by Cesare, Adam
They weren’t just partying in the woods—this was a campsite. The silver trailer reflected the bonfire light, lightening up the deep shadows that would have been cast if it weren’t there. Above them was a string of dim light bulbs, not Christmas lights, just a handful of full-sized bulbs threaded between the tree branches overhead.
There was a clothesline, what looked like a generator with several car batteries attached by jumper cables, and several tree stumps that had been sanded clean and were now home to stacks of red Solo cups and beer bottles.
If this was Davey’s home, it didn’t look as if he was often alone.
Claire finished her first beer. She hadn’t noticed that she’d killed it so quickly until Davey reached over, placed two fingers on the neck of the bottle and gave a gentle tug to pluck it from her grip.
“We should get you another, Claire,” he said. On cue, a tiny girl appeared at his left side holding a pitcher. The girl’s height was exaggerated by standing next to Davey and Tobin, but she would have been petite on any scale.
“Are we sure she can handle it?” Davey asked while looking at Claire.
“Oh for sure,” Tobin answered, his smile handsome but still devilish in the firelight. Claire told herself that she would be hooking up with him within the week. Not tonight, of course. She’d show some restraint, but definitely within the week.
Tobin bent and retrieved one of the Solo cups from the nearest stump, nudging a big plaid-clad Grizzly-Adams-looking youth out of the way. The bigger boy seemed to growl at being jostled, but relented when he saw that it was Tobin.
Claire got the impression that there was a pecking order at this party, with Tobin near the top.
Holding it up to the light, Tobin peered into the cup to make sure it was dry. His squint and appraisal of the cup was a pantomime that Claire was familiar with: it was exactly the kind of thing she’d done countless times herself. You drink enough cigarette ash and backwash and it teaches you to be careful with your party cups.
Once it passed inspection he handed it to the small girl, Davey’s cupbearer.
She poured from the pitcher what looked like orange juice. The smell hit her before the cup was full: floral, boozy, chemical and fruity, every aspect of the scent strong.
“Thank you.” Claire took the cup as it was offered. She grazed the small girl’s hand as she took the cup, momentarily thrown by the large scar. “My name’s Claire. What’s yours?”
Addressing her like a child was not Claire’s smoothest move of the night. Looking closer at her face, she was probably close to Claire’s age.
“This is Eden,” Davey said, placing a large hand over Eden’s shoulder. “The person, not the place,” he added. She guessed that it was the fiftieth time he’d made that joke, but Claire smiled and laughed along with the rest of them. Something about Davey made her want to be good and nice.
Claire lifted her cup, the smell almost overpowering.
“Just a second. Everybody drinks,” Tobin said, checking out two more cups and holding them out to be filled. He passed one to Davey. Eden disappeared with the pitcher, off to refill more cups, no doubt.
“He means to say that nobody drinks alone out here in this paradise,” Davey said.
“Sounds good to me,” Claire said. It was something.
“Poured out for the forgiveness of sins,” Davey said, raising his glass. “Go easy on this, but right now, let’s fucking drink!”
Although she’d never tasted anything exactly like it, the punch filled Claire with sense memory. Her first weekend in college, Allison had mixed up a pitcher of screwdrivers that was a third plastic-bottle vodka, and two-thirds Florida’s Natural. It was a great time, but the novelty had worn off after the sixth week and they hadn’t made them since.
When she opened her eyes and lowered the cup, Tobin was closer than he had been. The music seemed louder too and Claire felt her hips begin to sway almost instinctively.
“He likes you,” Tobin said in her ear. She could feel the heat of his breath work its way in with the words. She imagined the sweetness of the drink menthol-cooling the inside of her head.
“Who does?” she asked while taking another sip, closing her eyes again.
“David,” he said.
“Davey,” Claire corrected.
“Believe it or not,” Tobin continued, “he doesn’t like everyone who comes out here, especially the outsiders. Not everyone gets an invite back.”
Claire opened her eyes again and the topography of the party had changed. Davey was nowhere to be found, and all the dancers seemed to have switched positions and styles to account for the change in song.
They were careful about it, but Claire knew that she was being watched, that glances were being thrown her way. Not that she cared, but it was impossible to tell if the girls at the party considered her part of the family or a threat.
“Well, that’s nice, but what do you think of me? If I am invited back, I’m going to need someone to bring me out here. I’ll get lost.” She guided his hand around her waist and kept swaying.
“I think you dance well.”
The warmth of his body seemed to react with the warmth flowing out from the pit of her stomach. She let him move closer behind her, until the scent of him had folded her up.
Before she could notice, her cup was empty and she was facing him.
From over Tobin’s shoulder she could see the open door to Davey’s trailer.
Davey’s impossibly tall silhouette stood in the doorway, his arm around a full female figure.
This was the last image she could remember from the party. The rest of her memories were long, chemical kisses from Tobin, the strange hardness of the flesh of his chest and back, and the underbrush cutting up her shins as she stumbled back home to The Brant.
Chapter Twelve
Claire had to pee. Finding the bathroom was proving difficult, though, because by the time she was semiconscious she was already in the hallway, the door closed behind her.
