by Harvey Click
“Why not?”
“Because Linda just died. It’s like getting horny at a funeral.”
“Me and Linda made love sometimes,” Toya said. “She ever tell you that?”
“No.”
“Probably lots of things she never told you. She used to talk about having a threesome with me and you. If you don’t believe me, you can ask her.”
“I don’t care what you and Linda did,” he said. “I don’t think she wants me doing anything with another woman right now.”
“Let’s ask her what she wants.”
“Let’s not.”
“Suits me,” she said. “It’s not like I’m getting paid or anything. You feel like being selfish, that’s okay with me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you don’t care what Linda wants, just so everything’s done according to your Bible training. You think when people die all you gotta do is stick them in the ground and wear black for a little while and dump flowers on their grave once a year. Since you’re worried she’s still stuck in that pit, maybe you better go ask a preacher to sprinkle some holy water or something. While you’re at it, ask him how many dead people he’s talked to lately.”
Maybe Toya was right, he thought. At least Linda had sounded happier last night. Maybe they had soothed her fear. Maybe getting used to death was a lonely job without the help of loved ones. Mourners held funerals to ease the passage of the deceased, but Linda had no funeral, no grave, no flowers, no obituary. He’d helped her through dozens of small crises, so why should he abandon her now? The dark flames of sunset reminded him of a place he would hate to face alone.
“I want to help her,” he said. “But I don’t want to do it this way.”
“I can feel what you want,” she said, “and it’s not what they teach you in Sunday school.”
Toya’s toes wriggled like fish nibbling his erection, and trying to will it away made it harder. Dignity’s just a suit of clothes, Mark thought. The thing that wears it is still a slobbering ape. He had read that somewhere, but probably not in the Bible.
“Wouldn’t you like to be with Linda again?” she asked.
He remembered the way her knees used to shudder against him when they made love. He remembered the way her lips would pull at his.
“Of course I would,” he said.
“So would I,” Toya said. “And I know she wants to be with us. So let’s have that threesome now, just you and me and Linda.”
Mark got out of the tub and toweled dry. The sky above the fence was a livid purple blotch. He wondered if it was a harbinger of heaven or hell or just rain.
They went upstairs and lay on his bed. Toya started breathing slowly and deeply, and then Linda’s voice said, “Mark, I’ve missed you so much. I’ve missed having you in bed like this.”
Her lips pulled on his the same way Linda’s used to, but there was a little barbell in her tongue rubbing against the roof of his mouth and her breasts felt bigger and firmer.
“Make me happy,” she said. “You know how. Play with my puddycat. Put your mouth there.”
The shaved groin and labia rings belonged to a stranger, but the taste on his tongue was Linda’s. He remembered their first date and the smell of the blue silk panties in his dresser drawer.
“Mmm, that feels good,” she said. “Put the bad boy inside me.”
He entered her, wanting to feel that shudder in her knees again and that way she clutched him like no other woman.
“Oh God, fuck me hard,” she said. “Tell me you love me.”
“I love you.”
“Say it again.”
“I love you, I love you,” Mark said.
Toya’s knees started to shake. “I want you deeper,” she said. “Take me to heaven.”
He heard heaven in her voice and felt it in her lips and loins. If she hadn’t completely escaped the pit, he was going to bring her the rest of the way out. He was going to take her all the way up to the City of Light.
“Oh God yes,” she said. ‘‘Fuck me hard till the angels sing.”
Linda pressed her tongue into his mouth, and Toya’s barbell banged against his teeth. Heaven and hell were the same thing, he thought, like the golden sun turning cold and purple at sunset. Toya’s knees shuddered the same way Linda’s used to. She let out the same cat-purr and clawed his back the same way. Mark had loved that shudder for three years, and he came inside her when he felt it.
The three of them lay back against the wet sheets, hot and panting. Toya found the box of tissue paper on the night stand and blew her nose. Then there were just two of them, and the room sounded quiet and dead.
