by Bruce Talmas
He was not an emotional person. Stoic was how most people would describe him. But I’d lived with the man for seven years, and I knew that stoicism masked a very deep passion for life and compassion for all living things. He was probably the most decent person I’d ever known. Unlike many priests, he practiced what he preached. If anything, he held himself to a higher standard than what he expected of his parishioners…or his son, for that matter.
“It’s good to see you, Old Man.” My voice came out muffled because my head was on his shoulder.
“I was so afraid you were dead,” he said. “So afraid I’d never see you again.”
I patted him on the back. I meant it as a signal that he could disengage from the embrace, but he just squeezed me tighter.
“But I knew,” he pulled away and pointed a finger at me, “I knew that if anyone would find his way home, it’d be you.”
I smiled. “Yep. That’s me. Never count out the damned.”
He shook his head. “Don’t talk that way. What’d I always tell you? Redemption’s possible for us all.”
He swiped at his eye. It was a casual gesture, but I recognized the meaning. I’d never seen him cry in my life. He must’ve gotten sentimental in his old age.
“You can go back to Confession,” I said. “I’ll wait outside for you to finish.”
“That won’t be necessary. I’ll tell them they’ll have to come back next week. I wouldn’t be able to give them the attention they deserve knowing you’re waiting for me outside. They’ll understand.”
We both walked out of the confessional together. He shook a few people’s hands, then held up his own. “Folks, can I have your attention?!” he called out to the assembled few. “This is my prodigal son Jacob. He’s back home after a very long time away. I hope you can forgive me, but I’m going to have to reschedule Confession. I hope you all understand.”
They were all good Christians, so of course they understood. A wave of confusion spread through their ranks—probably revolving around how their priest had a son—but they all got up to leave. I explained to them that I wasn't actually his son, but that he'd raised me, and that seemed to settle down the excitement. A few of them even came up and welcomed me home even though they had no idea who I was. The old man either never mentioned me or had painted me in a far better light than I deserved. Even the old lady I’d cut in front of in line came up and welcomed me home. It was a little embarrassing.
I waited in a pew in the front of the church while my father ushered people from the building. It took about ten minutes because everyone wanted to talk with him, but eventually he came back in and sat down next to me.
“As good as it is to see you again,” he said, “I get the feeling that all is not well in the world if you’re back now.”
I nodded. “All is never well in the world. But right now things are a little less well than usual.”
He slapped a hand on my leg and stood up. “Well, come on back to the house. I’ll make some tea and we’ll talk about it."
And just like that, it was like I’d never left.
Chapter 16
His house was just as I remembered it: a little one-bedroom ranch that sat tucked away behind the church. The house wasn’t visible from the road, as it perched precariously on the bank of the Allegheny River. It seemed smaller than I remembered, a forgotten remnant of the last century eclipsed by the urbanization of the surrounding area and the increasingly mammoth structure of St. Margaret Mary’s church.
He ushered me into the house with a murmured apology about the state of the place. The house looked as immaculate as it always had, so I figured it was just an autonomic response to having visitors. For a man with his sense of decorum, he just assumed an apology was in order as soon as someone entered his home.
With the same attention to detail that had kept the house in such good order through the years, he filled his teapot with water and turned on the stove. I watched him go about the trivial task with all the attention and deliberation of a man performing brain surgery. He then left the room, leaving me to my own devices.
I’d always had a complex relationship with the man who had taken me in. It was nothing to do with him: Given the task of raising me as his own, he showed a willingness to accept and even love those parts of me that most people would find, well, repugnant. Even so, his presence in a world that was otherwise indifferent or hostile to me, made things more complicated than they needed to be. Even as a child, I’d never been one who needed or wanted support from others. My motto was the inverse of Christ’s famous line “Why have you forsaken me?” For me, the question was always, “Why haven't you forsaken me?” I could handle being forsaken. I thrived on it. Add up all the souls in Heaven, Hell, and on Earth combined that truly believed in me, and you might be able to fill a small minivan. The Old Man was the one person who never gave up on me even when I gave him every reason to do so. He made me feel accountable for my actions and their consequences, which was frankly annoying. It was probably—though I’d never admit it out loud—the main reason that I left home in the first place. I needed the freedom to be what my nature told me to be without fretting over the religious or moral implications of it. That required distance from the man who raised me as his own.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked. I hadn't heard him reenter the room, and being caught unawares was a foreign feeling. I tried to regain my footing, but questions like that threw me off my game. I wasn’t the kind of person people came up to and asked, What are you thinking about?
“I’m thinking about how everything has changed since the last time we were in the same room together.”
The teapot started to whistle. He poured the hot water and then sat down at the table across from me while it steeped.
“How so?” he asked.
“When I left, I was just some scared kid that didn’t know who or what he was and was terrified to find out. Now I have a pretty good sense of who I am, and it’s as bad as I thought it was. And I don’t care. I’m just worried what I might end up having to do before it’s all said and done.”
