Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  “It’s everything, Laurel, it’s everything.” His breath came in hitches. “Sometimes I look around and it’s, like, this place is such a sham it’s everything hypocritical I ever hated, and now I’m part of it. And other times I want to be here, I think of what I could do with it if it was mine, like Gabe seems to want.” Hyperventilation couldn’t be far away. “I can’t trust myself to know what’s right anymore, and do you know what that’s like inside?”

  Paul watched her draw back a few inches, submerging into thought, perhaps her own part in the soft ricochet of his mind.

  “Then we’ll get you someplace where the only voice you have to listen to, telling you what to do, is your own.”

  As if that would help. “I don’t trust it much more than the others.”

  Then she told him she loved him, first time for everything. He looked for salvation in the words and found none, even when he returned them, meaning it, but supposing some things were even too great for love to save you from. Love could not save you from yourself. Especially when you felt hellbound.

  The notion of hell was particularly frightening these days. He was so well-qualified to go.

  “Aren’t you afraid of me?” he said. “What I might do?”

  “A little,” spoken with somber honesty. “Yeah. I am. But I don’t think I could ever really love somebody I wasn’t a little afraid of.”

  She was smart, he decided. Everybody was that way. She was just astute enough to admit it.

  Maybe it would keep her alive.

  Paul began the afternoon in isolation, alone in his room. TV on, mindlessly, background noise for company. Staring at the ceiling from his bed, these solid walls like the reverse polarity of a bomb shelter. Containing from within, rather than shielding from without.

  He could explode in here, coat the ceiling with his fluids, litter the floor with his fibers. They could clean him up after he had dried, and the room would be ready for the next sojourner coming to Dawson in hopes of answers.

  Why not leave now? he wondered. Today. This afternoon. Why not? The answer was simple, quite possibly selfish. Leave now, and it was forever on the coattails of failure; more than failure, murder. One tap and it’s all over but the burial. Go through with tomorrow, though, one more round of healing in the blessed name of Donny Dawson, and whether or not Gabe’s freak idea of brain-wave transmission worked, there was still a chance of walking away feeling that redemption was possible. Proving himself the master of his body, his spirit, and all the intricate ways in which they had begun to operate, to his persistent ignorance.

  All the sick, the hurting — I need you more than you need me.

  He was nearly asleep when a light rapping sounded at his door. Not Laurel, he knew that immediately, her knock was louder, livelier. Paul answered and found Gabe in the hall. Stiff and suited, Gabriel Matthews and his transcendent eyes. Bringing with them Paul’s temptation to let that look elevate him once more, give us this day our daily fix of homage.

  “I need to tell you something.” Gabe strolled heel-to-toe over to the TV and clicked it off without asking. They stared across the room at each other, Paul knowing he shouldn’t listen to what this man of misguided devotion had to say. Knowing, too, that the pull was too great.

  “Do you have any idea what you are?” Gabe asked.

  Paul said no, feeling stomach, bowels, everything, clench and freeze solid. Gabe had asked this as if he truly knew the answer.

  “I came here five years ago in hopes of finding something,” he said, “and it wasn’t here. Until we crossed paths with you.”

  And Gabe went on, at length, for quite some time, with the most astounding tale of myth and legend, history, and the holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

  Amanda had come to categorize her days entirely according to the schedules of others. She at their whim and mercy, they at her beck and call, her phalanx of therapists. They alone broke up the cycle of monotony she endured in her home, until even they too had become a part of it.

  How strange to think, this Saturday afternoon, that a welcome ripple in routine had come in the form of a stranger breaking in after breakfast. Yesterday morning’s bizarre visit, Mike Lancer knowing more about her life than she did.

  Given the lies told by her, about her, it seemed trust should be the last thing she would freely dispense. Yet she believed him, trusted him to have more on his mind than sensationalism, and could come up with no good reason why. True, she’d had little choice; she couldn’t have run or fought well, and cries for help to an empty house would have done no good. But he’d plainly wanted to establish that he meant no harm to her.

