by Lee Thomas
She walked to the side of Lucio’s house and then around to the back.
Lucio had taken great pains with his garden. He had been particularly fussy about his roses, she remembered, having seen him on numerous occasions pruning branches and testing the soil. They were black now. Everything in his precious garden was, and the discoloration spread to the far back of his property. It was already climbing the trees of the greenbelt separating the neighborhood from Seventh Street.
Maxine turned back for the front of the house and noticed the glass patio door stood open. She shook her head and marched forward. The police had probably left it open after their investigation of Lucio’s suicide. Lazy bastards. The glass wasn’t broken, and as she approached, she saw no sign of tampering along the metal frame, so she discounted the likelihood of thieves—at least sloppy ones.
At the open door, Maxine poked her head in. “Hello?” she called, not expecting an answer.
But a sound did come back to her. Not voices. Not someone calling out an explanation for his or her presence in the home of a suicide. Instead, she heard thumps and raps, like someone locked in a distant closet, attempting to escape.
Maxine walked into the house and immediately saw motion ahead, though the gloom made it difficult to identify the details of the shape. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed 9-1-1. Her thumb hovered over the send icon on her phone’s screen. Cautiously, she made her way across the kitchen.
Ahead, she was startled to see a man lying face down on the floor. At first, she’d thought he was having a seizure. He jerked and spasmed against the hardwood, but just his torso and head. His hands and feet were motionless. Next to him, a woman similarly thrashed. Maxine continued forward until she saw all four of the bodies on the floor of the dining room, each of them in an agitated state. And then she noticed the spikes that secured them to the floor and her skin puckered tightly around muscles suddenly cold.
Remembering the phone she jabbed the send command and put the phone to her ear as she backed away from the horrors in the room.
A shrill squeal like nails on a blackboard erupted from the speaker and Maxine yanked it away from her head. She turned to flee the house and saw with dread John Lucio standing in the opening of the patio door.
Denis woke to an empty bed and his heart skipped.
“Fred?” he muttered. He looked around the room. Found it empty. He repeated the name only louder.
When no answer was forthcoming, he climbed out of bed. He walked through the house calling Fred’s name, but there was no response. Getting concerned, he went to the French doors overlooking the patio and peered out, half expecting to see the man standing naked, drinking his coffee at the railing. But he wasn’t there either.
A little over seven months earlier he’d made a similar circuit around a different house, only the name he’d been calling was “Benjamin.” He’d had no concern back then, just curiosity, wondering where his partner had gotten to so early in the morning.
Eventually, he’d found Benjamin on the floor of the garage. Lips parted. Eyes wide. Motionless.
Only later had Denis learned about his partner’s heart condition. Benjamin’s mother had told him at the funeral home, where they’d met to discuss arrangements.
“Fred?” Denis called, storming away from the patio doors.
The front door opened. Fred lurched inside and threw the door closed. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “The little prick slashed my tire.”
Denis, confused, paused by the sofa. “What?”
“I went out to get the paper. Fucking paperboy drops it at the end of the driveway every god damn day, so I gotta walk to the street to get it. And I see my car. The back tire has been slashed.”
“Are you sure it isn’t just low?”
“No, it’s not just low,” Fred barked. “There’s a gash an inch long.”
“And you think Eric did it?”
Fred shot him a look that said, Duh, and then stomped toward the bedroom. “I have to call Triple-A.”
“And the cops,” Denis said.
“No cops. They wouldn’t do anything about it—probably couldn’t do anything about it. I don’t have any evidence. Besides, the fucker only did it to get a rise out of me. He doesn’t have to know it worked.”
Maxine came to slowly. There was a terrible scent in the air that she couldn’t identify, and a squealing sound, like rats in the walls. The first time she opened her eyes, she saw nothing but a smudge of light, and then she drifted off again, though she didn’t realize it—time simply skipped a beat. She was truly awoken by a louder version of the squealing she’d heard before. Terrified that she shared a room with rats, Maxine opened her eyes.
She sat in a corner of John Lucio’s dining room with her hands tied behind her back. A thick wad of cotton had been shoved into her mouth as a gag. To her horror, she saw that she’d been stripped naked. She trembled from both fear and chill, and every muscle in her body ached as if she’d been pummeled from head to foot. Tears filled her eyes, and she sobbed into the cotton gag.
John Lucio knelt on the floor over one of his victims. With his thumb and index finger he wiggled the spike that held a young man face down on the floor. Then Lucio pulled the nail free. It emerged, accompanied by the familiar squeal. Metal against wood.
Behind him, two of his victims, the man and the woman Maxine had first seen, crawled on the floor, heads turning from side to side as if listening to music. She didn’t recognize these people, didn’t want to recognize them. Something was wrong with their skin. It was dry and gray, flaking from the muscle beneath like ancient parchment. Their lips were black. Their eyes were the color of oatmeal, with tiny black holes at their centers. Bones poked through their arms randomly, whether from compound fracture or unnatural growth Maxine didn’t know. A third broken person crawled into view; its mouth was open, revealing a jagged fence of sharp, shattered teeth.
