Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  “So. You got the idea now?” Paul absently stroked his inner arm, flaking off more blood. “I — I cut it … and it sealed up again a few seconds later. Just the weirdest thing. And now this.” He tapped his head, newly solid, intact. “So I guess you can tell Amanda that she doesn’t have to worry. Nobody can do anything to me. The damage … it’s already been done.”

  He crawled around on the bed, nose wrinkling in disgust as he scooped up a glob of gray matter and slung it onto the floor. “What a mess. What a mess. I gotta get my head on straight,” laughing weakly at his little joke. “I’m in control.” Sinking into the covers as his eyes lost their dementia, until he looked merely terrified. Caught in something’s jaws and resigned to being swallowed. “Thanks for coming by, I really do feel better now…”

  To think they could be of any use in this room was a fool’s quest. And when Mike and Ramon quietly bowed out, Paul was muttering away as if he were not even aware of them leaving.

  By the time Amanda called later that night, Mike and Ramon had wordlessly gone through most of a bottle of sour mash. The TV played quietly, any distraction from thought. Ramon sat on his bed, huddled within a blanket pulled tight in front. It was quite possible they were both in mild shock.

  “He’s very…” Mike paused, grasping for the proper word. Psychotic was close to the mark, and too blunt for Amanda at the moment. “…distraught. There wasn’t much good in trying to talk him out of appearing tomorrow. It’s almost like he’s wanting to prove something to himself. And, I don’t know why, but I got the feeling that somebody might have been there earlier, left him upset.”

  “There aren’t that many people around here he’s very close to, that could have much of an impact on him.” Her voice weighty with apprehension. “Laurel? Or Gabe, he trusts Gabe. I should call Laurel, I didn’t want to bring her into this, she’s too close, but …”

  “So we’re back to square one.” Mike shook the last cigarette from his only pack, chained it off the butt of its predecessor. Wasn’t like him to blaze through a pack in two hours. Wasn’t like him to watch self-resurrecting suicides, either. “What next?”

  “They go on the air at eight o’clock tomorrow morning,” she said. “That leaves less than ten hours to think of something. Will you be here?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  He should have known the night would bring more pounding at his door, pilgrims of abuse, he would receive all. If they could take this savage communion, certainly he could do no less than offer it.

  Paul answered, peered through a tiny slit of doorway, and she was there: My love, my leech.

  Turning from the door, going for his bed, “Come on in,” and when he heard Laurel entering, saw thr wedge of light sweep from the hallway across the floor, he said, “Leave the lights off. I don’t want any lights on tonight.”

  Sitting on the bed to receive her, Paul watched her walk slowly forward, with trepidation. Same sort of walk as Amanda’s friends earlier, what was with everybody tonight, treating him like he was wired to blow. Laurel, a silhouette of gray, faint light from the window skimming off planes of worry … her face.

  “I — I got to wondering … how you were feeling, and…”

  And she was a terrible liar, this night, at least. No chance visit, this, someone had tipped her off, Go see him, time for his ten-thirty status check. Never mind who, it didn’t matter anymore, he was fodder for this entire dynasty of deceit.

  “What happened in here?” she whispered, sniffing. “It smells like … oh, Paul.”

  She would know that smell, wouldn’t she? The stink of a gun fired in a closed room would be forever fixed in memory, no mistaking that one. Having watched a boyfriend commit .38-caliber neurosurgery, she would be initiated for life. Laurel would know the residual odor in those lingering grains of gunpowder, and perhaps, if she were very observant, the underlying whiffs of blood, and worse.

  “Don’t ask me questions you don’t really want answered,” he said, and held out one hand.

  Paul watched her tense and look at his extended hand as if he had asked her to grasp a live wire. Smiling at her through the dark, very calm at the moment, turbulent seas of self placid in the eye of the hurricane. He could lean over, switch on a nearby lamp, grin at her with the runic traces of blood down his temples, his cheeks, his jaw. Look familiar, remember this? But you’ve come up in the world, because it’s something I can handle.

