by Harvey Click
Tired and oddly contented, he began to drift. He thought he heard Rue speaking quietly, but her words passed over him like a warm breeze, and he had no idea what she was saying. Then from someplace far away he thought he heard her say, “You’re thinking of home.”
The crackling fireplace in the next room felt warm and comforting, and Jason remembered the cast-iron wood stove crackling in the kitchen on cold winter days when he was young. Winter mornings his mother cooked flapjacks on an iron griddle while fluffy snow fell slowly outside the window. He could smell the sizzling batter, and now he could taste the hot pancakes slathered with butter and maple syrup as vividly as if he were actually chewing them.
“You’re thinking of home,” Rue said again.
“Yes,” he murmured.
“What is home?” she asked. “Shall I tell you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a place where you can put all your weapons aside and unfold yourself like a blanket and trust that no one will ever cause you any harm.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Repeat it,” she said. “What is home?”
“It’s a place where you can put all your weapons aside and unfold yourself like a blanket and trust that no one will ever cause you any harm,” he said.
“You’re thinking that The Way isn’t a very good home,” she said. “You’re thinking that you’ll never go there again.”
“Yes,” he said.
“You’re thinking that this is your true home,” she said. “You’re thinking you want to stay here forever and let Rue take care of you in any way she wants.”
“Yes,” he said.
“It’s finished,” she said.
He opened his eyes and watched wearily while Rue put her brushes in a jar of linseed oil. She took off her smock, grabbed his erect penis, and led him up to his bedroom without letting go of it.
Part Six
The Night Watchman
Chapter Seventeen
He heard rain long before he opened his eyes, and when he did finally open them the bedroom was so dark he couldn’t tell if it was day or still night. He felt exhausted and sick. His groin ached like a rotten tooth, and the pain seemed to radiate through his whole body, not just through his nerves but through his bones. He shut his eyes again and tried to sleep some more but couldn’t.
When he got up his muscles were weak and trembly and he nearly fell. He thought either he was coming down with flu or else Rue had hexed him, and he didn’t think it was flu. He showered but didn’t have the energy to shave or brush his teeth. He padded downstairs naked and put on some clothes from his bag. As he pulled on his socks he was surprised to see that the raw areas on his feet were no longer raw—new pink skin had already formed.
He stepped into the studio and felt even sicker when he saw the finished painting. He didn’t think the portrait looked quite like him, but that didn’t matter. What did matter was that the portrait seemed to be him, as if some part of himself had been mixed in with the paint and smeared on the canvas and now it no longer belonged to him.
He pulled aside the drape in the front window and looked out. Rain was coming down hard. The grandfather clock said 8:45, but the sky was so dark he wondered if it was 8:45 p.m. instead of a.m. He didn’t think he had slept all day, but on the other hand he felt so sick and confused he couldn’t be sure.
He pulled on his leather jacket, zipped it, and turned up the collar. He decided to take his bag with him because he didn’t want to spend another night here, but of course he had nowhere else to go unless Hempy was willing to put him up. There was a green umbrella leaning against the corner by the door, and he took that too.
The air felt cold as winter when he stepped out. He hoped walking would get his blood moving and make him feel less sick, but it didn’t. His legs were shaky and his groin throbbed with every step.
He could tell it was a.m. instead of p.m. by all the students racing about with umbrellas and raincoats on the Oval, but he still had the odd feeling it was night. Rain was coming down in thick sheets now, and he was soaked despite the umbrella, which was flapping madly in the wind. He clutched his bag up close to his chest, but it was getting soaked too.
He knew it was time to see Holly, and he told himself it would be nice to lie against her plump, warm body and hold her soft belly with their unborn child sleeping inside it. She had her flaws, way too many, but he thought maybe he could learn to live with them—maybe. Right now staying with her at least sounded healthier than staying with Rue.
But first he wanted to see Drew. Drew had told him not to come over today, but surely Jason’s problem was more important than Drew’s stupid spirit quest or whatever he called it. Drew would probably know how to tell the difference between flu and a hex, and if it was a hex maybe he could undo it.
He bought two Big Macs but his stomach didn’t feel up to the job and he could eat only one. He wanted to sit for a while in the restaurant where it was dry and warm and bright, but in fact the lights were too bright and soon his eyes were aching like his bones.
Maybe it ain’t no flu or hex, he thought. Maybe it’s the clap.
He trudged through more rain to Drew’s front door and listened, but for once Drew wasn’t talking to himself. He knocked and knocked again. He knew the big phony was in there, probably avoiding him because he was off on his spirit quest, whatever the hell that might be, pretending to be a great magician instead of a two-bit fortune teller. He pounded again as hard as he could.
“I know you’re in there, Drew,” he yelled. “It’s me, Jason. Please open up, it’s an emergency. I been hexed and I need your help.”
Silence. He went to the front window and peeped in through the crack between the drapes. He saw Drew’s wheelchair near the coffee table, but Drew wasn’t in it. He moved his head and saw Drew lying on the floor face-down, wearing nothing but socks and boxer shorts.
He pounded the glass and yelled, “Drew! Drew! Drew, are you okay in there?”
Silence.
