Sons of Dust

by P. Dalton Updyke

  “Let it be as written!” His voice was strong, but her screams drowned his words.

  Two men stepped from the shadows. They carried between them a long length of heavy chain. It took two of them to carry it to the platform and when it hit the wooden floor of the scaffold, it made a dull sound and Magdalena screamed louder, her words babbling into anguish.

  They chained Lucien first, snapping the manacle around his right wrist, leading the other end of the chain to Magdalena, snapping the manacle around her left. She struggled, but it did no good as a third man came forward and held her fast. They wrapped the chain around her waist, then back to Lucien, where they looped it over his neck and down to his chest. Left to right they were bound—

  “For eternity,” the old man intoned, and the crowd began to cheer. With one last cry, Magdalena flung herself forward, but the men in the executioners’ masks stopped her. They dragged her off the platform, and she screamed all the louder, while behind her, Lucien was dragged through the dirt. Dust and grit worked their way into the fresh wounds on his back, the blood began to flow again and when Magdalena looked over her shoulder, her gaze fell on the tracks of red mud leading to the house and the wall

  the wall

  wall

  bricks

  bricked in the wall

  “Bricked in?” Katie whispered. “They walled you in?”

  The white light flashed again and Katie saw the crowd, dressed in black, crows, she saw their faces, the grim look to the women and men, the fear to the children, and then she saw the brick-layers, sweating as they lifted the bricks and closed in the room inside the white house and Katie was horrified, fear turning her not cold, but hot, so hot that her heart felt like it was boiling inside her chest, melting as the men stacked bricks and added mortar, the crowd watching in silent concentration as Magdalena and Lucien slowly disappeared behind the rising layers of the wall. Magdalena lifted her arms again, screeching and Katie saw

  the chain

  and then the picture was gone and the image that started to form in Katie’s brain winked out as if extinguished and Lucien was there, watching her from the ruined bedroom. “Did you see?”

  Katie nodded, her throat ached. “They walled you in.”

  “Yes. And that was not the worst.”

  But Katie had had enough. “I don’t want to see the worst.”

  “You must,” Lucien said. “You must understand so you will help.”

  And the bright light flashed in her again, abruptly going out so that she was in a darkness so deep it was beyond black. She could make out nothing in this inky murk, nothing. She thrust her hands out to the sides and her fingers closed on air. There were no walls she could see or feel, no doors to escape through just black and black and black. There were sounds in the haze, voices and then sobbing – children, maybe? The cries of many merged into a single sound and Katie thought Magdalena?

  Please no

  And then the cries grew louder, gasps of pain that echoed in the dark so that the shrill cries were all that mattered, all that counted and the voice begged, please, please, pleassssssse

  Katie covered her ears with her hands, tears streaming down her face because she couldn’t bear the sounds, but the noise kept coming through her hands, drilling into her head, and she couldn’t stop it, couldn’t shut it out and it was dark, so black

  Please no

  “No more!” Katie screamed. “No more!” There was a flash of white light and Lucien was in front of her, his eyes gleaming.

  “That has been our existence.”

  Katie felt dizzy and hot, sick.

  Lucien leaned forward and for one horrible instant, Katie thought he was going to touch her and she thought I can’t bear it, truly. I can’t stand for him to touch me—

  “Did you hear what the Justice said?” Lucien didn’t reach for her, but his eyes never left Katie’s face. “Did you hear, ‘Let it be as is written’?”

  Katie nodded, her heart hammering so hard in her chest she wondered if she was having a heart attack.

  “Let it be as is written,” he said again, and this time, the words were deeper, full of a meaning Katie couldn’t grasp. “It is written that Bosauvia shall set me free.”

  “But why Bo?” Katie cried.

  “She is the one. Bring her to me. You and the others--”

  “What others?”

  “The others.” Lucien’s voice was changing, blurring. “The others shall help move the stones.”

  “What stones?” Katie’s head was pounding now, in time to her heart.

