Ash Wednesday

by Chet Williamson

  "Hi, Uncle Brad."

  "Listen, I'm going out tonight, so I won't be able to tuck you in."

  Wally's face fell. "Okay."

  "Mommy can do it, can't she?"

  "Sure. I guess."

  Brad sat on the bed next to the boy. "Listen, kiddo," he said, "I know Mommy isn't . . . as much fun as she used to be. But I think she will be in time."

  "She's just scared," Wally said. "She's still scared of all the dead people."

  "Yeah, pal. I know she is."

  "I'm not. Not anymore. Fluffy isn't either."

  "I know you're not. You're a brave boy. But not everybody's as brave as you."

  "You are."

  "Well . . . I don't know."

  "You think she really will?"

  "Will what?"

  "Get used to it?"

  Brad sucked his lower lip. "Yeah. I think so."

  "I don't. I don't think she ever will. She doesn't know any better. "

  "Yeah, well, maybe she'll learn." He rubbed the little dog's ears. "Fluffy learned, right?"

  "Right. Will you be back late?"

  "Probably." The child's face contracted, as though he'd just tasted vinegar. "What's the matter?"

  "Are you coming back?"

  Brad's stomach tightened for a moment, as he realized the depth of affection that he had reached with the boy. "Of course. Sure I'm coming back. Did you think I wasn't?"

  Wally spoke with the honesty of innocence. "If I went away, I don't think I'd come back. Not to Mommy. Not if I was you. And, and before, if I was Mommy I woulda gone away and not come back to you." The boy frowned. "Is that funny?"

  "That's . . . kind of funny, yeah."

  "It's like you and Mommy traded being nice. I wish you could both be nice at the same time."

  He patted the boy's head, smoothing down the spot where an antenna of hair stuck up. "Well, maybe someday we will, huh? Give me a hug."

  They had their usual Saturday night supper—a frozen pizza and canned fruit salad, a Coke for Wally, water for Chris, a beer for Brad. Christine served as though gauging the strength of the table, and did not speak throughout the meal. Afterward, when Wally was playing in his room, Brad and Christine cleaned up together.

  "Look," he said, "do you want me not to go out tonight?"

  "Since when has what I wanted ever stopped you?"

  "I just asked. If you want me to stay home, I will."

  She gave a short laugh. "It's too late, Brad. It's too late for little . . . uh . . . whaddyacallems, gestures on your part. You don't love me, you never did love me, so do me a favor and don't start to fuck with my head now, okay? I don't care if you go out, I really don't. I don't care if you lose money, I don't care if you get laid, I don't care—"

  "About a damn thing," he broke in. "You don't care about me or your son or even yourself anymore, do you?"

  "You could've stopped it. You could've helped me—"

  "By what, running away? I don't run anymore, Chris, even if I can afford to. I'm too old to run away. This is my town, my hometown, and I'm not leaving because of blue goblins."

  "It would've been better someplace else, dammit!"

  "No! It wouldn't have been! If there aren't any ghosts, you make your own!" He hurled the tea towel onto the counter with a wet slap. "Everywhere has ghosts. The only difference is we can see ours, and I'm not so sure that that's not good."

  "Good? You think it's good?"

  "Yes. Damn right I do. 'Thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return,' ever hear that? Well, sometimes we forget it. But if we can't, if we're not allowed to forget, then maybe we act differently, we live differently."

  "I don't want to hear this." But as she turned he grasped her arm firmly and swung her around.

  "But you will. Look at me. It took me a while, but it's finally started to sink in. I thought about it more and more until I asked myself, What do you leave? What will you leave behind? And I left nothing, nothing. So I decided to leave Wally."

  Her face twisted. "Wally?"

  "He's a bright kid, a nice kid, and the way I was treating him he was going to grow up to be a shit. So I stopped, for him and for me and for you, too. But when I stopped, by the time I came to my senses, you'd lost yours."

  "You think I'm crazy?"

  "I think you're confused—confused and scared.”

  "Scared, yeah. Oh, hell yeah! But not confused . . . and I haven't lost my fucking senses either. You're the crazy one!"

  "Chris . . ." His hand went out to her in compassion, but she jerked away as though she'd seen violence in it.