Vickroy sat silently, chin calmly cradled on the backs of his hands, and nodded. “You’re a good person Jacob. You always were. Not another soul on the planet could have gone through the hell that you went through and made it out the other end sane.”
My sanity was still at issue, at least as far as I was concerned, and my opinion seemed to be the most important on the matter. I didn’t want to spoil the moment by disagreeing though. Instead, we sat in silence for a while, each of us lost in our own thoughts. Probably both looking at each other and thinking how much we’d changed in the last ten years.
“I’m going to have to kill people,” I said. I don’t know why I felt compelled to bring it up. Maybe being in the church had instilled a masochistic need to confess my sins. I wasn’t willing to talk with the Old Man about the things I’d done, so I should at least be able to talk to him about the things I was still going to have to do.
A thoughtful look came over his face as he studied me. I thought he was going to chastise me, but instead he went over and brought the tea to the table.
“Are these people, or are they…other things that you have to kill?” he asked, making a ridiculous query seem perfectly reasonable. He prepared his tea the same way I remembered: a teaspoon of honey and a teaspoon of lemon.
“A little from Colum A, a little from Column B.”
“Does this have to do with the family that was killed a few days ago?”
I nodded. “I think so, but I’m not sure how just yet.”
“I see.” He nodded slowly, miles away. Finally, he said, “I think there’s something you need to see.”
He got up from his chair with a little more effort than it used to take. He went over to a long bookshelf that took up most of the far wall of the room and came back with a newspaper clipping that looked recent. He laid it on the table so it was right side up in front of me.
I scann
ed the headline: the story was about a slain defense attorney a few miles north of the city. “What does a dead lawyer have to do with me?” I asked.
“Look at the attorney’s name.”
I read through the article quickly, searching out the lawyer’s name. I did a double-take at the name: George Lynch. My adoptive brother. He was the son of the family that had eventually adopted me after my biological mother’s unfortunate demise. I read on further to find the date of his death: two days after the children disappeared, and one day before the family was murdered by the so-called Ferryman.
“Somebody really wants to get my attention,” I said.
“It appears so,” he agreed.
“The family that was murdered? They’re saying it was The Ferryman.”
He looked surprised. “There was nothing about that in the papers.”
“If you were the cops, would you want it in the papers?”
“Good point,” he said. “This must be very strange for you, then.”
Father Vickroy had met me shortly after The Ferryman’s reign of terror, but he hadn’t actually known me until after the murders. While it wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back, The Ferryman killings did put me on course to face the demon inside me. Watching my own hands take the lives of men, women, and children was more than my human side could bear, but the human couldn’t stop it. I was powerless. The barriers that existed between my human psyche and my demon nature had started to break down. The human side of me was defeated and broken, but it was also unwilling to give in. Like a caged beast, it just needed the right opportunity to strike.
“Strange would be one way to put it,” I said. “A demonic mindfuck is how I like to refer to it. But to each his own.”
I laid out the file that Volkov had given me and showed each news article one at a time. “This is what I have to go on,” I said. “A busload of missing children. A cop whose son was abducted from that very same bus. A family murdered in the style that I had made famous twenty years prior. Now my adoptive brother killed in what the papers were calling a home invasion attempt. How could all of these events not be related?”
He sipped his tea thoughtfully. I could see the gears at work inside his head.
“Okay. The cop and the missing children are obviously connected,” he said. “The cop is a member of this parish, by the way.” He threw it in almost as an afterthought.
I shot him a look. We were now pushing the bounds of what could reasonably called a coincidence.
“Really?”
“Yes. His name is Thomas Rose. I don’t know him well. I think his wife is the religious one in the family, but he comes to church every Sunday.”
“What’s your impression of him?”
“I think the loss of a child is always an enormous burden. They’ve handled it as well as could be expected, but I think he’s hanging on by a thread. It’s tough to face the darkness in the world when you have no faith to lean on.”
Not as hard as you’d think, I thought, but didn’t say anything. Thomas Rose sounded like my kind of guy. Either deal with the shit the world throws at you or suffocate under its weight. I might have to meet him.
“What was his son’s name?” I don’t know why I cared, but it seemed like something I should know. Damn Katie. She was the reason I was asking questions like this…feeling things like this. It was moving quickly from an annoyance to a liability.
“Alexander Rose. He was ten years old.”
I tried to think what it would be like to lose a son that young and to have no idea of his fate. I couldn’t fathom. Literally. I had no point of reference to even begin to empathize with what the Rose family was going through right now. He was a cop, expected to protect the public, and he couldn’t even protect his own family. It had to be a blow to his ego, his confidence, and his humanity all at once. Unlike most people in my line of work, I had no problem with cops. It wasn’t like I was slinging drugs on the street corner. By the time law enforcement was involved in the crimes I committed, I was already in the next city and on to the next kill. I had no reason to view them as hostile. I still kept my distance, but that was just good business sense.