  Lucien rose to his feet, his shadow looming on the wall behind him. “Bosauvia knows.” He stepped forward, the chains moved with him and Magdalene’s arm jerked Lucien moved. The sound was like a rusted latch and Katie thought, I can’t stand the noise it’s making me crazy and if he moves again she’ll move again and her BONES are rubbing that’s what the noise is, her BONES are rubbing and her arm is ready to pop out of its socket like a Barbie doll and then I will lose my mind for real.

  Lucien took another step. The sound of bone against bone filled the air, choked it, and Katie scrambled to her feet, backing up against the wall, and he said, “There shall be no more peace for Bosauvia, or for you, Katrenjia, until it is finished. No peace until it is done.” His eyes were sad, tears glistened, like he was truly sorry for what he had shown her, what he was asking them to do. “If I could take this from you, I would, but I cannot and now you must do what is written.”

  Kate inched against the wall, and when he reached for her, Katie cried out and he said,

  “Kat--”

  “-ie! Stop! Oh, please stop!”

  The world snapped and Bo was crying. Her hands were on Katie’s shoulders and she was shaking Katie so hard Katie’s head snapped. Katie’s vision cleared and she was back in her room, her dear, sweet room with the pink wallpaper and china dolls and she was lying on her bed, the bedspread rumpled under her legs. Bo was crying so hard her head was jerking side to side with every eh eh eh sound she made. Katie’s shirt was sticking to her back, her hair hung in damp strings around her face.

  “I thought you were gone,” Bo sobbed.”I thought you weren’t coming back.”

  Katie put her arms around Bo, felt her shaking, their shaking, and she hugged Bo fiercely. When she could speak she said—

  --“I don’t know what we’ve gotten into and I don’t know how to stop it,” Kate took a deep breath and looked at the others. The room had grown dark. Rising to her feet, Kate switched on a lamp. Vinny, in the wing-tipped chair closest to the light, blinked and shielded his eyes. Alex was staring into the fireplace, his expression bleak. Marcus looked the worst, ashen and lost. Katie blinked the tears away.

  “Bo believed you were both haunted and you’d never have peace until you did whatever it was he expected you to do,” Gina was curled up on the couch, long legs tucked under her, a coffee mug clasped in both hands. Steam drifted in a thin wisp.

  “That story,” Vinny said, “isn’t the one you told us back then.”

  To Kate, Vinny’s tone was accusatory and she felt herself blush. “We told you everything that was important.”

  “You told us about a man being chained to a dead woman, but I don’t remember hearing a word about this great love story.”

  “We didn’t tell you about because we thought you’d make fun of us.” Vinny’s eyebrows rose. “Vinny,” Kate said as earnestly as she could, “We were eleven years old! This was in the days of, ‘Gina and Vinny sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.’”

  “Okay, I get the point. But back then, you didn’t tell us half of what you told us tonight. You didn’t say anything about the whip, or the black place where you heard kids screaming.”

  “We didn’t want to scare you, Vinny! We needed your help, but we didn’t want to--”

  “—let us know what the hell we were facing.”

  “We didn’t know! We didn’t know what we were facing! We were eleven!”

  The ani
mosity drained from Vinny’s face, leaving him looking pale and old. “I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore.”

  Alex muttered something, and Katie thought it was ridiculous but then Marcus rubbed a hand over his face and said, “We know Bo was right about one thing.” He looked at the others. “Lucien never let her have peace.”

  Chapter 21

  Marcus

  Marcus listened to Kate, his mind growing increasingly numb with every word. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe what Kate said; it was because he did. And Bo never told me, he thought, she never told me the whole thing. She never let me in all the way.

  Marcus closed his eyes and saw Bo, lying on her side in his bed, propped on one elbow, smiling that little smile. “Are you going to stand there all night, or join me?” her voice was husky with promise.

  “I’m lucky to have you,” he whispered as he took her in his arms. She snuggled against him, resting her head on his chest.

  “Luck has nothing to do with me,” she murmured against his sin. “Luck never has any play in love. It only has a role in death.”

  Something in her words struck him and he heard them long after she fell asleep.

