“You are to become part of both worlds. You now belong to the mortal world, as well as the world of the afterlife.”
Once the Smoke Warrior finished speaking, the flame disappeared from his eyes. The colorful flame tattoos that covered his skin began to swirl as though they too had become living smoke that was contained within his flesh. The black, swirling patches made their way up his body, toward his arms, and out toward his hands. Once the curious patches began to accumulate there, his hands began to glow. They glowed brighter and brighter until they gleamed as if they contained pure starlight. The light began to transfer from his hands to the weapon, which then began to glow and float of its own accord.
The dying man’s hands dropped from the shaft and, endowed with some mysterious power, the scythe floated toward its new owner, David. The hitman dropped the empty SMG and reached out toward the scythe, but hesitated to grasp it.
“You must accept it,” said the dying Smoke Warrior. All of his tattoos were now gone, leaving his flesh clean, aside from the bullet wounds and trickling blood. “It is the only way to keep you from dying a true death.”
David looked down at his own wounds. Blood freely flowed from many wounds that would surely lead to his death were he not given the proper medical attention in the near future. His vision blurred, yet the scythe still shone brightly before him. With the headlights behind him, he still wasn’t entirely sure this wasn’t some optical illusion. Even in his weakened condition, he couldn’t fully accept this as reality.
And so, with his outstretched hands, he grasped the shaft of the Smoke Warrior’s weapon. The glow from the wooden handle warmed his hand. Its warmth radiated through his hands, up his arms, and filled the rest of his body.
The light that entered him filled him with strength, but there was something more. It filled him with life. It filled him with death. The mysterious light healed his wounds and made him into something else – something better than the mere man he had been when he woke up that morning.
David looked down at his arms once the light had finished its transfer from the scythe into his body. The tattoos he had noticed on the shadow warrior from high atop the hotel roof were now on his own arms.
Then he noticed that his entire thumb had grown back. The pain in his face, back, hip, and leg had also not only lessened but had gone away entirely.
Near the end of his life, the Shadow Warrior felt the need to give what little advice he could while there was still time. He spoke as blood trickled from his nose and mouth. “You have proven yourself. Fall not victim to my ways. For too long, I have suffered the sin of pride. No matter how certain you are of the fate of one you seek to send to the other side, never let your guard down.”
Once the last word left his mouth, the Smoke Warrior slumped over, dead. David took a step toward him, but before he could attempt to rouse him, the body slowly dissipated into a whirl of smoke.
David could feel the light from above shining within, now that he was a Smoke Warrior. The hellfire danced in his eyes as he took off into the night, nothing more than a wisp of smoke.
Where the Monsters Live by Duncan Ralston
It was raining the day I brought my daughter’s CD player back to the sex offenders under the bridge, and everyone was in a crummy mood. Miami’s weather is a blessing when you’re living on the street, where you can sleep on a sofa for months at a time. The exception is the rainy season, those summer months when you’ve got to get a roof over your head that isn’t just a doorway alcove or the underside of a bridge, or you’ll be soaked to the skin in seconds. By the day I went home for the first time in months, it had already been raining three days, and most of us were sure the sun would never come out again.
I left camp early that morning, walking a little over three hours to the house where I used to live. My feet hurt and my clothes ran with a hundred rivers of dirt, but I hoped it would be worth the trek. There was a method to the madness, as they say. Or so I’d thought then.
Marnie was just pulling out of the drive when I arrived, our little girl Nola in the backseat playing with a doll I didn’t recognize, making it dance. Neither of my girls saw me hiding behind the sprawling gumbo limbo in the Garrisons’ front yard as they drove past, the two of them smiling and singing. Tears clawed out from my eyes, seeing the both of them looking forward instead of back, the way I thought they ought to be looking, toward a life when all three of us were still together. Toward the past I’d left behind in pursuit of my singular goal, this burning obsession. I’d been gone a little over four months by then, and it wasn’t as though I’d expected life to stay in a sort of freeze-frame with me out of the picture. Still, seeing them singing along to one of Nola’s CDs, seemingly as happy as you please… it was a blow.