  "No! Just don't touch me!" she cried, and she ran to the basement door, her shoes pounding down the steps to the rec room.

  Brad gazed at the door, thinking that although it looked open, it had in truth been closed for a long time. He went into the living room then, where Wally was watching the Muppets, his puppy resting beside him, chin on paws. Leaning down, he kissed the boy's hair, then watched him watching television for a second before he turned and left the room, hearing a softly spoken something that might have been "Bye."

  He drove to the poker game through the warmth of an early spring.

  ~*~

  Alone in the basement, Christine's thoughts gnawed at her like a rat at an ear of corn:

  Sonuvabitch. Sonuvabitch. He should talk, he should talk about Wally, he should talk after all he's said and done, calling me a whore, making my boy call me a whore, and hitting him, I know, I could see it, I could tell, and now he acts like I'm shit, like I'm nothing, like I'm a rotten fucking mother (MOTHERFUCKER!) because now he's nice, he's so goddamn nice, isn't he, buying the kid a fucking dog, a dog for crissake. Who needs a dog? Who the hell needs a goddamn dog?

  She needed no drugs to feed her rage, no alcohol to muddy her mind or dull her edge of sanity. That edge was sharp, honed razor-thin by the powerful whetstone of fear. Her thoughts felt bright and crystalline, sane as sunlight, sensible as earth, clear as seawater. Sanity in a world of madness, that was her. Was it crazy to harm what was harming you? Was it lunacy to want to survive? Was it madness to even kill to keep from dying yourself?

  He wants to hurt me. He wants to kill me. I'm dying now, falling away, and he still won't let me go. I'll hurt him. Yes. I'll hurt him.

  It all seemed very logical. So she thought and thought about how to do it, and thought some more, sitting on the hard-cushioned couch in the half darkness, until her son called to her from the top of the stairs. "Mom?"

  Wally.

  "Mommy? The Muppets is over."

  Leave Wally.

  "Mommy?"

  He wanted to leave Wally, that was what he said, wasn't it? Not leave, not go away, but leave him behind, leave him after, leave him to the world. Silly stupid thought, leave a little boy. Nothing else, he'd said, he would leave nothing else.

  Only Wally. Only the boy.

  "Mom, are you going to put me to bed?"

  Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I'll put you to bed. To sleep. That'll hurt him. Then he'll have nothing to leave. He didn't want to leave, so he won't. Never leave. Never leave anything.

  "Are you?"

  Are you, Mom? "Yes," she answered, a hollow voice coming from a hollow under the house, "I'll put you to bed."

  When she climbed the stairs to the kitchen, they did not seem as long and as steep as they had before, and when she reached their top, she was smiling.

  CHAPTER 26

  Hours later, midnight came. It was a new day, Quinquagesima, the last Sunday after Epiphany, the Sunday before Lent. It arrived in darkness, under an early March sky in which moon and stars were smothered by clouds, clouds that soon disgorged a cold, sheathing rain.

  Just a few minutes after twelve, Brad Meyers left the poker game. He had won $9 by playing cautiously, getting out of seven-card with less than a pair or three-flush on the first three, and bluffing once or twice to keep himself unpredictable. He had had a good time, and was somewhat surprised by that fact, and relieved as well, relieved th
at he still could have a good time, that he remembered how to laugh. He thought that Wally had been partly responsible for that. The boy had helped to save him as well, Brad thought. Had helped. He still had had to do most of it himself. You've got to want things. When you're sick, you've got to want yourself to get well.

  He hadn't wanted that for such a long time. He'd been content to be ill, festering in the jungle of sickness his mind had become. The confrontation with Jim Callendar had been the beginning. It hadn't been instantaneous, no miraculous epiphanic moment of truth like in the movies, but it had been the starting point, until now, a few months later, he felt cleansed at last, as if he'd thrown off something he'd been carrying for years. When he thought about what had happened to it, he felt that perhaps Callendar had picked it up, taken it on.

  Brad shook his head, thinking about the man. They were two sides of the same coin, fighting their own demons in outwardly different but inwardly similar ways, bound up in each other and in that vast impenetrable web work of destiny that included not only them, but Merridale, the living and the dead, Chris, Wally, Rorrie, Kriger, the world.