Fortunately the window was unlocked, but it went up only a foot and then got stuck. He shut the umbrella, tossed it inside with his bag and awkwardly crawled in through the narrow opening, scooting across the sill on his belly until he could reach the floor, then sliding his legs in until he landed face-down on the floor, much like Drew himself.
He scrambled over to Drew and rolled him over. His face was blue and swollen, and his body was slippery with some sort of greasy ointment.
“Drew! Drew!” he shouted. He shook the man’s shoulders and then felt for a pulse.
Drew was dead.
***
Jason hadn’t learned much of anything in school, and he hadn’t paid much attention when CPR was demonstrated in health class, but he remembered a little. He knelt astride Drew’s body and began compressing his chest.
Do it every second was what he remembered, or maybe it was twice every second or maybe once every two seconds? He wasn’t sure, and he wasn’t sure how to count seconds anyway when his own heart was beating so fast it was putting off his sense of time, but he kept pushing and pushing—and Drew just kept on being dead.
Okay then, mouth to mouth. He remembered you were supposed to clear the mouth, so he opened Drew’s, felt around on his clammy dead tongue, and found a glob of something that smelled like vomit. He scooped it out with his fingers and wiped them on the rug since there wasn’t a rag anywhere handy. He put his mouth against Drew’s dead mouth and blew as hard as he could as if he were blowing up a huge balloon.
Thick yellow snot air came snorting out of Drew’s nostrils onto Jason’s face, and he wiped it on his shirt sleeve. He thought maybe the nurse in health class had said you were supposed to pinch the nose shut, or maybe not, so he tried doing that and kept blowing air into the gaping mouth, which smelled something like puke mixed with sauerkraut. He became dizzy from all the blowing, but the balloon stayed dead.
Though he could see it was doing no good he kept at it anyway, and then suddenly
there was a sort of belching sound as Drew exhaled a breath of putrid air into his face. Time seemed to pause and hold its breath for a moment, and then he saw Drew’s chest rise, and then suddenly he was gasping and coughing and thrashing his arms around like a drowning man.
Jason sat back, speechless and amazed. Drew had been dead, as dead as you can get, not just for a few seconds or one minute, but for several minutes at least, and now he was alive. For once maybe somebody in this cruel and heartless town would be pleased with something Jason had done.
“Are you okay?” he asked, yelling loudly as if Drew were still somewhere far away in the land of the dead and needed to be yelled at.
A hideous noise came from Drew’s throat, nothing like a human voice, and Jason trembled with a terrible chill, thinking it wasn’t a live man trying to speak but a dead man half risen and maybe bringing back a demon or two with him.
“What did you say?” Jason asked with great trepidation.
“Ambulance.”
The phone was lying on its side on the floor. Jason picked it up, dialed O for operator and told her to send one.
When he put down the phone he heard Drew trying to say something, but his voice was a harsh hiss like a demon uttering some dreadful curse.
“What did you say?”
“There’s a key in the—” Drew started coughing and gasping. “In the phone stand. Get it.”
Jason opened the little drawer and found a key.
“It’s a spare apartment key,” Drew said, his voice so hoarse Jason could barely make out the words. “You must stay here until I’m out of the hospital. You must guard my manuscript. Rue will try to steal it.”
“Okay.”
“You must promise,” Drew said. “It’s urgent, very urgent.”
“I promise.”
“You must swear.”
“I swear.”
Drew’s head sank back to the floor, and he looked dead again. Jason knelt and listened for breathing. He heard some, but it was very faint, like a feeble hint of breeze on a still day. The room felt cold and damp, so he got a blanket from Drew’s bedroom and covered him with it.
There was loud knocking on the door, and Jason opened it for the two ambulance men.
“What’s wrong with him?” one of them asked.
“I dunno. I just come in and found him dead, so I brung him back to life.”
“You live here?” the other asked.
“Yep.”
One of the men listened to Drew’s heart while the other pulled an eyelid open, and then they moved him onto a stretcher and hurried out.
Chapter Eighteen
Drew’s tape recorder was on the coffee table, and Jason noticed the reels were still turning. He shut it off and shivered, deeply cold.
He found a dry pair of jeans in his damp duffle bag and changed. His shirt was fairly dry, but he decided to change it too when he noticed the big yellow glob of Drew’s snot on the sleeve.
After hanging his wet jeans over a chair in the kitchen, he hunted around for a clean blanket and finally found one folded up in a cedar chest at the foot of Drew’s bed. It felt strange rummaging through his bedroom, finding his frayed underwear in one drawer, his collection of well-thumbed girlie magazines in another, and the framed photo of a beautiful woman with long golden hair on the dresser top beside a scrapbook containing more pictures of her and some letters apparently written by her hand.
Jason was tempted to read them, but the handwriting was difficult to decipher and the bedroom smelled not much better than the drunken biker’s room, so he went back to the living room, feeling virtuous and mature for having resisted the temptation. Maybe later he’d have a peek at them, purely as an effort to better understand poor Drew.
He wrapped the wool blanket around his shoulders, found the furnace thermostat and cranked it up, then sat on the sofa and shivered some more. When the furnace kicked on the air smelled dusty, as it usually does when a furnace hasn’t been used for several months.
