by Harvey Click
Mary saw headlights approaching from behind. “Shit! Here they come,” she said.
They ran into the building, and a young man with a rifle bolted the door behind them. There were several other young men in the room, all of them armed. They were handsome and muscular, but there was a deadness in their eyes, and their faces didn’t look as healthy as their bodies.
“You’re safe here,” one of them said. “These walls are steel-plated and the window is bulletproof.”
Though on the outside the building resembled a small old barn, the front room looked modern and clean with a rack of cigarettes and chewing tobacco behind the counter, a soft drink cooler against one wall, and a few snack shelves against another wall. Mary peered out at a red Buick and a blue Blazer idling on the road in front of the station. Camouflage masks stared from the car windows. The Buick slowly moved on, and the Blazer made a U-turn and drove off in the other direction.
“Athena will see you back here,” one of the men said, opening a door behind the counter.
Grimes helped Garrick, who was reeling on his feet. He looked bad, eyes bloodshot, mask coming loose. Mary and Dexter followed them through a storeroom to a smaller room with a sofa and chairs but no window. The young men stayed in the storeroom.
Letha watched from a smoke screen, and she wasn’t smiling. “Shut the door,” she said.
Grimes shut it. “The muscle boys seem to think you’re some kind of goddess,” he said.
“It’s nice to be adored by handsome young men,” she said. “I much prefer them to tiresome old fools. The whole town worships me.”
“What’s that, about ten suckers?” he asked.
“Over four hundred, but who’s counting? Sit down.”
The others sat, but Mary stood. Her wire bracelet squirmed nervously.
“No doubt someday you’ll be as popular as Jim Jones,” Grimes said. “I daresay they’re all men?”
“I allow women in my town but not in my temple.”
“Temple,” he said. “This is rather outlandish, even for you. What do these poor saps get out of the arrangement, an occasional tumble with the goddess?”
“For one thing, they learn how to kill,” Letha said. “Each one of them is capable of killing you in approximately one second, not that it would take much skill. Let’s skip the pleasantries and get down to business. You brought the Lost Ones with you, just like I knew you would. Right now they have two cars positioned north and south of town, and they’re calling for backup.”
“What are you worried about?” Grimes asked. “You say you have four hundred disciples who can kill in approximately one second.”
“The Lost Society has a lot more than four hundred,” she said. “I’ve been safe and happy here for many years. Now I’m not safe and I’m not happy. Okay, let’s get moving. My men will strip-search you before they escort you to the temple. That goes for you too, Garrick.”
“Nobody’s taking my clothes off,” Mary said. “We already gave up our weapons.”
“You still have weapons,” Letha said, “like that animate wire you’re trying to hide with your hand.”
“No one takes my bracelet.”
“Shut up,” Letha said.
The air wrapped itself around Mary like a straitjacket. Then everything went black.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Mary collapsed to the floor and Dexter slumped forward in his chair. Garrick stared at his mother’s image and stammered.
“Don’t worry about them,” she said. “It’s just their nap time.”
The door opened and some muscle boys with guns came in. “Strip,” one of them said. “Everything off.”
Garrick turned his back to his father, who hadn’t seen his naked body since he was a boy, but he worried that his mother was still watching from the screen. Certainly her young studs were watching, and his seeping cankers itched with shame while they stared.
Out of the corner of his eye he watched two of them roughly stripping Bitter and her boyfriend, both of them still unconscious. At least she wasn’t able to see his sores. He knew he shouldn’t stare at her lying there naked on the floor, but his eyes refused to look away, and he saw that she was badly bruised and one of her breasts was bandaged.
The search was quick but thorough and included body cavities. Four men hastily dressed Bitter and Dexter and carried them out a side door, still unconscious, but for some reason Garrick and his father were told to continue standing there naked, maybe so they wouldn’t be tempted to run after their friends in the rain.