  He remembered them now; a punch to his gut and he missed her so terribly that his pain was a physical thing. It hurt every part of him, every fiber, every nerve. He clenched his jaw tight, trying to ride the wave of grief, drowning in the emotion her memory caused.

  Gina, sitting next to Alex on the couch, caught Marcus’s eye and nodded slightly, as if to say she understood what Marcus was thinking, feeling. Of all them, Gina probably did understand best. She’d lost her husband. And she’d lost her best friend.

  She and Bo had gotten closer after Katie moved away. They roomed together in college, shared an apartment on Shurtliff Street for a while, and then Gina had married Richard …and buried him two years later. By that time, Marcus had fallen head over heels in love with Bo. He’d always loved her, but in the year after Gina moved out and into a new life as Mrs. Richard Kobecki, his feelings for Bo changed, coalesced, and he knew she was the woman he was meant to spend his life with.

  Gina knew the agony of burying someone you loved, slept next to, someone whose body fit your own. And she’d known Bo until the end. Not like Kate who had moved away years before and was now back in their lives, telling them Bo’s death wasn’t a random act of violence, but something destined. Pre-ordained. Kate was sitting on the tapestry chair near the fire, eyes down, as if studying the fabric’s weave. A surge of anger washed through Marcus. It was her fault. She was the one—

  Stop it, he told himself. You can’t blame Kate for what happened. It isn’t her fault. But a tiny voice inside him whispered, Isn’t it, though? It was Kate Lucien came through.

  “How many times did you and Bo do the Ouija without us?” Gina asked.

  “Only that once. We never did it alone again,” Kate answered. She reached for her coffee. Her hand was shaking. “I told Bo I was too afraid and she was, too. We decided to let things rest for a while, see if anything else happened.” She paused, lifted the coffee cup to her lips.

  “And did it?” Vinny asked.

  Kate swallowed, set the cup back down without taking a sip. “Yes. The nightmares started that night.”

  Marcus jerked as if poked. “Nightmares?”

  “Bo and I both started having terrible nightmares. The dreams were almost identical. It was as if Lucien could contact us through our sleep.”

  Marcus could feel Gina’s eyes on him, watching him, her dark eyes liquid with concern. “Marcus, was Bo having nightmares again?”

  Something in his expression must have answered for him because Gina’s mouth tightened.

  “They started right after Christmas,” Marcus said dully. “She never told me what they were about; always said she didn’t remember. The first couple of times, she tried to laugh it off, said it was something she ate.”

  “Not enough exercise before sleep,” she had whispered, curled in the crook of his arm. “I need you to relax me more, Marcus.” Her tone was the light one, the one that said she was smiling even though he couldn’t see her in the dark… but was she smiling? Or was that a lie, too? Maybe the sound he had heard in her voice was nothing but a trick of his own imagination. Wishful thinking.

  Be honest, Marcus, he thought, you never saw anything going on with Bo because you didn’t want to see it.

  “She never said anything?” Vinny asked. “She never told you what the dreams were about?”

  Marcus shook his head, feeling powerless and lost, like Bo had walked him deep into a new city and left him there to find his own way home. “There’s a lot Bo didn’t tell me,” he said. “She’d been involved in a lot of things I didn’t know about.”

  Kate hesitated, then lifted her chin. “Last night, Vinny, you asked me why I had the power turned back on here. The truth is, I didn’t. Bo did.”

  “Bo?” The lines in Vinny’s forehead were more pronounced, so deep they looked like they could hold a dime like one of those cards banks used to give out to kids to save their change, Marcus thought randomly. “Why would Bo have the power turned back on at your house?”

  Gina said, “Her nightmares. Lucien found a way to reach her through her sleep again. Bo must have thought she could finish it once and for all. What better place to stop him than here – where it all started.”

  “You think she was trying to free him again?” Vinny’s tone was incredulous.

  “No, not free him. She knew what he was… or is. She was trying to stop him.”

  “But how?” Kate asked.

  “I don’t know. But whatever she tried to do, it failed. Lucien is free.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “We do know that,” Gina said firmly. “If anyone believes differently, I’d like to hear it.”

