A Choir of Ill Children

by Tom Piccirilli

“Yes I will.”

  I head out. It’s a long walk back home in the slashing rain but the storm begins to lessen while I’m on my way.

  Dodi drives past without slowing down and I think I see an odd movement in the back of the truck. A trifold darkness and blur of black motion waving. And beneath the sound of the storm of souls, fluttering in my basal ganglia, a laughter like the muted song of a choir of ill children.

  When I get back to the house the rain has ended.

  Drabs is hanging from a willow branch.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THREE DAYS AFTER DRABS’S FUNERAL Reverend Clem Bibbler presides over my marriage to Maggie. He’s also the best man and has to stop several times in order to wipe away his tears and calm himself. His voice quavers but his smile is sincere. Abbot Earl offers up prayers and litanies at sixth hour during the wedding. Most of the town turns out for the church service and there are lavish gifts, cards, and favors, along with hundreds of homemade dishes. Even Sheriff Burke shows up in a good mood wearing lizard skin boots and a white ten-gallon hat. We hold the reception at the house and he gets drunk on some good red wine, hits on the fat woman that Sap Duffy and Tab Ferris were fighting over, and eventually winds up sleeping it off in the bathtub.

  Fred and Sarah come in from New York. They’re both clean and sober, and Sarah shows off her engagement ring. Fred’s documentary on addiction has won some festival awards and he’s got a lucrative cable deal now. I decide to fund another project for him—an independent crime drama about a pair of hit men running from the mob who dress in drag and join an Atlantic City lounge act. Sarah’s written the script, which I read to Maggie one night in bed. I think it lacks a third act and make some notes in the margins with a red pen. Sarah and I discuss revisions and Fred uses the money to bring in two established actors. One is an Academy Award nominee, which will help to get distributors interested. Sarah takes the female lead and manages to hold her own pretty well, from what little footage I’ve seen. When we talk, she never asks about Jonah so I never mention him either.

  Clay, Lottie Mae, and Darr come to visit often. They all enjoy my sponge cake too. The mood is genial with hints of distress bubbling up from beneath, but eventually a much more mellow atmosphere takes over. Clay is quite talented at carpentry and I pay him well to rebuild a few missing shutters and fix up some other areas of the house that have fallen into disrepair. Perhaps he just wants a peek at the crannies of the place, which is also fine with me. I still don’t know why they were killing all the birds.

  Darr has taken up fencing, and I practice with him in the backyard. He wears a mask, plenty of protective gear, and a rubber tip at the end of his sword. He’s actually quite good. He’s got a much longer reach than I do, but he’s slower, so we’re evenly matched. I stock just enough liquor in the house to keep him pleasantly buzzed most of the time.

  Clay and Maggie exchange long glances and share something beyond my understanding. It’s all right because we’re all protected here. The tempests and the dead come and go as they’re meant to do. They bring their pain and we bring ours and together we fight our way to the dawn.

  I’ve put Velma Coots up in one of the free rooms. We’ve been spending time with some of the best doctors and mechanical engineers in the country fitting her with prosthetics. She wanted the hooks and cables, but I made her go for the gloveless endoskeletal hands with self-skinning foam. They’re much more realistic and even higher functioning.

  She tells me that she hasn’t heard from Dodi and has no idea of her whereabouts, but she’s lying. It’s understandable. I know my brothers and Dodi are still together, close by, probably out in the bog shantytown. They remain her charges and she fulfills her duty. One day, I’m certain, they’ll return as promised. We’ll share whatever burdens must be shared for the sake of Kingdom Come.

  THE CRONE HAS TAKEN OVER MY BROTHERS’ bedroom. We’ve replastered and painted it a nice summer yellow. I’ve bought her a new wardrobe and she now wears sundresses, orthopedic hose, and sweaters with big pockets where she hides bits of food. She listens to plenty of Liberace CDs and she’s become fanatic about the DVD player. Already I’ve purchased an extensive library of movies for her to watch, and she spends hours in front of the home entertainment center listening to the commentary tracks and viewing the outtakes and deleted scenes. Deliverymen arrive at all hours of the day with packages containing boxed sets of classic fifties sit-coms and wide-screen versions of the John Wayne Limited Edition Collection.

