting in a Phillies Perfecto box. He knew he should write her back, tell all that had happened. Give her the opportunity to rethink the commitment she had made to him. A commitment that on his part he had broken. Instead, he set the six preceding weeks aside. Treated them like they were a dream, something that never happened. And he responded to Corinne’s latest letter, just as if they hadn’t.
Elijah scanned the tops of the trees surrounding the slanting house, letting his eyes rest on the point where the blue of the sky touched the green of the highest point. He would take all this. Everything he was feeling. About his women. About his friends. He’d lock it up and put it away. Just do the best he could from this point on.
The position of the sun told him it was getting late. He needed to get home and do the milking. Elijah allowed himself one last moment before heading back. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath, surprised to realize the unfamiliar scent he’d noticed earlier seemed to be growing stronger. He opened his eyes and trod down the steps, retreating quickly when this time the second one down cracked beneath him.
He stopped in the yard, casting a backward glance at the old place. It was funny, really. Although it lay miles away by road, as the crow flies the cemetery where Ruby lay was only maybe an eighth of a mile away, dead west in the direction of the sinking sun.
TWENTY
Even though he couldn’t bear the light of day, the Judge hated it when the evening shadows started to descend upon his room. When Ruby died, he’d thought the darkness was the worst thing that could happen to him. Now he knew better. He prayed she’d rest in peace tonight, but he knew it was not to be. He could
feel her stirring, even before the last of the sun’s rays had bent around the horizon. She was waking. Thinking of him. She’d come for him again, just as soon as the shadows outweighed the light.
He’d pretended to the old doctor that he believed his daughter only returned to him in nightmares, but that wasn’t so. She’d visited him every night since her burial. For a while, the signs had been subtle—her distinctive scent, a strange flicker against the shadowed wall—sensations he could deny, figments he could ignore. But these impressions of Ruby’s presence had grown stronger with time. Then, last week he saw her, saw her with his own two eyes. And she spoke to him, pleading with him to invite her in. He’d thought her visit a dream at first, then, feeling her cool touch, he began to consider the possibility that he might be losing his mind. But once she began feeding from him, he knew what Ruby had become.
Back when he and her mother had started dating, they’d gone to just about every movie Hollywood had churned out. Maybe the blame could be laid at her mother’s feet. Ruby had inherited her love for both the silver screen and the macabre. The Judge couldn’t have given a good goddamn about either. He had just been hoping to do a little spooning before dropping his date home at the end of the night.
A chilling spicy scent that reminded him of myrrh—sickly sweet, but still somehow woody and medicinal—told him that Ruby was on her way. He grasped at the bedclothes, pulling them to his chin. A tentative scratching, which he refused to acknowledge, on his door. His eyes pierced the shadows, taking in the sight of a luminous mist as it insinuated itself through the space between the door and its frame. He watched as the knob turned and the door squeaked open. The mist billowed into the room now, as thick as the fog from the mill, and his daughter’s animated corpse came riding in on the ethereal wave.
She floated a yard or so above him, her long hair cascading down, nearly touching his pillow. The Judge closed his eyes and held his trembling hands up, trying to shield himself from the phantasm, praying that his flesh would not meet with her coldness. “Daughter, I wish you’d leave me be. Let your father rest.”
“Oh, Daddy, I know how you feel,” she whispered, reaching down and running her fingers through his graying mane. “I do.” She leaned in and purred into his ear. “I felt the same way every night you came to me, pressing your flesh against mine. Smelling of just enough bourbon that come morning you could tell yourself nothing had happened, and even if it had, you weren’t really responsible.”
He clenched the edge of his covers with tight white knuckles as hot tears forced their way through his tightly closed eyes. “I was weak. I know that. I admit it. I’d do anything to undo the damage I’ve done.” A wail came from between his grinding teeth. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. My God, I am so sorry.”
“That is quite a show of contrition, Daddy, but if you’re trying to throw yourself on the mercy of the court, I gotta warn you, I am fresh out of forgiveness.”
Ovid opened his eyes, though he hated the sight of her, this thing his daughter had become. Her moonlight-blue skin, the burning cerulean of her pupil-less eyes and the light they cast on him.
“Leave me,” the Judge commanded, trying to take control of this living nightmare. “Go back to the hell that bred you.”
“But I already have, Daddy,” she said, her voice like wind through dry grass. “That’s why I’m here.”
TWENTY-ONE
The dour faces of Ruby’s ancestors challenged her approach. The dressing table where they sat strained under the silver and gold framed images of those who’d come before her, those who had long since turned to nothing more than dust and sour memories. There were no pictures of her in the collection; all of them predated her mother’s death, so Ruby had always reckoned it was her mother who’d assembled the photos there.
Ruby glanced in the mirror, past her own flickering reflection, at her father as he lay rasping and shaking in his bloodstained sheets. Did the Judge hold on to the photos because he truly felt some form of affection for the people depicted, or did he just care so little as to never have them removed? No, more than likely they’d remained in place as a testament to his own origins, witnesses to his own greatness, betrayers of his own vanity.