She screamed into the wad of cotton, catching the attention of Lucio who was removing another spike, releasing the right foot of the boy sprawled only a yard from Maxine. The man in the suit who was supposed to be dead, stood and observed her. He looked so peaceful. Content. He stepped back and wiped dust from the sleeve of his suit. Then he observed the victims in the room and swept his arm toward Maxine.
The victims responded, crawling toward her like eager infants. She tried to move out of the corner, but Lucio was there. He placed his foot against her shoulder and wedged her against the wall. She struggled against it. She didn’t want to die. Not here. Not like this.
The four victims surrounded her. One grabbed her ankle with its destroyed palm. Another leaned close to her chest, sniffing at her skin curiously. It pushed its nose against her breast and she squealed in disgust. When it opened its mouth, Maxine observed the saw-like teeth and shrieked.
It bit, pinching the skin unbearably before it whipped its head back and forth and tore away a piece of her breast. Blood spilled in gouts from the ragged lips of the wound. Maxine lost her breath from the pain. From the sight of a part of her disappearing into the black-lipped mouth. The thing chewed and made a humming sound in its throat as if delighted by the flavor. Turning to the others, the victim nodded his head.
And they all began to eat.
The downpour they’d been expecting started while they were eating a late breakfast at Dewey’s. Before going to the restaurant, they’d dealt with Triple A, and Denis had followed Fred to the dealership, so he could drop off his car and get a new tire to replace the one Eric had destroyed. The dealership couldn’t make any promises, but they might have the new tire on the rim and the rim on the car before noon.
Denis hated to see Fred’s mood sour even more, but he understood, and he remained silent, allowing the man to vent all the way to the restaurant and through most of the meal.
“Now it’s raining,” Fred said.
“Supposed to go on for a few days.”
“Great.” Fred dropped his fork and looked out the
window. “I’m sorry. I’m going to be lousy company for a while. If you want to drop me off at home, we can try the mountains next week. I’m feeling a heavy sulk coming on.”
“I don’t mind sulking, but if you want to be alone that’s cool.”
“What I want is to hurt that prick. But I won’t because I’m not twelve-years old and because it’ll just give him the jollies he was after all along.”
They drove back to Fred’s in silence. At the lip of the park, Denis followed the road to the left.
The park was built on a sloped parcel of land, surrounded by dense shrubs and trees. The main lawn sunk into a broad bowl of well-trimmed grass. Roads framed its periphery. Denis drove up the rise on the north side of the park, but when they reached the corner on which John Lucio had built his house, he pulled over and stopped.
“Do you see that?” Fred asked.
“I’m surprised we didn’t see it this morning,” Denis said.
“We didn’t come this way. The dealership is the other direction.”
“Still,” Denis said.
The black stain covered Lucio’s entire property and had drifted well into the park. “It’s all the way back to the greenbelt,” Fred noted. “What is that shit?”
“Maybe we can ask that guy,” Denis said.
He pointed over the steering wheel at a tall man wearing hunter green hip waders and latex gloves. He stood in the middle of Lucio’s lawn, poking the ground with a metal tube. A white van sporting the city’s health department decal sat at the curb.
“Don’t know,” the man, whose name was Steve, said. “Just getting my samples now.”
“Have you seen anything like this before?” Denis asked.
“Can’t say yes,” Steve replied. “Any idea who lives here? No one answered the door.”
“He’s dead,” Denis told the man. “He killed himself earlier in the week.”
“Oh,” Steve said, looking at a plastic bag holding a divot of black lawn. “I’ll have to call it in then. I need documentation before I can enter the house. If I had to guess, I’d say the guy doused everything down with some kind of herbicide before he said goodnight. Maybe he didn’t like his neighbors and he wanted them to know.”
“Are there herbicides that can do this?”
“I suppose,” Steve said with a shrug. “I need to get a few more samples up by the house to see if the concentrations are different. He might have chemicals in the basement leaking all over the place. That’d be real bad. But we’ll get it squared away.”
Back in the car, Denis said, “I think you should stay at my place for a couple of days until they figure this out.”
Fred was looking out the window at the house beside Lucio’s. The stain had reached the halfway point in the yard. “I think you’re right,” he said.
They stopped at Fred’s house so he could gather clothes, toiletries, his phone charger and laptop. With his bag packed Fred walked through the house and checked the locks on all of the doors and windows.
“I’m paranoid like that,” Fred said with a half-hearted smile.
Instead of going directly to Denis’s apartment, they returned to the auto dealership, where Fred picked up his car. At Denis’s apartment Fred excused himself to the balcony to make calls.
He needed to touch base with a friend. When Denis checked on him, Fred was standing at the railing, holding his hand out to catch raindrops on his palm. He laughed into the phone. It was good to see him smiling, Denis thought.
Early afternoon, they lay in the bed listening to the rain. Denis spooned Fred, arm wrapped around the man’s thick chest. Since he was so silent, only light even breaths, Denis thought his boyfriend was sleeping until Fred said.
“Ivan says you’re the gold.”