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  She faltered, one step forward, stop. “I want to,” but she didn’t sound terribly convinced she should, and he supposed she couldn’t be blamed for that.

  “It’s okay,” he murmured, “I really want us to do this tonight, just like always. I need to know there’s somebody who loves me for me.”

  His breath quickened with the desire to feel her beneath him, surrendering within and without to his touch, and she came the rest of the way. Their hands met halfway, fingertips, then palms, and he closed his eyes, shuddered, felt the outflow as she gasped, pop goes the melanoma.

  He rose and kissed her, Laurel’s lips wet and tender and hesitant against his own. Her limbs stiff, even as he stripped away her clothes, and she began to weep. Paul licked a tear from each cheek. No sweet tears of rapture, not this time. He could taste the difference, the bitter fear. So familiar with her body and its essences, he could analyze her by scent and taste alone.

  Paul shed his own clothes and fed her to the conjugal bed. Watching as she squirmed uneasily after reclining, “Paul, there’s something under me, what’s this in the bed?” And how would it feel to her, how wet, how sticky, how cold? Remains of his earlier cranial indiscretion. Had she felt those tissues before?

  “No questions,” he reminded, kneeling between her parted legs, running his hands along smooth thighs, what a shame he’d had no access to leprosy. “No questions.”

  He could reach beneath her, draw one morsel out, slip it between her lips, Take, eat, this was my body. A ritual to bind them further, and would she taste the madness of his earlier thoughts?

  “You’re scaring me,” her voice pious with the hush of sanctitude.

  “Then it must be love.”

  He worked his magic of hands and virulence, and Laurel writhed.

  How far could he take this? The question had always been in the back of his mind, had finally been dislodged to the forefront. If I killed her … could I bring her back again?

  Such fevered temptation.

  Chapter 40

  Sudden death, Sunday morning suffocation, abrupt airless dreams of being a fish out of water, and Donny awakened only when his lungs began hitching with spasms. Awareness, the waking world, he couldn’t breathe … a hand in his face, fingers pinching shut both his nose and mouth. He thrashed his head with a frightened moan, and the fingers let go. He blinked in the darkness, dawn a mere hope of things to come. A moment later the bedside lamp switched on, and he stared up into the face of Gabe Matthews.

  “Rise and shine,” said Gabe. “Big morning ahead.”

  His brain had gone to sludge, his body filled with more of the same. Morning mouth, dead tongue in a jar of teeth and paste, with the taste of sour bile.

  “Sleep,” he croaked. “Need more sleep.”

  Gabe shook his head. “No time for that. We’ve got to get you up and get the Valium worked out. We can’t have you making a fool of yourself on live TV. Can we?”

  A spark of purpose flared, one candle in a darkened stadium. The show, there would always be the show, his audience. The only true loyalty shown him anymore, and he dared not disappoint.

  Gabe produced a pair of capsules, popping them between Donny’s rubbery lips. Before he could spit them out, a glass of water was at his mouth, tilt, water cascading down chin and throat. He swallowed without intending to, eyes bulging in fear. Poison? No, that would make no sense.

  “To get you up and running,” Gabe said.

  He lay back a moment, letting h
is eyes get used to the light. His body accustomed to awakening. Trying to squeeze out a few coherent thoughts, powers of the mind feeble and fogbound. Mandy’s voice, just before the fall that forever changed their lives, protesting their living of lies. How prophetic she had been, touching the infinite before the coma robbed her of months. And what had those months been but the conception of one lie nourished on the afterbirth of another?

  This had all been some sort of grand punishment, watching helplessly as his own creation whirled around, sprouted coils of its own, and tried to choke him.

  Had Gabe slept here last night? Very possibly he had. Donny peered up at him as he stood in pale blue pajamas decorated with some red pattern. Nothing left inside himself, Donny realized, not even sufficient residual emotion left to hate Gabe for what he had done. Numb curiosity, more than anything.

  “This is Hell, isn’t it?” Donny said.