The portraits were all more or less familiar to her; she’d seen them many times during her life. One of them, though, had always fascinated her. This one she’d memorized by heart. A much younger version of the Judge sat in a paper crescent moon next to a woman—the woman wearing the only smile recorded by any of the photos there—she’d always been told was her mama. Ruby had to take this assertion on faith; nothing had ever stirred within her as she looked at the pale and lovely young face that stared back at her. Nothing in her heart had ever said, “This is your mother.” And if she’d hadn’t felt this quickening before, she knew she’d never feel it now.
Ruby bore absolutely no physical resemblance to the woman. She shared neither her coloring, nor the kindness she had always imagined she could see in her eyes. Ruby doubted she shared any of the woman’s moral or emotional traits either. No, Ruby was her father’s daughter, through and through. Her face carried his fine features, and she knew also his sharp and merciless regard. It was almost as if she, like Athena, had sprung from her father’s brow, or at least as if her mother had been nothing more than an incubator, leaving no mark of her own on Ruby.
It struck Ruby as inevitable that the Judge should have ended up destroying this fair and seemingly joyful creature. Ruby only regretted that she’d been his accomplice in the act. Maybe things would have been different, better, had the woman not died giving birth. Then again, perhaps it was a mercy to the woman that she’d died never knowing the depravity her husband was capable of. At least Ruby hoped this was the case. Regardless, Ruby’s mother hadn’t needed to spend her years pretending to be ignorant of the Judge’s crimes committed both in the world and under his very roof.
She’d never learn of Ruby’s own crimes, or the thing that she’d become.
Ruby paused, lifting the portrait to examine it, but the metal irritated her skin, stinging like a paper cut. Ruby dropped the photo on the table, relieved when it landed lying facedown. She paused and focused again on her own flittering image in the glass. Every so many seconds, it would resolve into a seemingly normal reflection, the face she’d always known, though her complexion showed a strange silvery blue. Then the reflection would blur, as if she were moving quickly, though she stood perfectly still. Ruby intuited that the thing inside her, the force she’d been bound to, came from a blind realm. Her quivering reflection testified to either its attempt to shield itself, or light’s own attempt to reject it.
She closed her eyes and let her mind drift. She knew she and her father were not alone in the house; Lucille crouched fearfully in her mama’s old sewing room. Ruby could feel her fear, smell it like a magnolia flower on a warm afternoon, and although she had no intention of harming the servant, the scent of her fear brought pleasure to the thing inside her, a rich warm dessert to the feast of her father’s blood.
At first she’d loathed the sensation of it moving within her, but she’d come to accept it. No, cherish it. Those who had bound it to her thought they were punishing her. They could never begin to understand the great gift they’d given her. Her mind drifted back to the moment when she lay, nearly lost to the opium she’d so willingly accepted from the great Myrna King’s own hand. She found herself lying on a gurney that had been covered with a type of silk. She remembered it had been black, embroidered with symbols in crimson.
“You wanted to know our secrets. Now, my dear, you shall have your way,” King had said, leaning over her. A man approached them, and only then had Ruby realized they weren’t alone. No, the gurney stood at the center of a circle of men and women. Ruby was beyond the ability to count them, but she sensed they were numerous. She cast her eyes around, her head lolling. Sleep, oblivion, warm and wondrous, called to her. No, she couldn’t count them, but the glimpses that registered in her mind informed
her that they were all young, and oh, so very beautiful.
Those gathered round them began drawing closer, tightening the circle around her in a synchronized yet lurching movement, too ungainly and awkward to be thought of as dance. The reedy whine of a high-pitched flute sounded in opposition to their movements, the rhythm of its atonal moan out of time with their steps. Had Ruby’s senses not been dulled by drug, she probably would have laughed at the sight of them; it was just all so overly dramatic, so Hollywood.
They began singing, or maybe chanting, the melody nothing more than a repetition of three discordant notes that seemed to share no relation to the tune played by the piper. The utterances they made were ugly, guttural, sounding more like the cries of a tortured beast than a proper language, but the repetition of these sounds told her that they must have been words that held meaning. A man’s face appeared before her, a cruel lopsided smile on his lips, and then drifted back. Another, this time a woman she knew from one of Myrna’s parties. She’d fetched her drinks and lit her cigarettes, laughed at her jokes, and even bore the brunt of a few of them in the hope of ingratiating herself.
The woman’s face receded, replaced by that of another man, one she recognized, a financier, she’d been told, to whom she’d offered herself at another of Myrna’s parties only the week before. She’d hoped to find herself a spot in his entourage, worm her way into his circle of wealthy acquaintances, and discover which of them might demonstrate behaviors in private that they’d pay to keep secret. His gaze had passed quickly over her without attempting even the most superficial appraisal of her form or features and settled on Dylan, who’d approached, carrying a mound of cocaine on a small silver tray. The financier watched as Dylan cut the mound into lines and snorted two of them. Dylan held the tray out to him, but the man only set it aside and took Dylan’s hand, leading him away into the mad throng of guests. Ruby had instantly begun to calculate ways to catch the men alone, in a well-lit room, with a camera in her hand. The financier should’ve led to a fat payday, but then Dylan had up and disappeared without a word.