  The other granny witches visit quite often. Velma Coots has gotten good with her new hands and she can handle small objects with great dexterity. The conjure ladies used to spend afternoons brewing potions and making oxtail soup, but now they’ve taken to playing pinochle and mahjong. Velma Coots is so good with the prosthesis that she can sail the cards across the table like a Vegas blackjack dealer.

  Lottie Mae occasionally joins them but most of the time she merely sits quietly and lets the conversation circle around her. Often she stares toward the bottoms as if she’s watching something off in the distance. She stares and frowns before turning again to the discussion, smiling blandly.

  I try not to gaze at her with any great longing but it’s difficult. My heart juts into my ribs and a soft sorrow runs through me until the world begins to draw sideways and the wind brushes my collar back.

  The burns fade and my eyebrows fill back in, but my hair doesn’t grow anymore. Every day I look as if I’ve come fresh from the barber. I still go on retreat to the Holy Order as much as I did before, but I scan Abbot Earl’s face wondering if he was the one who got Lucretia Murteen pregnant, and then balked at his responsibilities. I bake the morning bread, ride the donkey, and contemplate our efforts to discover the will of God. Sister Lucretia’s white eye patch watches me closely as I wander through the empty maternity ward thinking of her and newborn babies.

  The carnival packs up and leaves town, traveling a few more miles upriver every week until it crosses the state line. It’ll be back next year and Maggie and I will visit again with a wretched man whose disappointments murdered my mother and drove him into the unstoppable wheels of his one grand monument to Kingdom Come.

  I’ll beat the hungry dogs from him and chase the bog folk off. I’ll stare him in the eye and pay him the six bits it costs for a pint of moonshine, and when his blue runny lips quiver and begin to part I’ll leave him there in the slime once more.

  There are still frayed ends that I return to again and again, questions that will not go away. I vow to find the killer of my grandmother no matter how long it takes me. I will know who pinned her to the roof of her school with a reap hook, and I’ll learn what the words on the side of the building meant.

  Maggie gets pregnant and a new excitement fills all of us. Darr goes out and buys a tiny fencing outfit. Clay begins to carve and assemble a bassinet made completely from white oak.

  The boys at the mill bring me gifts and good wishes, but there’s an added worry in their eyes. Paul the foreman tries to give voice to it but can’t quite pull it off. He wants to ask me if I’m afraid my wife will give birth to a monstrous three-headed being that will wallow in darkness and hide in the swamp and—

  I smile evenly and dock him for the five minutes he’s late that day getting back from lunch. He walks around the floor in a wide-eyed panic the rest of the afternoon, screaming at the workers, keeping the line rolling as I look down from my office window.

  I still wonder about who carried the torches and chased Betty Lynn through the tobacco fields, and if they’re still out there. Perhaps they believed that she was actually pregnant with my baby. If that’s the case, then they may return when Maggie begins to show.

  We’ll be prepared. We have numbers. I track down all of Drabs’s children in the county. There are fourteen of them, more than I had thought. I take care of their mothers and set up accounts for their futures, and we invite them over to our home and watch them at play on the swing and along the slopes of the property
. Reverend Bibbler’s laughter booms on the breeze as he plays with his grandchildren and he’s taken to wearing short-sleeved shirts and shorts. I’ve set up jungle gyms and seesaws and slides out in the yard. Clay builds the playground so it’ll hold up in a storm.

  My mother is dead but she continues to dream.

  I witness her as a girl with blond curls draped across the shoulders of her gingham dress as she tugs at the coat sleeve of her father. She removes all the rat traps. She forgives the shortcomings and hangs near the ceiling and drifts to the corners at dusk. Her hands are ivory and she brushes them softly against my cheek. She has an incandescence that will never die out.

  Mama has shown me this: Maggie and I will walk side by side through a field, carrying an infant. Maggie’ll be wearing a sundress and bonnet and somehow we will find wheat and stand in it. The baby will give a toothless smile and hold out his chubby hands as if the whole world is a rare and precious thing for him to hold. My wife will glance at me, radiant with the autumn sun, her hair coiling out from beneath the bonnet and struck by the sunlight in such a way that her features are suddenly blazing, as natural and perfect as the season itself.