  “It’s whatever you want it to be.” Gabe looked down with tender regret, one of those rare moments in which his demeanor of killer instinct had cracked like a mask. Letting out a look of desperate hope, dead dreams. What goals had Gabe had long ago, Donny wondered, before encountering whatever had warped him into this sad creature who manipulated the world to the dictates of some hidden agenda? “Aren’t you supposed to suffer in Hell?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t see the point of it by then.”

  Gabe began to unbutton his pajama top, hand descending as Donny noticed the irregularity of the material’s red pattern, and then he was slipping the shirt off and Donny shut his eyes hoping he wasn’t seeing this, what do you know, something could have an effect on him this morning after all.

  Circling Gabe’s torso, so tightly they sometimes bit into already scarred flesh, were loops of new barbed wire. Most of the barbs were half buried in thickened clots, and as Donny reopened his eyes he knew he’d never even come close to knowing Gabe as he thought he had. He had known a mask. And entrusted it with his entire life.

  “Suffering pain leads to redemption. The Hindus believe that, that pain purifies. That’s their contribution to a higher truth.” Shaking his head in frowning wonder. “I really feel that I’ve gone as far with it as I can. Almost. This morning will finish it.”

  “You … you need help,” Donny stammered. “You need guidance … you need prayers.”

  “Today is my answer to prayers.” He lowered his head for a moment, letting it droop, world-weary. Then he looked up with a quivering lower lip, and dear lord, his face looked for all the world as if he were about to make his last goodbye. “You may hate me. You may think I’m wretched. You may think I’m a sham. And maybe you’re right. But whatever I’ve done around here lately, I didn’t do it for money. I did it to find out the truth. I’m no fraud in that sense. And that puts me way ahead of you.”

  Donny turtled halfway up in bed, sitting among rumpled covers. His honor smarting as if he’d been slapped across the face with the gauntlet of challenge.

  “I didn’t fake it that first time in Alabama. I healed that boy for real. I did it for real! Jimmy McPherson, everybody saw me.” Donny bit his lip, would not cry. Voice pinching into a cracked whisper, “You have to believe me. It was real.”

  “Then that one fluke was the worst thing that ever happened to you,” Gabe said with terrible wisdom. “Didn’t you once, ever, think of some other possible explanation? Ever?” When Donny didn’t answer, he went on. “They say even the most brilliant among us doesn’t use more than twenty percent of the brain. Who knows what abilities were lost inside that other eighty percent? Who knows what gifts we were given once, and lost, because we turned our backs on them. Because our faith went into other things instead of wherever the gift came from.”

  It forced him to think, to at least entertain this notion. A dormant ability, tapped in an instant of pure crisis; in that moment, his faith in a higher power pure and unmuddied; then lost forever in the labyrinth. Yes, perhaps he had remembered how to bestow the gift of healing. And simple Jimmy McPherson, in that childlike faith of the retarded, had remembered how to accept it.

  He thought of stories of young mothers, impelled by love and terror to lift cars from the ground to free their pinned children. Did they expect to repeat the act at will? No, they did not.

  For they were wise enough to know better.

  “I have lots to show for my life,” Donny said, faltering.

  “Name one.”

  The clock ticked, excruciatingly loud. Filling the house, all three floors, a hollow echo. Like a pendulum, heavy, heavy, hangs over thy head. Gabe turned to leave, and no, Donny didn’t want to think anymore, let him worry and sort this through later.

  Gabe turned, poised in the doorway. “Be on time. Don’t make me come looking for you.” Then, as if he refused to hold himself responsible for the consequences of someone else’s stupidity, “Follow the script and you’ll be okay.”

  Gone, almost forever, and in some ghastly way his absence left a kind of void. In prison, even the voice of a jailer was preferable to isolation.

  Donny sat in bed for several minutes, and after the stimulants began to seep into his system, he set about the safe routine of making himself presentable for the day. A shave. A chilly shower. Breakfast. Wrapping himself in the trademark white suit, his armor … rusted. Energy to burn by now, great. Whatever these pills were, he needed to get a prescription for them, as well.