  To Donny was another matter.

  Mike’s visit was her secret, still. In years past, anyone who’d come with their sights set on Donny would have been as welcome to her as a maniac wielding a straight razor. But she could play his co-conspirator no longer.

  Trust … why? Maybe there had been something familiar about Mike Lancer. This was within the bounds of possibility. Before his demise, Irv had told her she might recall things that had gone on around her, that a coma did not negate all awareness. Perhaps she remembered his voice, subconsciously, from her impromptu photo session. Had sensed his compassion that first day, without threat.

  But going so far as to help him? She couldn’t even leave the house without help, and had she been able, her first priority would have been Paul Handler.

  After Gabe had first brought him by, and she’d extended the invitation to visit again, he had taken her up on it. Once, twice a week over the next three weeks. At first on the pretext of seeing how she was faring, a few minutes spent with the detached warmth of a doctor’s bedside manner, as if he had such miraculous patients all over the compound and was making rounds. The visits had gradually grown longer, long enough for her to learn where he was from, how his father had died; why he had come here, those accidental deaths brought by a touch in anger.

  Amanda had neither feared nor judged, just felt the ache in his heart as if it had throbbed in her own. He was as alone in his world as she was in hers, and why such empathy when she could no longer work up pity for her husband and the walls he had fabricated around himself? Maybe because Paul had climbed inside her body and mind, taken her by the hand, and led her back out of herself like a shepherd.

  But this week he hadn’t been by. If the shepherd had lost his own way, she wasn’t even sure she would know whom to blame.

  Amanda maneuvered with her cane to rise from the chair, easing herself over to stand by the window. Arm and leg surrendering day by day to her will, a triumph of vast personal magnitude, a toddler’s first steps to a parent’s arms.

  Her window. Autumn lived out there, breathed its breath of winsome sorrow, and she sensed the ache in its hollow bones. A day without sunshine, with winds of bluff and bluster, tears of rain. Trees shedding leaves as if weary of their burdens, letting the ground have its way with them, where they rolled, rested, clustered. Small mounds of the dead, waiting for the worms.

  Paul could heal. Paul could harm. Paul was obviously being exploited for the glory of another, too close to home. And now this unaccountable switch to live telecasts, and the bizarre scheme to send Paul’s brain-waves out with the satellite feed, it was madness around here, pronounced and infectious.

  God, I need some help down here, an urgent upward plea. I don’t understand this, not any of it.

  Waiting, waiting, and no flash of revealing light came from above or within. She abandoned the window when her leg grew testy from the weight, wandering about the room to keep it flexing, mind me you piece of meat. She didn’t stop until her eyes lit on a photo Donny had brought up a week after her awakening, had rested on the dresser. A much younger and more innocent couple smiled at her from within the frame, on their humble wedding day.

  Donny’s motive in bringing this up was painfully obvious, trying to tug one more heartstring in order to salvage what might be better off left wrecked and forgotten. She touched fingertips to i
t, the glass over the picture like the sixteen years between then and now. Can’t get there from here. They’d taken so many wrong turns since that tiny pauper’s wedding.

  A stringent urge to see him came storming in out of nowhere, if only they could have fifteen minutes of talk, honest and open and free. Renewal. And then she had to laugh, gallows humor — if only Donny, too, could spend a few months comatose and wake up to see his wrongs.

  But at the moment he was likely spinning more webs of deceit. Some emergency meeting of the Board of Directors — of which she was a member, his staff was nothing if not handpicked — trying to soothe some outraged tempers over the amount of money spent converting to a live show.

  With the real thing unavailable, video seemed the next best alternative. For convalescence purposes — just like a real hospital room, oh, thanks — he had brought up a small TV, plus a VCR and an assortment of tapes. She turned on the hardware and picked a tape of Arm of the Apostle shows from last year, take me away to a simpler time of self-delusion.