Once the car disappeared around the corner, I did what I could to smother the pain. I drew the hoodie up over my head and crossed to the house, looking both ways, skirting the garbage cans which lined both sides of the street, glad the municipality hadn’t changed trash pickup to another day while I was gone. If Marnie had re-keyed the locks, God forbid, I figured I could wait around and break a window when the truck came rumbling up the street. But I didn’t need to wait. My key slid in effortlessly. Twisting it in the lock, I let out a sigh of relief.
The house was as I remembered it, if a little messier. It smelled nice, like the lilac shampoo both Marnie and Nola apparently still used. It smelled clean. Even the hints of last night’s dinner in the garbage – a spaghetti sauce starting to turn – smelled terrific. Smelled like home. Stink permeates homelessness: the smell of trash, the smell of dirty streets, of fire bins and piss and other people’s body odor, the wet dog smell that saturates your clothes and bedding, the smell of rust and dirt and decay. It felt good being back here. Felt right. I wanted to strip off my clothes and climb into the shower, wash off the layers of grime the rain hadn’t been able to make a dent on, wash off all the hell and scum I’d had to wade through to get to where I was now, with the Rabbit Man almost within my reach, and stretch out on the fresh clean sheets. To wait for Marnie to come home and tell her I’d been stupid, that I’d give it all up if only she’d let me stay.
Our bedroom was exactly the way it was the day I left. If she’d taken down the pictures of the two of us together, the trips we’d taken before we had Nola, our engagement and wedding and honeymoon photos, I might have paused to reflect on its meaning. That they were still right where they’d been when I left made me think I could still come back if I wanted, if I could just summon the courage to quit. To give up on death and allow life and love back into my heart.
Anger rushed into my veins, and I pushed these thoughts away. Useless speculation. The thoughts of a coward. I had to protect my family, and the only way I knew how to do it was by leaving them behind.
I headed for the closet.
The night before I left home, Marnie had been off at a parent-teacher conference, listening to ‘suggestions’ from parents who believed their fourth-grade children weren’t receiving an adequate learning experience. And so Nola and I were home alone, which happened every so often. While Nola read her favorite book for the hundredth time, listening to her little CD player, I watched the Yankees get their asses fed to them with the sound turned off. After a while I headed out to the garage, fed up with the lousy game and Nola’s repetitive pop music. I remembered she’d always been curious about the music Marnie and I used to listen to when we were young, and so I hunted down a handful of mixed CDs I’d made in college, most of them for when we’d turned the overhead lights off and the Christmas lights strung up around her dorm room twinkled over the bed like stars. I came back to the living room with the box and hunkered down in front of Nola. She scowled when I turned off her music, but when I showed her the words I’d written on that first CD, her eyes lit up and she tented her fingers in a devious manner reminiscent of her mother hamming it up over some cunning plan she’d devised to rope me into something I didn’t want to do.
The fi
rst song was Sweet Child O’ Mine. Nola seemed to enjoy it, even though she said Axl Rose’s voice was funny. After that were a couple of songs I don’t recall – one-hit wonders, most likely. Then came Sympathy for the Devil, and it wasn’t long before Nola and I got to howling along with Mick Jagger – “Hoo hoooo! Hoo hoooo!” I skipped the Chili Peppers’ Under the Bridge since it’s about suicide or heroin – or both – and even though Nola had already been through more than most kids had by sixteen, she was still only six. (I’d missed her seventh birthday while I was gone, something I imagine every parent with a deadbeat dad like mine promises themselves never to do. I sent a card procured from money I’d panhandled, but I can’t be sure it arrived in time. And even if it had, Marnie might not have passed it along. By then she was probably sick of hearing Nola ask what had happened to her daddy. It’s a question I often ask myself: What happened to me? It’s a question I’m afraid to answer.)
Near the end of the CD, Nola and I had nestled down on the rug with the ball game flickering unwatched on the TV. I’d been staring up at the ceiling with my arms behind my head while Nola talked about what she liked and disliked about each song, a running commentary that was amusing at first but then sort of droned on as I began to daydream about grabbing the Rabbit Man by the throat and feeling his trachea splinter between my fingers. The image made me smile.