“You have a friend named Ivan? Do we know any of the same people?”
“Maybe,” Fred replied. “I don’t know.”
“What did he mean gold?”
“I have a theory. See I’m convinced there’s a cosmic scale and for all the gold on one plate there is an equal weight of shit on the other. Eric and his prank fall squarely on the shit side. Whatever is happening to my neighborhood is also weighing things down. But then there’s you.”
“I like your theory, though I can’t say I buy it.”
“You don’t have to. I know it’s nuts. But think about it. We met on Tuesday, not even a week ago, and we haven’t spent a night apart since. I’ve never done that before. Never wanted to.”
“Neither have I.”
“And my being in that grocery store was totally random.”
“I was going to ask you about that.”
“I had a meeting at the coffee shop across the parking lot, and I figured it would be easier to run in there than to look for parking where I normally shop.”
“I’m glad.”
“Yeah, me too. And I’m not saying this other shit wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t met. I had no intention of seeing much more of Eric, so that was already in motion, and I can’t imagine Old Johnny was waiting around for me to bring home a hot trick before he offed himself. But I’m glad we met, to keep things balanced.”
“Well, it’s better than you thinking I jinxed you or cursed you or something.”
“No chance of that,” Fred said. He pushed his ass back into Denis’s crotch and growled deep in his throat.
They lay there quietly. The rain rapped in a soothing rhythm against the window. Denis rubbed his hand over Fred’s stomach. It was a good moment, except Denis couldn’t shake the word, “curse.”
Fred had said something about John Lucio’s suicide note. Something about cursing the world.
John Lucio—
The Book of Wives has told me: Tonight the sky will be wrung of light and I will offer my blood at the Gate of Hell. It will grease the hinges, so that as I enter it will throw wide. I sacrifice my Christian soul and curse this sinners’ world. In return I will be given After Life. I will anoint four apostles in the black honey, and they will walk the East, the West, the North and the South, spreading the Word. As the souls of the living pass through the gates, the darkness seeps free. Doubters will know truth.
I will know forever.
“You were right,” Denis said. “That’s pretty crazy.”
“Yeah, right? But check out the left side of the screen.”
“What am I looking for?”
“The guy had two thousand ‘friends.’”
“And nobody thought to check on him? Some friends.”
Fred closed the laptop and leaned back in his chair. “Well, his little show was pretty convincing if you ask me. I mean all of the plants dying after he commits suicide. He put together an intricate hoax, if it is a hoax.”
“What else could it be?” Denis asked.
Fred shrugged. “I just can’t imagine him spraying chemicals all over the neighborhood like that. Someone would have had to see him.”
“So it’s more reasonable to believe a Christian activist sacrificed himself to the devil to damn the world?”
“The question isn’t whether he would or wouldn’t do it. Those whack jobs get some fucked up ideas in their heads. The question is whether it worked or not.”
“No more horror movies for you.”
“Try and stop me,” Fred said. He smiled, leaned forward and gave Denis a kiss. “Just so you know, Ivan has a spare room if you want some time to yourself. I don’t want you to feel trapped.”
“I don’t feel trapped. Besides, the city will probably have figured all of this out by morning and you can go back to your place without worrying about toxic exposure or demon possession.”
The next afternoon the steady rain shower intensified. They had gone to an early movie and afterward decided to check on Fred’s neighborhood. Denis felt a chill as he navigated up the sloped drive of the park. The terrain was painted in shades of gray from the storm. Pellets of rain smeared the air and made the sprawling lawns and picnic gazebos appear unreal, like ancient
photographs with badly scratched surfaces. As they neared the far side of the park, they saw the news vans and the city vehicles surrounding the corner lot. A crowd of people stood in the park watching the scene. They too were gray. None of them held an umbrella. This group—easily forty people—stood unprotected from the downpour as they stared at the house by the park. Away from this aggregation on the other side of the road, two aged men in black stood beneath the semiglobes of umbrellas. They had the white collars that identified them as priests. They too were motionless, but instead of looking at the house, their attention was captured by the group of onlookers across the road.
“Street’s blocked,” Denis said, pointing to the barricade ahead. Flashing orange lights seemed to be the only color in an otherwise grayscale landscape.
“Hopefully, they’re cleaning up whatever Lucio put in the ground.”
“Do you want me to head back to Seventh Street and come in from the other direction?”
“Absolutely,” Fred said. “Somebody up there must know what’s going on.”
Denis navigated a three-point turn. His headlights fell over the priests and both men turned toward the car. Their faces were stern, agitated. Their gazes were intense, yet looked weary like pictures of soldiers Denis had seen on the web. One of the men touched the cross hanging from his neck. The other nodded solemnly.
They encountered another roadblock on the opposite end of Fred’s street. Another group of onlookers, as unaware of the weather as the congregation in the park, had gathered just outside the barricade, and police officers shouted for them to get back, but the rain-soaked crowd paid them no attention. Oblivious. They remained a motionless pack, staring past the police and through the downpour at the house by the park.
“We’re not going to get any answers,” Denis said. “I don’t even think we can get anybody’s attention.”