Garrick stood and shivered, weak from his seizure and his shame, Bitter still lying there nude in his mind. Now she wished to be called Mary, but she would always be a bitter ache in his heart, Bitter Ember, Bitter Mary, with her bitter almond eyes. He imagined driving away with her down the twisty road, imagined her short slim arms embracing him. Surely then he could resist Mother’s image on the smoke screen.
He’d always known that Bitter would never love him, but now that he’d shown her his true face even the fantasy of her love was lost. Everything that he loved was lost, his home, his books, his handmade chairs, the laboratory where he had spent his happiest hours, his fireplace which in the chilly evenings wrapped its warm glow around him like a faithful lover’s arms. Worst of all, he was losing his mother.
Memories of his first six years stuck in his mind like snapshots, pictures of Mommy nursing him in a bright bedroom filled with toys, Mommy singing songs for him in a sunny parlor, Mommy walking him in a garden with fragrant flowers and chirping birds, but that Eden had ended on his sixth birthday when she sent him to stay with Father. Since then he’d seen her only on a smoke screen.
Garrick was fifteen years old when his face began to collapse, an eruption of teenage acne turning into boils that turned into tumors, and his hopes of having a girlfriend collapsed with his face. While he deteriorated, Screen-Mother remained young, beautiful, and oddly flirtatious, so it wasn’t surprising that he began to wrap his yearnings around her. In his spasms of solitary lovemaking, he pictured the soft mysteries of her body like exotic pink flowers growing in the lost garden of his childhood.
Spasms of shame followed spasms of lust. He thought he could overcome the urge to be Momma’s boy if he could win his father’s respect, but his efforts always failed. If he risked his neck to gather worms, Father complained that they were crawling all over the laboratory. If he baked cookies, Father burned down his house. If he tried to outrun the Lost Ones on rainy back roads, Father made him so nervous that he turned into an epileptic fool. The old man was impossible to please, and that left only Mother.
But she was vanishing. Tonight she’d looked at him differently, no longer as her special man but as a potential enemy to be strip-searched by her hunky disciples. Her words still simmered in his ears: “It’s nice to be adored by handsome young men.” All these years, while teasing and tempting him on a screen, she’d been collecting young men to admire her. Now they were sneering at his sores.
“Okay, get dressed,” one of them said, a muscular Adonis who sauntered with a preening ease that said he’d been certain of his own beauty from the time he learned to walk. How different life would be if one weren’t tortured each day by the cankered face in the mirror, the ache of gnarling bones, the reek of decay in one’s breath. Garrick smelled his own sick stink in his clothes as he put them back on.
“Let’s get moving,” Adonis said. He and three others escorted them out through the mud to a rusty VW van.
“Where’s my van?” Garrick asked. It contained all he had left, the few belongings he’d rescued from the house.
“Safe in a garage,” Adonis said. “Get in.”
Father climbed in, but Garrick stood in the rain. “I want my animals,” he said. “They’ll have to be fed.”
Adonis smirked. “Don’t worry about your cute little animals, just get in.”
His friends raised their rifles enough to make a point. They climbed in after Garrick, and Adonis d
rove them down a gravel road behind the gas station. The road crumbled into a narrow mud lane that descended into a valley. Adonis eased through an open chain-link gate and shut off the VW.
He stayed inside while the three riflemen got out with Garrick and his father. It looked like a big field surrounded by hills and smothered with fog. The riflemen led them through long wet weeds and finally stopped.
The air smelled watery and sounds were oddly muffled. Then the fog parted and Garrick saw that they were at the shore of a small lake. Something tall and dark jutted out of the center.
It was a stone tower. There seemed to be no windows or doors or features of any kind, just a lofty bleak pillar of stone standing in the middle of a cold black lake.
“Well, I daresay we’ll be safe here,” Father said at last.