The cops still hadn’t caught him, the man who’d assaulted my child, my little Nola, and I’d been spending most of my waking hours daydreaming about choking a man in a bunny suit to death as if the whole thing was a joke when the truth was far more sinister. Even then, I’m sure some dark part of me knew I could never move beyond the blind hatred, beyond thoughts of bloody revenge. That the wound he’d opened in me would turn gangrenous. Deadly.
I’d found myself sympathizing with those hovering parents Marnie and I used to berate. I heard the truth in meaningless catchphrases like ‘stranger danger.’ Buffer zones like Ron Book’s sex offender ordinances, barring perverts and pedophiles from living within a short distance of any place children gather, seemed to make some kind of logical sense to me. I was deluding myself, because I couldn’t live with the truth: that I would never feel Nola was safe again without my constant supervision.
When I snapped out of it, a song I hadn’t heard since Marnie and I were in grade school had come on, and I realized Nola had grown silent. I rolled over onto my stomach to see she sat frozen, her face, framed under the little brown bangs Marnie cut with scissors on a kitchen stool, twisted into a rictus of fear.
“Nola,” I said. She didn’t respond, didn’t take her eyes off the CD player we’d gotten for her fourth birthday, the little pink one with Dora the Explorer stickers plastered all over it. I snapped my fingers in front of her face and she didn’t flinch. A runner of drool spilled from her lip and pattered on the carpet.
Was she having a seizure?
The chorus kicked in then, the choir singing of tiny hands in larger ones, of a love that could be seen as a crime. The words struck me like a hammer in the chest. Wanting to be her daddy. Her preacher. Suddenly the love song seemed sinister. When I reached to turn it off, an odd creeping sensation like when you’re about to crush a particularly large and wriggly insect crawled up my spine.
The song stopped. Nola snapped out of her trance.
“Nola,” I said. “Sweetheart, have you heard that song before?”
Nola shook her head violently, wide blue eyes obscured by her bangs as she looked down in curiosity at the drool spots on the floor. Though she’d never spoken a word about the monster who’d assaulted her, the trauma still far too pervasive, I felt certain he would have told her never to tell, that if she told on him he’d come to her house and murder her family or something equally abhorrent. I understood that fear, but rage overcame me, and I grabbed her arm, much rougher than I’d meant. “Nola, don’t lie to Daddy.”
I didn’t realize Marnie had come home until I looked up in that awful moment to find her standing in the doorway. My hand fell away from Nola’s tiny arm, the skin red in the shape of my fingers. Tears stood in Nola’s eyes, though the look on her face was not pain but surprise. I’d never laid a finger on her for discipline until just then. Quite frankly, the look on my face in that moment probably mirrored hers.
There was no argument that night or ever. Marnie simply looked at me, straight into my heart where the poison had been festering. She took Nola by the hand, who’d run to her crying as the shock of what had happened finally struck her, and the two of them went upstairs to bed. I spent a few sleepless hours twisting back and forth on the couch under a small throw blanket. Eventually, I crept upstairs to my office and picked up the journal the family therapist had suggested I use to jot down what she’d called “irrational thoughts and/or behavior.” I’d had neither the time nor inclination to use it, just left it on my desk to gather dust. What good would writing about it do? I needed action, not words.
When I opened it that night, I realized I’d been wrong about that. Marnie had been filling in the journal for me, and her words were exactly what I needed in that moment. Reading it made me sick, looking at my transformation through Marnie’s eyes. In her words, it was like I’d been holding the family underwater, drowning us in my grief, determined to make Nola relive what that monster did to her over and over so she’d remember something, anything, about him: a smell, his voice, something about the place he took her, something about the rabbits. Dr. Ambrose might have held similar suspicions, but Marnie had known in her bones I would never get past it, that I’d never wanted to. She’d known before I fully understood myself just how badly I’d wanted to hurt him, even kill him – to make the Rabbit Man suffer for what he’d done to our little girl. Our sweet Nola.
The next day I told Marnie my plan. All she did was sigh. As if it had been inevitable, like she’d been waiting for me to admit it. Finally she’d asked me, “Do you really think it’s going to help her? Nola needs a father, not a vigilante.” She’d told me if I went through with it to never come back.