  Amanda settled into her chair, watched herself filmed with innocence still intact. Fraud, who, me? But with opened eyes, even these old shows had to be viewed in a new light, and a harsh, ugly one at that. Twenty minutes in, she was willing to concede this had been a mistake, like rubbing a dog’s nose in the residue of its crime against the rug. Except she and Donny didn’t even smell that good.

  She was working herself up to leave the chair and shut off the tape when Donny’s words seized every nerve.

  “‘Who, then, is a wise and faithful servant?’” said the video-Donny, reciting from the Book of Matthew, the phrase suddenly pulling triggers of memory, everything Irv Preston had told her validated in one terrible brainstorm.

  “‘Who, then, is a wise and faithful servant?’” Gabe’s disembodied voice in high frantic run-on. Amanda in paralysis and fearing such a loss of control in one from whom she has seen nothing but cool professionalism.

  “He is the one whom the master has placed in charge of the other servants,” Donny continued from the screen. Amanda gripped the arms of her chair while memory grew as potent as a whiff of ammonia.

  “‘How happy is that servant if his master finds him doing this when he comes home,’” Gabe’s toneless babble, and she cries soundlessly, leaden in a world into which sound sometimes ventures but she is powerless to react, unable to tell these two, Mike and Edie, to run, fight, do something.

  “…that servant’s master shall one day return when the servant does not expect him,” Donny intoned. Amanda hugged herself against the chill of spoiled suspense, knowing exactly what was to come, the memory and sound-pictures smashing their way up from subconscious to conscious.

  “‘And the master will cut him into pieces.’ I’M SORRY I’M SORRY!” Gabe screaming by now. Unseeing, Amanda lies still, tracking his sudden movement by sound alone, flinching inwardly at the horrid wet crunch and subsequent thud, a sound of broken bones and sudden death. She swims in overwhelming gray, the frustration of a body refusing to obey eating her alive, and then her spirits buoy with faint hope for a survivor when she hears the brittle shattering of her prison’s window, someone’s liberation. A tirade of high quavering cries from this trusted employee turned killer, and he rushes from the room, and she wants no more to do with this place. She would walk away if her legs would hold her, but the only defense is retreat, and a deeper gray beckons, swirling to black like a whirlpool, and she lets it suck her down, beyond even the most fevered reach of husband, traitor, thought.

  Over, finally. Remembered, relived, while she hugged herself, meager comfort from childhood, when nightmares woke her and she was too frightened to call out from midnight to her parents, for fear that the nameless thing in the dark would know where she was.

  And was this God’s answer to a prayer for understanding? Let her select the proper cue so she knew only that a killer had touched her life and home, family and friends? She hoped it had been no strain up there.

  No longer able to walk, not with the weak shakes wracking her body, Amanda crawled across the floor like a paraplegic to shut off the TV and VCR. Lay beneath them until the worst of the tremors passed. And when she was able, she crawled to the closet and yanked her robe free of its hanger, let it bunch without shape atop shoes. She plunged her hand into a pocket and came out with a scrap of paper.

  He had held back yesterday, that reporter, probably to spare her more turmoil. For which she both thanked him and cursed him.

  At least he printed legibly.

  Even for a workaholic like Gabe, rare was the occasion that brought him into the office late on a Saturday afternoon. Today was different. Today was final. And here he was, grand master of the judgment before which he would stand tomorrow. Hours before, leaving Paul alone with a brand new heritage to contemplate.

  It made one humble.

  It made one take desperate measures to insure that the overall scheme of things suffered as few setbacks as possible. Paul was now teetering on that brink of breakdown, needing only the final nudge. Gabe would supply it, with finesse, with awe, with love.

  Such subtleties of devotion to the inevitable were lost on his two guests. Thick was the one word that came to mind whenever he dealt with Dougie and Terry Durbin. Thick of nose, thick of fingers, thick of head. They sat before his desk at hunkered attention, inbred bookends. They would have been the sort of children charitably described as husky, turned by puberty into hulking monsters with heads a bit too small for their bodies. Identical blond hair that looked as if they had used the same cracked bowl for the cut. Dougie and Terry were not twins, but the assumption was natural. Born in West Virginia just ten months apart, some nineteen years past. Their family was vast and rife with odd conjugations, and Gabe never wanted to meet them.