  When it came time to leave for the chapel, Donny stood at the foot of those fateful stairs, gazing upward. Feeling a pull from the third floor, strong as the sirens’ song in the ears of Odysseus. He got three stairs up before deciding against it. There would be no facing her, not this morning. This morning was the biggest jewel of all in his crown of hypocrisy. And while he knew that he could easily ignore it, Mandy no longer could.

  So he left, wondering if a reconciliation of differences was even possible once the day was done, Gabe was gone, and life and destiny were restored to his own hands.

  Probably not, to be honest.

  Because it was his show, it had always been so. As it would always be. And regardless, the show must go on.

  Paul and Laurel had slept in fitful starts and stops. She left before dawn, not kissing him, merely sitting on the edge of the bed after putting her clothes on. Stiff, knees pressed together, one intrepid hand resting lightly on his chest. Holding him down? In practice, he could rot the hand away. Oh, she was courageous. Or trusting. Or maybe she just enjoyed a good dare.

  “See you at the chapel,” she said, voice listless.

  “Mm hmm.” He watched her leave, wondering vaguely how much more she could stand, knowing she would one day awaken to realize she’d met someone who could take her too far, too easily. And was probably too willing to do it.

  A day of hideous loneliness loomed on the horizon, and Paul welcomed it as much as he hated the thought of it.

  He locked himself into the bathroom he shared with the other two, showering before anyone else arose. Tiles and steam, and at his feet the water swirled pink with reconstituted blood. The scabrous crusts on either side of his head took the longest to dissolve. The water was as hot as he could stand, and beneath its fierce spray he tried to cleanse himself of the toxins in his heart and mind, send them wafting to the exhaust fan along with the steam.

  Too little, too late. He was swaying over the chasm of breakdown, fingernails alone arresting the plummet.

  Paul dressed in his finest gray suit, blue shirt, solid yellow tie. Black shoes buffed to a mellow gleam. Staring at himself in the mirror, this outer man so normal, placid. Shatter the mirror or peel back the veneer, the result would be the same: broken fragments with sharp edges, do not touch.

  He made it to the chapel just after six-thirty, reporting through the back entrance. Surprise of surprises, he could no longer just breeze in as if he owned the place. The backstage door was locked, manned by a uniformed guard. Rent-a-cop, no doubt more of Gabe’s doing, really carrying precautions too far, wasn’
t he? Cocky young stud with a belly of authority, he opened up when seeing Paul through the glass, checked his name off a clipboard of admitted personnel. No others need apply, presumably.

  Backstage, Paul threaded his way among those who would be before the cameras and those behind them. The corridors were already a beehive, smelling of nerves and hairspray. Soundchecks on the microphones echoed out front. He watched as an usher fretted with a carnation boutonnière, finally rescued by one of the sopranos, her blue robe open over her dress as she positioned it in place. They exchanged cheek kisses, then parted, eyes radiant for one another, and weren’t they just the most adorable things.

  Paul tasted jealousy all the way to the makeup room.

  “Uh-oh, we’ve got some dark circles under those eyes today,” said the makeup artist, and she went to work on him with creams and powders. Fingers strong and cool and pleasant on his face. “You’re going to have to quit burning the candle at both ends.”

  “I haven’t even started to burn yet,” he said.

  She smiled, nodded, blissfully unaware. “That’s the spirit.”

  Gabe was there to meet him when he stepped from the chair, and ushered him into the hallway with one hand at Paul’s elbow, this way, please, this way.

  “You’re really wanting to go ahead with this today,” Paul said.

  Gabe nodded briskly. “Why not? The equipment’s already been bought, it’s in place. It’s not even that complicated.”

  “But I am,” and there was strange comfort to be found in someone who knew what he was and didn’t care, who could take charge and fearlessly point him in the proper direction.

  Paul had actively hated him yesterday afternoon, letting it smolder and smoke until the hatred burned itself out. Gabe was, after all, telling truths. Hatred was like killing the messenger for bringing bad news.