She stood in her panties and T-shirt, her keycard left behind—presumably—in her jean’s pocket, locked inside her room.
The hallway pitched and twisted. She was standing inside a funhouse that looked just like the hotel. She did not know for how long she’d lost consciousness, how long she’d been back from the woods, or what time it was.
The window at the end of the hallway told her that it was still dark out, so she guessed that it was around four, but had nothing to back this up.
She saw half the world in a wiry chestnut-red haze until she pushed the hair out of her left eye, the clumsy motion covering her right eye with Silverfish’s blonde streak. Her hair had grown out since she’d last bleached it and half the strands were now a brownish-red.
Time and space seemed to run past with long stretches of blackness. When she was finished contemplating her hair she was in the stairwell with no recollection of opening the service door to get there.
She gripped the banister and tried to remember how much she’d drunk, what she’d done with Tobin (was he in her bedroom right now, could she have just knocked and had him let her back in?), whether or not she’d taken anything else, pills or smoke.
Her bare feet slapped against the polished concrete steps and she lost track of what floor she was on or which one she was going to.
Was she going to Daisy for help? That didn’t seem smart. In response to this thought, the world swam and a wave of nausea radiated to the tips of her fingers and then back to her brain.
She was going to be sick—no way to fight it.
She vomited during one of the rolling blank spaces that dotted the next few minutes.
She couldn’t remember the act itself, but she tasted the puke. Not remembering was a bittersweet sensation since she hated few things more than vomiting, but was sure that she had at least one more episode in the near future.
Now she was somewhere within The Brant that she’d never seen. Either it was a different part of the basement she’d
never been in or it was a sub-basement.
Around her were tarps, plastic pool chairs and what looked like umbrellas with the golden Brant rabbit on the edges.
This rabbit got more play than Mickey Mouse.
Mickey hasn’t texted in a while, her thoughts traveled off until she tripped over the leg of a chair. She caught herself with her hands, but the ground was rough and sandy, so she’d still drawn blood on her palms.
There was light, not much, but she couldn’t remember flicking any switches. It was the blue glow of florescent light ahead of her.
She didn’t have to pee now and ran two fingers down the front of her panties to make sure she hadn’t had an accident. A puddle of puke on the stairs was bad enough to get her fired, but Claire thought of Ms. Brant slipping on her pee and giggled.
Her underwear was dry. There’d been no accident, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t removed her panties and squatted in a corner of this basement during one of her blackout moments.
What am I doing here? In some ways she was sleepwalking, but her awareness seemed too acute, the world less dreamlike than she’d imagined it would be if she were asleep. Everything may have been spinning, but there was concreteness to her surroundings, details she wouldn’t have invented.
Claire approached the light, crouched lower to the ground now because she wanted to spare her shins any more trauma this night.
The source of the basement’s illumination was a door, open just a crack. It was not the kind that opened in or out, but side-to-side on a track. She was reminded of the walk-in fridge in the kitchen, but this wasn’t that walk-in fridge. She used that one every morning while she helped Roy prep for the day and, as messed up as she was, she could recognize that she was not in the kitchen.
As she approached, she instinctively wrapped her hands around her bare arms, but then noticed that there was no chill coming from the doorway.
A shadow shifted over the blade of florescent light and she realized for the first time that she was moving towards an inhabited room. This epiphany did not scare her. She didn’t care at this point if a coworker caught a glimpse of her in her skivvies, but she did try to approach as stealthily as possible.
Pressing herself against the wall beside the doorway, she listened to the sounds inside. There were footfalls, too many to be coming from one person. Who could it be?
She grossed herself out by picturing Roy and Daisy meeting up in the basement, Roy rubbing her crotch with his half-finger and Daisy moaning with a slight lisp. It was revolting and comical, like most of the things Silverfish kept her mind occupied with.
If she took a quick enough peek, she could go unnoticed, as long as neither of them was looking at the sliver of open doorway. She heard a wet smacking sound from inside and cringed. The sound reminded her of the retching she couldn’t recall doing, the acid bubbling up her throat, the smell of the vomit still dripping down her sinuses.
Despite feeling the waves of nausea, the pull of curiosity was too much and she looked into the room.
It wasn’t two figures but a group of four. The room was much bigger than the walk-in fridge upstairs, with low ceilings but a tiled floor that pitched downwards into a kind of pit. It looked like a high school locker room shower, the kind with no stalls, just one long row of shower heads.
Three of them were cleaning up, wearing black plastic jumpsuits that looked like cheapo HAZMAT attire, complete with surgeon’s masks. The fourth figure sat in the middle of the room, a black rubber apron draped over his knees and nearly touching the floor.
The seated man’s face was a nightmare.
Nearly hairless, the skin stretched so tight around his jaw that it looked like clingwrap almost at the breaking point. She caught a glimpse of his glassy white eyes and was not concerned that they were looking right into her own because this was Father Hayden, the blind priest.
It took a moment of taking in the details before Claire’s addled brain realized what they were cleaning.