  “You understand,” Gabe told them, “that evil is a very real force in this world, and sometimes it takes human form.”

  They nodded, solemn, all business.

  “We been looking for it all our lives,” Dougie said. The brains of the duo, dear lord, save us. “We don’t put up with it when we find it.”

  “Uh huh, that’s right,” said Terry, eager to contribute. “That’s how come they come to send us here.”

  Which had transpired seven months back. Gabe had accumulated files on these two even before their arrival by Greyhound. High school transcripts and counselors’ evaluations. Even as children these two had bred mischief like swamps breed parasites. The usual thievery and vandalism, and dead pets could more often than not be traced back to their door. They thumped heads for lunch money and spent it first on comics, later on beer. Everyone knew they were headed for prison someday, or perhaps some economy-minded deputy would do taxpayers a service and just shoot them during the commission of a crime to be named later.

  Then the unexpected happened when Dougie was fourteen and Terry thirteen: They got religion. An older sister had died giving birth to their nephew (and if their own theory of relativity ended there, Gabe would have been surprised), and the fire-and-brimstone sermon delivered at her funeral convinced them they would never see her again unless they mended their wayward souls. They decided that very day to redirect their natural exuberance to new ends, and become sin-stompers. Wherever sin was to be found, they would wade in with their size thirteen’s and put whatever stop to it they deemed necessary. Leaving bruises aplenty in their wake.

  How they’d settled on the idea that Donny Dawson had been placed on earth to herald the second coming was a mystery of arcane dimensions, and beyond their articulation. But believe it they did, and for Dougie and Terry Durbin, that settled it.

  “I won’t kid with you,” Gabe said. “There’s a threat to this ministry from within, and with your help, I’d like to take care of it. You know what I mean when I say take care of it. Don’t you?”

  Terry nudged Dougie with his elbow and they grinned happily at each other. Only brothers could smile that knowingly, born miscreants.

  “But I need warriors
on my side. Not cowards. I need a pair of strong backs and stout hearts on my side. Not weaklings.”

  “They don’t come much stronger than us,” said Dougie.

  “That’s right,” said Terry.

  “Men like Mr. Dawson,” Gabe said, switching gears, “are like the generals in our army of believers. And everybody knows that generals are too valuable to do the hard fighting. Right?”

  They nodded, oh, right, right, everybody knows that. Gabe smiled. Feebs liked military analogies, easy to grasp.

  “Men like me — and you — and you — we’re the true soldiers. We’re the ones who have to fight sin and evil in all its forms, and sometimes we’re the ones who are called to sacrifice for it.”

  “Do we get paid extra for this?” asked Terry.

  “I’ll see to that, don’t you worry,” Gabe assured, and they both looked as proud as champion boxers. Keep it moving, keep their attention. “Now just as we fight enemies of good and right in their different forms, our weapons are different too. Sometimes our weapons are faith and prayer. And sometimes … we have to use something a little louder.”

  Gabe unlocked a lower desk drawer and brought out the firepower he had picked up earlier this week. Another pistol for himself, and identical weapons for the Durbins, a TEC-9 for each of them. Wicked little things, barely over a foot in length, each with a magazine of thirty-two rounds. Semiautomatic fire only, which was why they were legal. Cheap, too, he’d talked the dealer into letting them go for two hundred fifty dollars apiece.

  “Holy Moses,” said Dougie.

  “And hallelujah,” said Terry. “These are for us?”

  Gabe stood up behind his desk and contemplated the morning to come, the light of transcendence beaming from his face. They were helpless before it. He could feel it spreading like an infection.

  “Tomorrow morning I’m giving you the chance to let the whole world see how strong and brave you really are. And I’m about to tell you the most important secrets that Donny Dawson Ministries has ever learned.”