“I guess that was heaven,” she said. “But I sure feel like hell.”
***
Toya went to the bathroom and got under the shower. She felt dirty all over. She told herself there was nothing wrong with what she and Mark had done, just sharing their love with Linda, but she couldn’t remember why she had wanted to do it so badly. Her head ached and her throat tasted like blood.
Something freaky about calling up Linda, and not just because she was a friend. That first séance, right before the seizure, an ugly blast of static had interrupted Linda’s voice. It had sounded like some sort of electronic noise, like digital death downloading in her head.
Probably just Linda’s death-fear zapping me, Toya thought. No more fear now. Me and Mark took Linda past all that, and tonight we took her all the way up the shiny road. Best orgasm ever, three people all mixed together, warm heaven mixed with hot sex, what a great fucking buzz!
Except it hadn’t felt like that, not really. More like a big burst of bloody darkness spurting in her brain.
Toya rubbed shampoo in her hair, wishing it could wash away her headache. Her link with Linda was so strong that sometimes she wasn’t quite sure who she was. Toya, Linda, two peas in a pod, two brains in one head, she thought. It was worth a few headaches to experience that kind of intimacy. Nothing to fear, not getting sick or getting old or even dying.
Nothing to fear, but deep in the marrow of her bones she was scared, in some deep buried part of her getting deeper and smaller all the time like a shriveling corpse in a sinking grave. Her memories were mixed up with Linda’s and with other things that didn’t seem like memories, pictures that didn’t make sense, weird people burrowing through the dirt like worms and firestorms burning on some rocky shoreline that she’d never seen and Linda probably hadn’t either. Fucking freaky.
Suddenly all the wine she had drunk came spewing out of her mouth. Something else too.
Blood.
She felt better after it washed down the drain. A pleasant old song began to play in her head: “Come live with me and live forever, your life is death and now is never.”
She sang along with it, and the shower nozzle seemed to be singing too. Why worry? she thought. Be happy. Death don’t mean shit.
She shut off the water and dried herself. Her nose was running, and she went to the mirror to look. Another damn nosebleed. She’d been having them since the first séance.
As she wiped her nose with a wad of toilet paper, she noticed some white mucus in one of her nostrils. She pulled it out and looked at it and wanted to vomit again.
It was a little white worm wriggling in a smear of blood.
Chapter Seventeen
Monday night Dexter sat in his study poring over Ebenezer’s journal, hand-copied because Naomi had never permitted him to Xerox it.
He’d picked up the copy from his office at the university after spending an uncomfortable hour or two being questioned by the police. When he got home from the university, he brought in his laptop from his car, since his desktop computer had been stolen, and spent another uncomfortable hour or two searching the Internet for information about the two murders at Heathenhead.
Four other people had been murdered a few miles away the same night. One of them was named Darrel Kane, and his car had been found parked off the road near Heathenhead. Two other
men were still unidentified, and the only woman was an ex-con named Lizzie Murphy.
It was obvious that Mary and Grimes had nothing to do with the murders, since they already had what they wanted. But Dexter wasn’t so innocent. He knew his article had been a death warrant for Naomi and Miss Barkley.
“Look to yourself for the answer, Dr. Radcliff, and look to the words of your ancestor,” Grimes had said. “Then you’ll know why you started all this trouble and why I kept you safely out of it.”
Dexter knew Ebenezer’s story almost as well as his own, but he looked carefully for details he might have missed. For the first month that Ebenezer owned it, the Horn had refused to talk to him. Most other men would have given up on it, but Ebenezer was persistent and so were the rumors that spirits had spoken through it to its previous owner, Fallen Crow. Ebenezer developed a ritual, each night speaking into the Horn like a child dutifully saying his prayers, and one night his persistence paid off: a voice spoke back, asking Ebenezer who he was.