  That was behind him now—if not his involvement in it, then at least his obsession with it. Let the Fates spin as they would. He wasn't going to second-guess them again. All he was going to do now was try to live without looking over his shoulder or counting his heartbeats. Maybe in time he could even love Christine and make her love him.

  When he pulled off of Sundale Road into his driveway, he noticed the blue Pontiac parked across the street. He'd seen the car before, but only late at night, never during the day. Wondering to whom it belonged, he stepped a few feet closer to it until he heard the low hum of its engine. Then he smiled as the cold raindrops pattered on his hair.

  Jesus Christ. Parkers. It was not the only answer, but it was the logical one, and he was tickled to think that kids still parked, even in chilly weather. He silently wished them luck, then turned back toward the house, thinking how the shadow that the latticed kitchen window made on the driveway looked like the web of a large spider. He stepped into the web, and opened the back door.

  The kitchen light was on, the cellar door was closed. He heard no sound but the refrigerator rumbling in the corner, making an unseen dish, slightly unbalanced on its pile, rattle in response to the low vibration that the machine sent through the room. He went into the living room, where a low light was burning. It was empty, and he walked down the short hall into his and Christine's bedroom.

  "Hey," he whispered. There was no answer. In the dark he approached the bed, feeling blindly for the familiar contours of Chris's body under the covers, but instead the bed was flat and smooth.

  Bitch. Gone out. He could not help it. It was the first thing he could think of. In a way, he was angrier at the thought of her leaving Wally in the house alone than he was at the thought of her infidelity. He considered searching the rest of the house for her—after all, it was easier to imagine, wasn't it, that she had fallen asleep on the basement sofa than that she was out once more picking up men for a night away from Merridale's ghosts. But first he would check on Wally.

  The door to the boy's room was ajar as always, the interior palely lit by the Mickey Mouse night light. Brad edged the door open far enough to slip through, and walked softly over to the bed. Wally was there, his eyes closed, his mouth open a crack. His dark hair was plastered wetly to his forehead, and Brad thought it odd that he should be sweating with the house so cool. He pulled back the top quilt, hoping the boy didn't have a fever. Then a slight, high-pitched whine sounded in Brad's ears, and he thought it was Wally stirring in his sleep. He put a hand to the boy's head, pushed back the moist hairs, whispered, "G'night, kiddo," and went to the door. It was then that he saw the source of the whining.

  Fluffy's head protruded through the doorway, his big dark eyes looking up at Brad for a moment in supplication before he came limping into the room, holding up a shattered left forepaw. "Jesus . . .” Brad knelt by the dog. "Jesus Christ, what happened, fella?" The paw, though not bleeding, was mangled and twisted into a flattened lump of fur, flesh, and bone. When Brad gingerly touched it, the dog yelped and jerked away. "There, there," he said, "it's okay, boy, it's okay," and he patted the animal to soothe it.

  As his fingers ran the length of the dog's shivering body, they deposited something on its coat, dark streaks in sharp contrast to the fawn-brown hair.

  It's bleeding. I didn't see it was bleeding.

  He examined its head closely, but found no wound. Then he glanced at his right hand, and saw the red darkness.

  Eat the flesh. Drink the blood.

  Faces smeared crimson in firelight . . . the young boy torn from his father . . . too young for this. Oh, Christ, was anyone old enough for this? . . . Drink it, you little bastard, drink it! . . . Talk, shit! Too late for talk!

  When was the last time he had had blood on his hands?

  Ram his face in it! Now bite, bite on it, eat it, goddamn you, eat them! Chew it, make him chew it, now swallow, swallow, you bastard, and don't you puke it up, don't you puke it up or you'll eat that too!

  He didn't understand. He didn't even understand what we were saying.

  (then the boy's face came up, but instead of slanting eyes, the eyes were round, occidental, the face bore no scars, no blood coated the chin and mouth, and he was younger, years younger, and the only blood was the blood that hung wetly on his hair from some cut that the hair hid, some deep, horrible cut, and why wasn't his boy breathing, why was the only sound the dog's whining and his own lungs fluttering faster and faster and his cry that he had carried for all those years, all the way from that hot wet jungle to this cool dark bedroom, a cry of "Wally! Wally!" and that laugh, high and shrill, that laugh beneath him, under his feet, as though from hell itself, why all those sounds and no sound of his boy breathing?)