  No one said anything. From where he sat, Marcus saw Alex take a deep breath, like he was about to say something, but then he shut his mouth and lowered his eyes once more.

  “Bo’s nightmares were horrible,” Marcus said in the void. “So bad nightmare doesn’t even begin to describe them. She’d wake up not screaming, but shrieking. Drenched with sweat, her eyes wild. I thought…” his voice faltered. “I thought she was under too much pressure at work. I thought it was the job, or her mother, or a hundred and one other things. At the end, I thought it was me. I mean, us. She’d grown so distant. She cut me out, didn’t return my calls.”

  “Bo did that to all of us,” Gina said. “She did the same with Vinny and I, Marcus. It wasn’t just you she cut out of her life. She moved away from all of us.”

  “But I was the one who loved her,” his voice shook. The pain twisted, turning his gut into a knot, his heart a hard fist stuck in the middle of his chest. “I should have seen it. I should have seen she was in trouble.”

  But more than that, he wanted to say, she should have told me – and she didn’t. What did that say about how she’d felt about him – and their relationship? The guilt was one thing he’d live with for the rest of his life, he’d learned that, but the fear that their love had been a sham was another, harder truth. If Bo didn’t trust him enough to tell him what was happening with her – to her – then he hadn’t loved her enough.

  Marcus swallowed. “I should have insisted she tell me what the dreams were about. I should have made her tell me--”

  “Tell you what? She was dreaming about the devil? C’mon, Marcus. Bo wasn’t about to say a damn thing to you.” Vinny leaned over and grasped Marcus’s knee. He squeezed it hard. “She was cutting you out – and me and Gina – for a reason.”

  “Yeah. She didn’t think we’d believe her.”

  Vinny laughed and the sound startled Marcus. “Yeah, right. Jesus, man. You knew her better than that. She didn’t tell us because she knew we would believe her. She knew we’d get into it again with her and she didn’t want that. She was protecting us, Marcus. She was trying to keep us out of it.”

  “You really be
lieve that?”

  Vinny snorted again. “I know it. Bo, more than the rest of us, except maybe Katie – Bo knew what Lucien was and what he was capable of. She didn’t want us near that.”

  Could that be it? Could Bo have been trying not to shut him out, but to keep him safe? God help him, he didn’t know and it was killing him. Kate shifted in the chair, curling her legs under her. Marcus could read the exhaustion in the lines around her eyes.

  “The nightmares you were talking about,” Gina said to Kate. “When did they start?”

  “The same night I did Ouija with Bo. It was …horrific. It doesn’t surprise me, Marcus, that Bo woke up shrieking. The dreams…” her voice faltered and she cleared her throat. “I dreamt I was in a pit. A dark hole of a place. It was round, like that old well we found on Essex Street, but the sides weren’t stone or brick, they were dirt walls, streaked with blood. The blood was fresh and oozing. All around me were echoes of people screaming. Some were screaming for their mothers, but most were crying out to God to save them and the screams…there were flames, flickering everywhere, heat blistered my skin. I could feel it burning.”

  Marcus couldn’t think of anything to say. The pretty parlor Kate’s mother had decorated so carefully was gone; Marcus wasn’t seeing the floral couch or the chintz pillows. He wasn’t seeing the delicate china antebellum ladies waltzing with fans, he wasn’t even seeing his friends. He was seeing a dark, hot pit, streaked with blood. He was hearing the sounds of the damned.

  “I could feel it,” Kate said again, and she leaned forward in her chair, her eyes locking to Marcus first, then sliding to Vinny, then Gina and finally to Alex. “It was so real, when I woke up, I had blisters on the soles of my feet.”

  No one spoke.

  “And then Lucien was there, in the pit, right next to me. He was still chained, and the chains led from his wrists to the top of the hole. He was crying, and I knew that he’d been in this place for a long, long time and the agony I was hearing around me was nothing compared to what he’d gone through already. Magdalena was there, too, but she was above the hole, lying on whatever ground was up there. I couldn’t see her face, but her arm was dangling over the side and blood dripped from her wrists. As I stared up at her, a drop of her blood fell on my face and sizzled there, like a drop of hot oil.