It was the voice of an Englishman, not an Indian spirit at all. For thirteen nights, it asked questions and answered none. It must have liked Ebenezer’s answers because it offered to teach him “miracles and wonders, the secrets of Earth and Hell,” and promised that the apprenticeship would last beyond the grave “in the murky Hereafter, where dead souls most sorely need a Guide.” After Ebenezer sawed off his left index finger as a proof of loyalty, the Englishman revealed his name, though Ebenezer never spelled it out in his journal. He referred to his teacher merely as R. B. or the Philosopher.
Ebenezer took the money he’d saved from his years of fur-trading and moved to New York City, where he rented an apartment and set up a crude laboratory. The Philosopher’s many areas of erudition included alchemy, and for the rest of his life Ebenezer attempted to create a Philosophers’ Stone capable of transmuting lead into gold. Another lifelong quest was for the Elixir of Longevity. He failed in both pursuits. He spent many pages grumbling about poverty for the first three years of his apprenticeship, but these complaints ended after his medicines began to sell.
He was thirty-four years old when he founded Radcliff’s Patent Remedies, and barely able to afford the bottles and labels. He was soon one of the wealthiest men in New York. Radcliff’s Patent Remedies did something that most medicines of the time didn’t: they worked. Praises of their efficacy were sung in magazines and newspapers, copies of them still crumbling beneath dust and pigeon shit in one of the towers of Heathenhead. The formulas came from the mysterious R. B., as did the ideas for the innovative optical devices that soon doubled Ebenezer’s fortunes. By the time he died, at the age of ninety-one, classified government contracts made the receipts from medicine look like pocket change.
Radcliff’s Patent Remedies became Radcliff & Radcliff, its name stamped on products in every home, but the company’s fortunes waned after the death of Ebenezer’s son. Naomi’s father, having no interest in business or science or the Talking Horn, watched the account books turn red and then shut forever at the beginning of the Depression. Now the estate was gone and even the Talking Horn, and all that was left was the idiot whose article had caused his aunt’s death.
Long pages of the journal were filled with formulas so esoteric that Dexter had never paid attention to them. He studied them now for a clue, but they still made no more sense than his own idiocy. Ebenezer himself complained that his mentor’s instructions were impenetrable:
“Tonight the Philosopher spoke again of the Elixir of Longevity, though the names of many of its ingredients I have never heard, and their very existence I doubt, and methods required for their preparation and administration are surpassingly tedious and laborious, quite beyond the poor skills I currently possess. The Philosopher’s teachings are often cloaked in such obscure riddles that I wonder if they are designed to be unintelligible. If his riddles signify any meaning whatsoever, it is not with their words but rather with the shadows cast by the words. With due respect I questioned him, saying if he knew the secrets of Longevity, then why should he today be in the Land of the Dead, and he answered that these were secrets that he acquired in the Hereafter, and with which he was unfortunately not acquainted during his sojourn on Earth. Whereupon I asked him if these herbs and ingredients could be found on any continent of Earth, pagan or civilized, and if so by what name they would be called, and he referred me again to the 13th treatise of the Secretum Secretorum, but therein I found no answer apparent to my eyes.”
The Secretum Secretorum. The Secret of Secrets was a set of treatises ascribed to Aristotle, but most likely penned by an anonymous Medieval alchemist. Dexter tried to recall where he’d recently seen the title. Yes—he’d read an article about Roger Bacon that mentioned Bacon’s acquaintance with the apocryphal work. Was it possible that R. B., Ebenezer’s Philosopher, was the thirteenth-century alchemist Roger Bacon?
He turned the page. “Tonight the Philosopher revealed to me one of his secret names. I dare not write it here lest his enemies see the name and gain power over him, but he told me that I might safely transcribe it thus: > ( + (.”
Dexter stared at the symbols. He had copied them with his own hand and glanced at them a dozen times without finding any meaning, but tonight they seemed to blaze with fire on the page. He saw his childhood bedroom again, saw the crayon drawings of the moon taped on the walls, and he remembered something that his “see Dick run” first-grade reader had made him forget.