  Secrets still chase me down the long dimly lit corridors of my life. Perhaps Drabs paid my debt for me or perhaps my brothers forfeited him. These walls are filled with history and heartache. The ham is still in the house. I go to the attic and stare at the trunk, which no longer has a key. There are dozens of other locked drawers, chests, chiffoniers, highboys, cabinets, and old luggage. I wonder what’s in them and what else my father has hidden up here. And his fathers before him? Any keys I find around the house I add to one large ring. One day I’ll try them all, but not just yet.

  We are a family. This is blood. The home is huge and there’s room for plenty of healthy children. Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we’ve offered and those we have yet to make.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TOM PICCIRILLI is the author of eleven novels, including The Night Class, A Lower Deep, and Hexes. His two collections of short fiction (Deep Into That Darkness Peering and Mean Sheep) gather only a fraction of his published short work, which spans multiple genres and demonstrates his wide-ranging abilities. He has been a World Fantasy Award finalist and a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner. Visit Tom’s official website, Epitaphs, at www.tompiccirilli.com.

  OTHER BOOKS BY TOM PICCIRILLI

  NOVELS:

  Coffin Blues

  Grave Men

  A Lower Deep

  The Night Class

  The Deceased

  Hexes

  Sorrow’s Crown

  The Dead Past

  Shards

  Dark Father

  COLLECTIONS:

  Mean Sheep

  This Cape Is Red Because I’ve Been Bleeding (Poetry)

  A Student of Hell (Poetry)

  Deep Into That Darkness Peering

  The Dog Syndrome & Other Sick Puppies

  Pentacle

  NONFICTION:

  Welcome to Hell

  Praise for Tom Piccirilli and

  A CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN

  “In this compelling Southern Gothic, Piccirilli . . . presents a searing portrait of twisted souls trapped in a wasteland. Piccirilli masterfully increases the tension . . . [and] . . . the novel will appeal both to genre fans and to readers of Flannery O’Connor and even of William Faulkner. James Lee Burke and Harry Crews devotees should also take note.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Lyrical, ghastly, first-class horror.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Extraordinary imagery, and Piccirilli has a gift for pitch-black humor that makes much of this novel outrageously funny, until laughter finally drowns amid murderous phantasms.” —Locus

  “Piccirilli has created a world that is disturbing and compelling.” —Rocky Mountain News

  “A Choir of Ill Children is a full-on Southern Gothic . . . a surreal mélange of witchcraft, deformity and ghosts. Piccirilli explores[s] his ongoing theme of memory and knowledge as damning elements . . . adding a further level of surreal absurdity to the proceedings, until you’re not quite sure which way is up.” —Fangoria

  “Piccirilli delivers a marvelous fable about family, responsibility, and owning up to your nightmares.” —SF Site

  “In A Choir of Ill Children Piccirilli explores monsters of flesh and mind, intermingling abominations with unlikely saviors in a narrative puzzle as intellectually challenging as it is slap-your-knee entertaining. Piccirilli creates a geography of pain and wonder, tenderness and savageness. There is as much poet as popular entertainer in Piccirilli’s approach.” —Cemetery Dance

  “Tom Piccirilli writes with a razor for his pen. A Choir of Ill Children is both deeply disturbing and completely compelling.” —Christopher Golden, author of The Boys Are Back in Town and The Ferryman

  “This is a Gothic tale of sustained invention, told in colorful prose. I loved the characters, the prose (which alternates, deliberately, between jazzy and/or bluesy tones and a clipped sort of Faulknerian picture-making), the imagery, the incidents, and the smart balance between the humorous and the horrific.” —Michael Bishop, author of Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas and Brighten to Incandescence

  “A resonant title for a resonant, powerful, lyrical and disturbing piece of work. I enjoyed A Choir of Ill Children enormously.” —Simon Clark, author of Stranger and Darker

  “Whether writing horror, mysteries or thrillers, Tom Piccirilli delivers the goods. His characters have heart, smarts and guts. They come to life in fine stories you’ll not soon forget. I’m a big fan.” —Richard Laymon, author of Night in the Lonesome October and The Cellar