“So we have a connection between Officer Rose and the kids,” he said. “How does your brother fit into it? Or The Ferryman, for that matter?”
“First off, don’t call him my brother. He was a sick fuck. Both of them are murderers, for one thing. And having both of them in the headlines was guaranteed to get my attention. I think they were both simply ruses to get me out in the open.”
“That’s a bit egotistical of you, don’t you think?”
“Look at the evidence. I’ve been traveling the world for over ten years. No one had any clue how to find me except for a crazy angel and his creepy kid. What are the two names that would be most likely to catch my eye?” I asked. “Lynch and The Ferryman. And both names surfaced within a day of each other. Give me a more likely reason for that to happen. It’s like taking out a Super Bowl ad to get my attention.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” he said. “I’m just saying that it’s a little bit conceited of you to think that way.”
“So sue me. The whole world revolves around me. I didn’t ask for it.”
“Would you have it any other way, though?”
I laughed harshly. This was the man who knew me at least as well as anyone else on the planet, and when it came down to it, he didn’t know me at all.
“Yes. I would have it any other way. And I mean that literally. I would have it any other goddamn way but this way. Let me fade into anonymity. Let me be a goddamned CPA. Let me not have to worry about angels or demons or crazy people trying to kill me every day. I’m fucking fine with that. To not have to worry about the fate of the world every time I open my damn eyes, and to not have to worry about going to Hell every time I close them? Sign me the fuck up.”
He took a sip of his tea and gave me an exaggerated frown. He liked to make the other guy talk. I knew all his tricks. I stayed silent.
“Would this be a bad time to ask you to come to dinner tomorrow?’
I almost laughed. Not what I expected, but I didn’t let him see me falter. “I’m guessing I’ll be busy. Or dead. Either way, I’ll probably have other plans.”
“Try to make it,” he said. “It’s been too long.”
I stared him down for a second, then shrugged. “Fine. I’ll try to make it for Sunday dinner,” I said as I stood up and drank the last of my tea. “Assuming I’m not dead. You just seemed to brush over that part.”
He stood up and patted me on the back, “You were always a little bit melodramatic. Besides, you’ve lasted this long.”
He grabbed both cups and took them to the dishwasher. He’d never had a dishwasher when I was growing up. The refrigerator and stove were new as well.
“Decided to splurge on some new appliances, I see.”
“Everything gets old,” he said. “Everything gets replaced or sticks around long enough to become obsolete.”
I got the feeling he wasn’t talking about the refrigerator.
“And yet you still have the same ugly drapes,” I said, motioning to the yellow and green kitchen curtains hanging above the sink.
He shrugged. “Some things are just classics.” He winked at me, the sparkle in his eye making him seem far younger than his seventy-five years. “We just get better with age.”
Chapter 17
I left Father Vickroy’s and went to Asgard. Strangely enough, it did seem very much like a gay bar. A lot of blond buff dudes with long hair and tight clothes. Ville and his entourage took up residence in the corner booth. He looked like Fabio except he was twenty years younger and didn’t have a tan. The rest of his posse looked like they shared the same genetic code. Most of them even shared his hairstyle.
I ignored my gut reaction to just go right up to Ville and ask him if he’d kidnapped a busload of children recently. Instead I went to the jukebox and checked out the music selection
. It wasn’t one of those internet jukeboxes; it quaintly still played CDs, and the selection was strictly European. Not bad though. There was a good selection of European metal, which was hard to come by in the States prior to everybody feeling they had a right to steal whatever they wanted. While the choices were mostly metal, there were a couple more popular Scandinavian artists thrown in. I saw a Cardigans CD in there, and there was a bit too much ABBA for my tastes. Other than that, hats off to Ville and his sexually ambiguous posse. I played a couple Opeth songs and took a chance on a band I’d never heard of and whose name I couldn’t pronounce, but whose album cover was a bunch of guys in face paint and a moderately hot blond chick.
I had to wait through a couple of songs before mine started to play. It gave me the chance to watch Ville and his boys in action. For about ten minutes, all they did was play with their hair and punch each other in the arm. It didn’t take long to determine that Ville was no criminal mastermind. If these were the descendants of Vikings, someone had splashed around in the gene pool and this was what was left behind in a nearby puddle. The only wars Ville was fighting was with his buddies at the gym to get the best angle in front of the locker room mirror.
Once my songs ended, I decided it was time to go introduce myself. He was still in the corner booth with two blond women that looked like they’d stepped out of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Either Ville was way, way overcompensating or he really wasn’t gay. More likely he just hadn’t realized it yet. It would surely dawn on him at some point.
“Excuse me,” I said when I got close enough to the table for Ville’s bodyguards to start moving toward me. “I’m looking for Ville.”
I looked at the Viking wannabe nearest Ville. He was the biggest one there. His pecs rated a solid C-cup when everyone else was just a B-cup. He stepped forward so that he could properly tower over me. This was probably where most men backed down.
“I know you,” I said. “I think I dated your mom in high school. Was her name Olaf?”