He remembered the secret alphabet Mr. Grinchin had taught him before he learned the real one, and he saw that Ebenezer’s code resembled his own childish made-up letters. He sounded out the characters, and the word he formed was Ghrensken.
Ghrensken. Grinchin.
His eyes fell on the next sentence: “The Wisdom-Sayer’s soul grows closer to mine with each secret name he gives me.”
Wisdom-Sayer. Dexter remembered something Professor Krickbaum had said: “Ach, Dr. Ratliff! So agreeable it is to meet you here at last. Many good things the visdom-sayer has said about you.”
The house was still except for the patter of rain on the roof. Questions tumbled through the silence, and Dexter couldn’t answer any of them. He stared at his bookcases and filing cabinets and wanted to see an enemy lurking behind them. He was hungry for action, but nothing moved except the rain.
He checked the windows and doors and lay down on the living room couch fully dressed with his Colt 1911 cocked and locked beside him. He dreamt that someone was knocking on his door, and he dreamt that he opened it but nothing was out there except that Goddamned rain turning the world to mud and washing it into the sewers, and the nothingness outside was more frightening than any intruder.
Then he heard the knocking again, and he opened his eyes and sat up. The moonlight drizzling through the drapes turned the wrecked furniture into nightmare thugs. He snapped the Colt’s safety down and padded to the door, his right foot numb like a prosthesis. He peered through the peephole and thought he was still dreaming.
It was Mary.
He opened the door, and they stared at each other. Her face was cut and bruised.
“Go ahead and shoot me if you want,” she said, “but don’t make me stand out here all night in the fucking rain.”
Dexter realized he was pointing the gun at her. He lowered it and said, “Come in.”
“I better hide my car.”
“I’ll open the garage,” he said.
Her Jeep chugged into the garage and kept coughing exhaust after she shut it off. Her face looked worse in the garage light, black and blue and swollen.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. You want me to leave, I will.”
“No. Just don’t tell me any more lies, I’ve heard enough.” He carried her duffel bags to the kitchen and dropped them on the floor beside a box of broken debris.
“Jesus, what happened?” she asked.
“Burglars. Maybe you know their names.”
“Were you here?” she asked.
“No, your buddy Grimes kept me occupied with some cute parlor tricks. Maybe you know about that too.”
“He was supposed to keep you safe,” she said.
“Yeah, well I don’t much care for his idea of safety. How do you know him?”
“It’s a long story,” she said.
“I’ve got all night.”
Mary placed something on the table, a wire pyramid with a rock dangling inside it. “This stone should start moving if Ryver comes around,” she said.
“Who’s Ryver?”
“Didn’t Grimes tell you?”
“No. He didn’t tell me much.”
“He was supposed to,” she said. “That was part of the deal.”
“What deal?”
“Do you know about your aunt?” she asked.
“I know she’s dead.”
“Ryver’s the man who killed her,” Mary said. “I tried to protect her, but I got there too late.”
“Got where?”
“Heathenhead. I missed Ryver by a few minutes.” Mary looked up from the stone, her eyes familiar and strange. “I just came back to explain some things,” she said. “I don’t expect you to forgive me.”
“Back from where?”
“New York.”
“It’s a long drive,” he said. “You want some coffee?”
“Yeah. Strong.”
“You hungry?”
“Starving,” she said. “Goddamn Jeep broke down twice.”
“The cousins think you killed her. That’s what they told the New York police, so I had to spend two hours today telling the Columbus police that I’ve known you for three months but don’t really know any damn thing at all anything about you.”
“Maybe you think I killed her too,” she said.
He looked away from her bruised face and didn’t say anything.
“Well, I didn’t,” she said. “Part of the plan was to protect her…after your article was published.”
He chewed over the insinuation for a minute and then said, “What was the other part? You didn’t steal it just to protect Naomi.”