One of the figures lifted a mop and wrung it out with a yellow plastic bucket, the kind that janitors pushed around schools and office buildings. She watched as the water strained out a coppery red.
She was witnessing the cleanup of a crime scene. The robin’s-egg-blue tiles where the mop hadn’t passed were covered in oily ponds of blood.
The cleanup crewmember farthest from the door was using a large sponge to wipe down the walls. The graffiti was in thin lines of semi-dried blood, the patterns making no sense at all. Triangles and neat spirals and squiggles, the drawings looked like a difficult math problem.
The third crewmember was tying a knot in a heavy-duty black garbage bag, filled three-quarters of the way. He had two similar bags at his feet. The angles of the bags were organic, the bottoms rounded like half-filled water balloons.
This crewmember was shorter than the rest, the HAZMAT suit tight enough around the breasts and hips to imply the female form underneath. She hefted one of the bags off the ground and started for the door.
In her shock, Claire retreated behind the wall. The world around her became more amorphous as her consciousness faded. No please, not now. She pleaded with herself to stay with it, at least let her find a hiding spot before passing out.
There was a stack of pool chairs beside her and she crawled under the bottom-most one as she heard the metal runners of the door begin to screech behind her.
The sound was too much to handle. She felt the cool of the basement floor against her cheek and then remembered nothing else of that night.
*
She awoke with coldness still pressing against her face. This time it was in the form of a cool, damp cloth that Daisy had folded over and was mopping over her brow.
“Don’t get up,” Daisy said, her lisp still carrying that unnatural sweetness, but now very much tinged with a mother-bird attitude.
“What happened?” Claire said.
“I assume, because you smell like a still, that you went out into the woods for a party.” Daisy narrowed her eyelids, made her voice a bit deeper.
“Yeah,” Claire said, trying to sound ashamed. She wasn’t ashamed, and she hadn’t meant that. Claire was more interested in how she’d gotten back to Daisy’s room.
“You’re lucky I woke up later than usual. At around five, I found you. You were lying in front of my door, nearly naked and covered in dirt. I had to rinse you off before putting you to bed.”
“Oh.” Claire wasn’t sure what to say. She felt her own nakedness under the quilt. Neither her shirt nor her panties remained. Had last night been a hallucination? Was a hallucination that bizarrely specific and detailed even possible?
It had to be much later than five. Claire tried looking around Daisy’s room, but stopped when she reached the window. The sunlight that slashed through the curtains was blinding. It seemed to burn her retinas, boiling the alcohol off her brain in puffs of smoke.
It was already the late morning.
“I told Ms. Brant that you were sick. I told her that it was probably the shrimp Roy had been serving for dinner, so now he’s in for it. I hope you appreciate that.”
“Thank you, but you didn’t have to do that. I don’t want to him to get in trouble.”
“He’s in trouble often, every time justified, so he’s used to it,” Daisy said. “I found the sick you left on the stairs. You would have been fired if Ms. Brant had found it first.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Just make sure that this doesn’t happen again. You are expected to be a professional while you’re working here.”
“I understand. It won’t ever happen again,” Claire said. She cinched up the quilt and tried sitting upright in Daisy’s bed.
“What you need to understand is that them out there.” Daisy pointed out her window, motioning to the woods. “They don’t care about you. He wants to use up all the youth and beauty you have. He wants to get what he can out of you and then get rid of you.”
There was silence
in the room. Daisy handed the wet cloth to Claire, then smoothed out the wrinkles in her apron.
“You think I’m exaggerating, but they’re not your friends.”
“I know,” Claire said, unsure if she did, but feeling that this was the only way out of this room. “I’ve had friends like them before. It never ends the way I want it to.” That part wasn’t a lie.
“Well, they’re not representative of what Mission is about!” Like a switch, Daisy was back in chamber of commerce mode. “Take the rest of the day to get yourself together. I’ll take care of your responsibilities today, but only today.”
“Thank you.”
“We were more alike at your age than you think, Claire.”
“Well, I don’t know if I’d cover your shift, so you’re a kinder person than me.” Claire would help her out after this morning, though. Not only to repay a debt, but because Daisy was more human to her now.
“Oh, you’d do the same for me. Besides, the Chopins checked out this morning, so that’s two less people I have to look after on your route.”
Part Two
The Congregation
Chapter Thirteen
Terry Chopin died much earlier than he was supposed to.
Victoria Brant watched Roy hit him with the baton, fast and low in the throat. She could hear the crack, knew that the young man’s windpipe had been crushed even before Roy realized.
She watched in the pale light as Terry Chopin’s desperate, pathetic inhalation slowed then finally stopped as his face turned purple.
The girl did not watch her husband die. She was hooded and unconscious before Roy had dealt the blow.
Killing Terry had been Roy’s second mistake of the night and his sweating, red-faced apology told Brant that he knew it. He didn’t speak, didn’t dare, but Victoria watched as he mouthed “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over while slipping the mask over Terry’s head.
As if the burlap bag mattered. The boy was dead.
Roy’s first mistake had been in administering the sedative.