  “Tom Piccirilli’s work is full of wit and inventiveness—sharp as a sword, tart as apple vinegar. I look forward to all his work.” —Joe R. Lansdale, author of The Bottoms and Captains Outrageous

  “Tom Piccirilli is one of my favorites of the new generation of horror authors—vivid, involving and downright scary.” —Graham Masterton, author of The Manitou and A Terrible Beauty

  “Tom Piccirilli is one of the best stylists working today—not simply in the horror genre but in fiction in general. His characters are quirky and fascinating, and his imagination is a scary, amazing thing.” —T. M. Wright, author of A Manhattan Ghost Story and Cold House

  “A Choir of Ill Children is spellbinding. Piccirilli writes like lightning, illuminating a dark landscape of wonders.” —Douglas Clegg, author of The Hour Before Dark and The Infinite

  “In A Choir of Ill Children, Tom Piccirilli takes us for a walk on the real wild side . . . an eerie, turbulent book that pushes at the boundaries of reality and horror fiction alike. This has the same paranoid energy as Philip K. Dick at his best.” —Ed Gorman, author of The Day the Music Died and The Dark Fantastic

  “This book is brilliant. Surprises abound on every page, and every one of its characters is unforgettable and sublimely imagined.” —Flesh & Blood Magazine

  “Piccirilli’s brand of horror fiction is always something deep, daring, and stunningly original—with story concepts that few other authors would attempt. A Choir of Ill Children is brilliantly grotesque, beautifully written and yet shockingly morbid, pulsing with blood that seems a little too real for fiction. This is not just another genre novel, it’s a macabre work of art.” —Edward Lee, author of City Infernal and Monstrosity

  “Tom Piccirilli never backs away from a disturbing or disgusting scene in the dubious interest of self-censorship, but neither does he seem to relish it as some perverted writers do (guilty, guilty, guilty). He faces it and follows it through to the consequences, and that requires bravery.” —Poppy Z. Brite, author of Lost Souls and Exquisite Corpse

  “Piccirilli has crafted what must be his strangest and yet most compelling novel. Whoever said that jet-black humor and horror make p
erfect bedfellows could use A Choir of Ill Children as a definitive case in point: I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or try to find Jesus!” —Tim Lebbon, author of The Nature of Balance and Face

  “A Choir of Ill Children is effing brilliant—Carson McCullers by way of William S. Burroughs . . . or Ellen Gilchrist on really, really bad acid. It’s the kind of novel that makes me shake my head in envy and awe. In lesser hands this story could have been just a morbid freak show, but in Tom Piccirilli’s, it’s a powerful meditation on isolation, pointless anger, and familial obligation that ranks right up there with Geek Love and Tattoo Girl.” —Gary Braunbeck, author of From Silent Graves and Things Left Behind

  “Tom Piccirilli’s A Choir of Ill Children is rich with poetry, his characters are vivid and sharp, and his writing peels away layers of everyday reality. Like all the best authors, he leads readers into the strange and dark places inside themselves.” —Gerard Houarner, author of The Beast That Was Max and Road to Hell

  “Piccirilli courageously walks a dangerous line, telling his story in a fast-paced stream of consciousness narrative that drops the reader into fascinating circumstances with the very first sentence. A Choir of Ill Children does not disappoint. You won’t be able to stop reading.” —David B. Silva, author of Through Shattered Glass

  “The hypnotic power of Piccirilli’s writing draws you into a world you might otherwise run from. It’s easy to believe that this man won a Bram Stoker Award for his poetry because his narrative is infused with a lyrical voice. I can’t imagine who else’s mind A Choir of Ill Children might have sprung from.” —Robert Randisi, author of Blood on the Arch and Curtains of Blood

  “Better start revising your favorite author list—Piccirilli deserves to be at the top.” —Book Lovers

  “[Piccirilli] invests his work with potent atmosphere and realistic characterization while maintaining an economy of words and seamless plot cohesion. His horror fiction is mysterious, and his mysteries border on the horrific, and no matter what genre he employs the plots hold true, developing organically from the actions and reactions of the players.” —Gothic.net