That was a third of a year ago. This rain-soaked morning was the first time I’d been home since.
***
I found the little pink CD player right where I’d hidden it that night, under the musty old sleeping bag we’d used at the Grand Canyon the summer before Nola was born. I took that, too, and returned to Bookville shortly after one, dog-tired but eager to share my “find” with the others. The battery had died in Walker’s RV a few weeks back, and our little area of the camp hadn’t had music since. I was sure they would be pleased.
As I trudged down the concrete shoulder toward camp, I was reminded of a phrase from one of Nola’s favorite picture books: Under the bridge, where the Monsters live… A story about a family of nice, cuddly monsters. Here is that fabled place, I thought. Only the monsters down here were most definitely not nice, and trying to cuddle one would be dangerous, like kissing a piranha.
By then I’d narrowed the Rabbit Man’s identity down to three suspects: Tony Walker, Alejandro Gonzalez, and Orville “Popcorn” Perry. These were the convicted pedophiles I’d been living among for the last three months. Not everyone in Bookville had committed the sort of vile crimes these men had. Some were rapists, others were molesters, but most had been stuck there for petty sexual assaults, hadn’t even spent a day in jail but had been forced to register anyhow. Forced out of their homes, into the shadows, and under the bridge. Statutory cases, groping, sodomy. Some drunk guy caught pissing in public near a school yard. You could almost laugh at a creep who exposed himself to old ladies, so long as one of them wasn’t your relative. It’s sick, sure, but it doesn’t hurt anyone. But regardless of their crime’s severity, lobbyist Ron Book’s ordinance forced these men and women to live 2,500 feet from any school, park, or bus stop. Without violating parole or removing their ankle monitor and skipping town, the Causeway and the Everglades were the only places left for a sex offender to live. Ron Book’s folly had pushed them underground and
off the grid. Instead of making Miami safer he’d made the city a thousand times more dangerous.
Walker, Gonzalez, and Popcorn Perry – these guys had done hard time. Gonzalez liked little girls. Popcorn preferred boys, but he’d gotten arrested for trying to diddle one of the girls on his school bus route. He told us she had a short haircut and had yet to hit puberty, so it was easy enough to imagine her as a boy despite not having the parts. From my understanding, Walker was a pinch hitter. None of these men had ever killed anyone as far as I knew, but together they’d strangled the souls of at least half a dozen children. What had sent me rushing home that morning was Gonzalez had told a story a few days prior about the rabbit he’d had as a boy, reminiscing about how soft its fur had been. I could easily imagine it reminding him of the silken hair of his victims, which I thought was probably why he’d liked it.
“Look what I found,” I said, holding up Nola’s CD player.
The three of them looked up from their game of Rummy on a table made of plywood and wooden cable spools. Gonzalez’s eyes lit up like a kid who’d just found the bra of his best friend’s mom on their shower rod (though I suppose that wouldn’t have interested him much even as a child). I plastered on a smile to cover for the sneer I felt trying to creep its way onto my face, having placed all bets on him.
He was my Rabbit Man. I was sure of it.
“Got batteries?” Walker asked.
“These ones still work,” I said, and put it on the table by the discards.
“What’s all this pink shit?” Popcorn wondered, eyeing me with suspicion. “You break your parole, or what?”
I pretended to be shocked. Early on, I’d made up a story to ingratiate myself with these three, telling them I’d done two years in Alamosa County for assaulting my niece. Popcorn and Walker had wanted details, and so I fed them details: said I’d been grooming her for years before I actually got up the courage to go through with it. That I’d babysat for my brother and his wife – I have no siblings, only in-laws – for months just working up the nerve to touch her. Popcorn had wanted to know about her underwear, if it had ‘decals,’ which I took to mean prints. Walker hadn’t even tried to conceal the erection in his frayed jeans. But Gonzalez had just stared, open-mouthed. Afterward, I’d excused myself for a piss and ended up being sick in the shadows behind one of the big pillars, my guts churning the whole time I’d concocted the story.
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