Already the great responsibility of guarding Drew’s manuscript was weighing on him and making him feel restless and bored. He didn’t want to be alone with this terrible task and it didn’t seem fair that he should be. He had brought a man back from the dead, the very sort of thing Jesus was given so much credit for even all these years later, but instead of being given credit Jason was supposed to sit all alone in this damned dreary apartment without even a TV to keep him company.
He considered calling Holly with the monumental news, but she’d ask too many questions, and the answers to her questions would probably all involve Rue in one way or another, and thinking up convincing answers that didn’t would be another terrible task.
He’d be damned if he’d call Kyra, even if he knew her number, which he didn’t. He doubted he could ever forgive her for shoving him into the biker’s room, and if she ever wanted his affections back she’d have to beg for them on her knees and then kiss his ass for good measure.
But he had to talk to someone, so he called Hatter. This time the desk clerk put him through.
Soon Hatter was banging on the door. He shut his big umbrella and leaned it against the corner by the door, where it made itself at home by peeing copiously on the hardwood floor. He hung his frayed brown overcoat on the coatrack, and Jason watched it contribute its own puddle, stretching out in a sort of rivulet in an effort to join the other one.
Now that he was in charge of the apartment, he thought maybe he should find a towel to wipe up the puddles. But he didn’t. The heavy burden of his responsibility was already making his flu or hex feel worse, and he decided it would be foolhardy to increase his burden by mopping up puddles.
“You’re sure he was dead?” Hatter asked.
“Yep.”
“Well, it’s not unprecedented. There are plenty of cases where clinically dead people are revived. Sometimes they have interesting stories to tell.”
Hatter peered into Drew’s bedroom and then the kitchen. “Place looks just like I pictured it,” he said. “The kitchen’s a real pigsty. I guess this must be his study.”
He was about to open the door when Jason said, “He don’t allow no one in there ‘less he invites them.”
Hatter opened the door anyway and peered inside. “A little peek won’t hurt,” he said. “A writer needs to know his settings. Do you happen to know if that broken figurine is still in here? I’d like to see it.”
“I told you to keep out of there.” Jason had raised his voice, causing his throat to feel scratchy as if it was trying to get sore. He wondered if the clap gave you a sore throat.
“Okay, okay.” Hatter shut the study door and sat in the armchair where Jason usually sat. “So did he say anything after you revived him?”
“Yep. He made me promise to stay here and guard his book. It’s my responsibility and I take it serious, and that’s why I ain’t gonna let you poke around in his study. They’s nothing in the world you could give me to let you have a look at that there book.”
Hatter chucked and coughed. “Did he say what you’re guarding it from? Rival sorcerers? Minions of the devil?”
“Rue. He said she’s gonna try and steal it, and I’m the only one he trusts to guard it.”
“Why does Rue want it?”
“I dunno. Maybe to spite Drew. He had a fight with her, and now maybe she’s turned nasty on him. Maybe she wants to burn it up and ruin his life work.”
“Did you know Mingo’s her landlord?” Hatter asked. “I’ve been doing a little research—he owns the house she’s living in.”
“He might as well own it,” Jason said. “He comes and goes there whenever he pleases.”
“I don’t know how long she’s lived there,” Hatter said. “So far I haven’t been able to learn anything at all about her, she’s a complete mystery. Have you ever mentioned my name to her?”
“Nope.”
“Good. Then I’ll take the manuscript to my hotel and have them lock it up in their safe. Since she kno
ws nothing about me, she can’t possibly think of looking for it there.”
“Nope. Drew made me swear to guard it till he gets home.”
“Oh come on, kid, you don’t want to sit around here worrying about it day and night. My hotel will be a lot safer than this dump. Why, anybody could break in here with a ten-cent screwdriver. Then you can come and go as you please.”
“Nope. I swore a promise. Besides, I bet you want to read it so you can steal some ideas for your book, and I ain’t gonna let you do it. That would make you a plagiargeist. In case you never heard that word, it means a guy who steals somebody else’s writing.”
Hatter chuckled. “Well, it’s not exactly the word I’d use,” he said. “But maybe I could slip into Drew’s study for just one brief hour and have a quick look at it.”
“Maybe not,” Jason said.
Hatter grinned. “Well, I admit I never would have thought of this twist,” he said. “Drew dies and then rises from the dead, and now you have a sacred mission to protect his life work from witches and plagiargeists. I tell you, this story just keeps going its own directions, and I have no idea where it’s headed. I haven’t felt this excited in years.”
But he didn’t look excited, he looked his usual grim self, and Jason didn’t like his attitude. Drew was deathly ill, maybe dying in the hospital right now for the second time, and Hatter was gloating about his damn book.
“You’re not looking so good, kid. Are you sick?”
“Rue put a hex on me, or maybe she gimme the clap. Started off with a pain in my nuts and now it’s shooting through every bone in my body.”
“Sounds like flu to me,” Hatter said. “Try not to breathe on me.”
He had been eyeing the tape recorder on the coffee table. “I wonder what that thing could tell us,” he said.