Garrick stared. All his life he’d been plagued by dreams of a tall, horrible building made of stone. Sometimes it was an enormous mausoleum in a flooded cemetery, other times it was a crumbling castle surrounded by a filthy moat. Some nights the dread was sharp enough to wake him, but other nights he found himself inside the cold wet mansion, descending decrepit staircases from floor to floor. He would wander through ruined rooms with damp decaying beds and chairs, the soggy air heavy with musty shadows rotting into darkness. He’d wander into wrecked bathrooms with cracked sinks and dripping faucets, iron-claw tubs filled with black septic water slithering as something swam beneath the surface, unflushed toilets smelling of shit and sickness, ancient leaky pipes disappearing into moist walls where they snaked through cubbyholes too dreadful to imagine, and he’d descend dank stairways and cobwebbed crawlspaces toward some festering horror awaiting him in the watery basement.
“Look there,” Father said. He pointed to something scooting up the side of the tower like a spider jerking on a thread. “It’s Dr. Radcliff, I think. He’s being lifted to the roof with a rope and pulley. Letha seems to have built a fortress with no doors.”
Garrick kept staring. After a seizure, there was always a period of mind-numbing exhaustion, but that didn’t explain why this place looked like the setting of his nightmares. The air was balmy despite the drizzle, and the mixture of warm and wet felt like the sweat that drenched him when he awoke from his dreams, except now he couldn’t wake up. He watched a rowboat emerge from a patch of fog at the base of the tower.
The muscle men were walking back to the VW, and Garrick waited till they were out of earshot before he spoke.
“I feel like I’ve been here before,” he said. “But Mother and I lived in a nice big house, nothing like this.”
“How well do you remember it?” Father asked.
Garrick described his cheerful bedroom, the walled garden, the backyard with tall trees and a rope swing, but the pictures seemed oddly bare, furnished with ideas of tables and toys and trees, and beyond their edges he could dimly see a different childhood, faded pictures of strange male nurses dressed in black feeding him in strange dark rooms and a strange mommy doling out punishments he could remember only in nightmares.
“A hypnotic memory implant,” Father said. “She kept you here but doesn’t want you to remember. She doesn’t trust you with the memory of her fortress.”
Garrick tried to argue but couldn’t get the words out. His teeth scraped against a sore on his tongue.
“She’s the mistress of your memories, Garrick. You’re stammering because you’re ashamed to admit it.”
“I . . . I . . . I don’t think hypnotic suggestion . . . it couldn’t last that long.”
“But she visits you every day and keeps you under her spell,” Father said. “I daresay some nights as well.”
Father’s words were thick with innuendo: mistress of your memories, under her spell. Garrick stared at the tower and tried to recall some comforting moments from childhood, but they fled like dream images. The fog no longer felt balmy—it was cold.
“I guess you don’t trust her,” he said.
“Only an idiot would trust your mother.”
“Then why did we come here?”
“Because we don’t trust her,” Father said. He looked small and cadaverous, thin hair plastered against his skull and his glasses reflecting darkness. “But we have a few tricks of our own—no?”
He tried to light his cigar, but the wet air snuffed his match.
Garrick stared at the lake. Letha, Athena, and before that her name had been Helen according to the bedtime stories Father had told him. He’d memorized dozens of poems written to Helen and had written dozens more of his own, but the only lines he could remember now were Poe’s.
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
The boat emerged suddenly from a smear of fog a few feet away. A rifleman watched them from the bow while the other man rowed it to shore.
“Your turn,” the oarsman said.
Garrick reluctantly followed his father into the rocking boat. Cold bilge sloshed in the bottom and soaked his feet as they pulled away from shore. He hated water and couldn’t swim. The VW van fired up in the distance, and he watched its tail lights disappear into the narrow valley. He wished he were going with them.
A penny for the ferryman, he thought. He imagined Charon rowing them across the river Styx to the land of the dead. Helen, Letha, my mother, my lover, my life, my death. The fog parted like one of her whispery white gowns to offer a glimpse of the bleak tower in the distance.
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Some grandeur, he thought. Some glory. He knew his father was right: this was the place of his childhood and his nightmares. This was home.