  Bradley Meyers grabbed himself, left hand on right arm, right hand on left, and realized that he had lost his second son. He stood trembling for a minute, while the laughter under his feet came and went, as though joke after joke were being told silently in the basement. He knelt beside the bed then, and pulled back the sheet.

  Wally lay there in his pajamas. Smears of blood obliterated the cartoon baseball players that decorated the pajama top, and a small but deep stain was on the pillow. The boy was on his side, his arms and legs positioned so that it looked as though he were sleeping. But when Brad lifted the limbs, they were unnaturally heavy, slightly stiff, with only a trace of warmth on the flesh. He moved his fingers to the neck to feel, beyond hope, for a pulse, but his motion made the head rock back with such pathetic fragility that a sob escaped him. He felt as if the stem of the loveliest rose in his garden had been snapped, the blossom tossed onto an ash heap. He had barely had time to nourish it, and it could have grown so beautifully, lived so long.

  The laugh bubbled up again from below, and he pulled back the tears, his features broadening with the effort. He turned, still kneeling, and picked up the pup. Its whining ceased as he held it to him, warming it against his down-filled Army jacket. Its dead paw dangled helplessly, tapping his coat like some fleshy pendulum as he rose and walked into the kitchen, opened the basement door, looked down the stairs at the two lights, the white and the blue.

  Now the laughter was louder, more mocking, nearly drowning out the sound of the rain that had begun without his noticing, and he could see Christine's feet and ankles, crossed jauntily on the hard, tile floor. From their position he knew that she was sitting on the couch. The white light from the lamp defined the outlines of her feet, the blue light gave them tone, atmosphere, the blue light of Wally's ghost, Wally's corpse-candle, the bright cerulean beam of Wally Grimes's raw evidence of mortality.

  Brad moaned low, and the dog twisted in his arms, but he patted its head and it grew still. He descended the stairs, and let more and more of Christine's body come into view. Wally's form had been visible all along from the stair top—thin, stark, twisted, a blue, porcelain s
tatue shattered from a fall . . .

  Did I do it?

  He banished the thought. He would not feel guilt now, he would not. Omission or commission (or co-commission, he thought dimly) he could deal with later. Not now. He held the dog tighter, and took the last step into the basement.

  "Welcome home, Daddy," Christine giggled. "Welcome home." She gestured merrily to Wally's fallen figure. "Do you know that this is the first one of these fuckers I haven't been scared of?"

  "What happened?" He had wanted his voice to sound stronger.

  "He fell. Down the cellar stairs. Rumpety-pumpety-pum!" She giggled again.

  "Did you . . . push him?"

  "Wouldn't you like to know?"

  "I have to know. Did you?"

  She leaned forward, elbows on knees, and looked at him intently. "So you'll know what to do?" she said slowly, sneeringly. "I'm not scared of you, you asshole bastard. Yes. I pushed him. I pushed him right down the old stairs, and then I came down them myself and watched him leave. You wanted to leave him? Well, he's the one who left. And it took him a long time too. I'd just finished tucking him in when you got here, when you pulled up from your night out with the boys." She grinned. "Have a good time? Win a dog? Win another little son of a bitch?" She cocked her head and shook it. "Mutt was harder than the kid. One good tramp and he was off. Couldn't find him anywhere. Didn't look hard. Watching him was easier." She gestured at the revenant. "It was just like a One Step photo—you know? just . . . showed up. And he was dead." Her expression softened for a moment, her lower lip drooped, her jaw dropped slowly, as she looked at the residue of her son.

  "The dog's crippled," Brad said. He took the dog and held it out for her to see. As she looked, her face was empty of emotion. It did not change until Brad grasped the animal's neck, let it hang unsupported, and twisted his arm once. With a furious snap, the neck broke, the animal voided itself, and Brad let it fall, silent and unmoving, to the tile floor, where its corporeal body occupied the same space as its master's less physical one.