The oarsman seemed to move with dream-slowness and then stopped rowing altogether. He sat and watched the shore. Garrick turned and saw two cars moving quietly through the weeds toward the lake with their headlights off. A red Buick and a blue Blazer. The Lost Ones.
“Row!” Father yelled. “Get out in the fog where they can’t see us.” But the oarsman didn’t move.
The cars stopped and a spotlight shone on the boat. A man wearing a camo mask stepped out of the Buick and lifted a bullhorn to his mouth.
“We’ve got four of your buddies,” he called. “Come back or we’ll kill them.”
More men emerged from the cars and aimed their rifles at the boat. One of them opened the trunk of the Buick and pulled out Adonis with a gun to his head.
“Row, you idiot!” Father said. “What are you waiting for?”
“The only one we want is Michael Grimes,” the bullhorn said. “Give him up and we’ll leave everyone else alone. Your friends will go free.”
The oarsman started rowing to shore.
“It’s a lie,” Father said. “They’ll kill us all. Go on to the tower, damn you!”
His fingers were fidgeting in the darkness, speaking the sign language he’d taught Garrick years ago. “Count of three we jump in swim to tower,” his fingers said. “Keep under water long as possible.”
Garrick’s fingers squirmed slowly. “I can’t swim,” they stammered.
Father’s fingers clenched into an angry fist. They opened and said, “Learn to swim.” The boat tilted as he sprang overboard.
The rifleman grabbed Garrick’s wrist, and they all stared at the black water. Father surfaced nearby and shouted, “Jump, damn you!”
A minuscule waterspout spumed up a foot from his face as a rifle pinged from the shore, and he went back under. He surfaced again thirty feet away, and the water danced with bullets.
Garrick’s cowardice would cost his father’s life while Mother watched from her tower—the ideal fuckup to crown a lifetime of fuckups. Better to drown in water than drown in shame. He jerked free of the rifleman’s grasp and plung
ed overboard.
He somersaulted through frigid water, his churning limbs speeding him down instead of up. His feet grasped for the bottom but found only more lake, as if it descended to the center of the earth. Something grasped his wrist, death’s bony claw, and he fought desperately and sucked water into his lungs. They exploded with panic and drank more water as the iron grip hauled him up to the surface.
“Breathe!” Father roared, pounding his back. “Breathe, damn you!”
Water spewed from Garrick’s mouth, but he couldn’t replace it with air because his lungs were tied in knots. Something like a fist bashed his left shoulder, and his father dragged him down again.
A chill colder than the lake swept down his left arm, and he felt it dissolve in the water and disappear like his house and animals and everything else. His arm was paralyzed, and he realized the fist must have been a bullet. His torso convulsed, and then he felt nothing but his lungs grasping knots of terror.
Father pulled him to the surface again. Garrick vomited water and saw the old man clearly for the first time. Silly man, gasping and shouting with his silver glasses somehow still clinging to the face of an overgrown boy overwhelmed by his own naughty pranks. Garrick felt a fatherly concern for this frightened child. He tried to smile to show him that everything was fine, but his lips felt fat and lifeless. Bullets stung the water, and they went back down.
His body was numb; nothing hurt except his lungs. He thought he heard his mother say, “Breathe, Sugarplum, don’t be afraid. Water is Mother’s air, rich and good like milk from the breast. Drink deep, my baby.”
Garrick glided through endless tunnels of watery gloom, but he wasn’t afraid. His lungs calmly unknotted themselves. He had his own air to breathe, the sweet heavy fluid of Mother. He drank it in and felt her cold womb surrounding him, the comfortable chill of her love.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Grimes squeezed water from his son’s lungs and forced air into the dead mouth until a spray of bullets drove him deeper into the fog. Garrick’s mask had washed off, and Grimes stared at his ruined face in the darkness, thinking so this is all that’s left, a cankered corpse and a few belongings in the back of a van, residue of a wretched life, in pace requiescat.