Sons of Dust

by P. Dalton Updyke

  Alex didn’t answer and Vinny thought, he’s dead.

  The others were clustered at the base of the stairs and Vinny could see that the shadow of Lucien had grown larger; it covered the full back wall and half the ceiling now. He looked back at the altar and there, next to Alex, was the nun.

  He knelt next to Gina, lifted her in his arms again, then stood shoulder to shoulder with Marcus, Kate on his other side.

  “We’ll fight you!” Vinny’s voice rang out “We’ll fight and we will win!”

  Was it his imagination, or did Lucien’s shadow flicker?

  “We will win!” Gina said to the cavern of pews and plaster. “We’ll beat you now as we did before!”

  Marcus lifted his head, put his hands out to the side as if in supplication and prayed in a voice that made every nerve in Vinny’s body jump, “You, O Lord, have chosen this house wherein your name is honored. A house of prayer for your people. Take vengeance on this man and his army of evil and let them die by the sword.”

  Lucien howled in rage. Vinny thought the fierce anger wasn’t the result of Marcus’s prayer, but at the tone in which he delivered it. Marcus wasn’t afraid. As he stood on the altar stairs, Gina in his arms, Vinny realized he wasn’t afraid, either. The knowledge came as a jolt. He wasn’t terrified.

  He was furious.

  Anger had taken the place of fear, and it was good. He took a step forward, Gina cradled against him. He could feel her heartbeat against his chest and knew that her heart was racing in rage, not horror.

  Lucien’s shadow crouched lower as Kate grew closer to Marcus, and this time, Vinny knew it wasn’t his imagination. The shadow flickered. Holding Gina with one hand, he reached out the other and took Kate’s hand. She slipped her palm against his, gripping his fingers tightly and then she extended her other hand and reached for Marcus. Marcus took her hand and they stood like that, hands clasped.

  Behind him, there was a rustle of movement and Vinny looked over his shoulder. Alex’s head had turned. Was he watching them? Was he still alive? Thunder boomed, louder than Vinny had ever heard, so close, so here and then lightening split the stained glass window. A searing rod of light flashed, burned all images white. The heavy velvet curtains erupted in flame, fire jumped to the wooden pillars and pews.

  The shadow of Lucien was gone.

  “Is he gone?” Kate asked.

  No one answered. Still holding their hands, Vinny stepped off the stairs. The smoke was already thick, already cloying. He shouted, “Cover your nose and mouths! Hold on to each other!”

  Vinny looked back once more. The nun was there, beside Alex. She sees me, Vinny thought, she knows I don’t want to leave him here to be burned—

  And then he heard her voice, but this time it was in his head and he knew that the words were meant for him and him alone. “You are not leaving him to be burned. You are leaving him to finish his business of dying, here in the house of the Lord. Go, Vincent. Go.”

  Blinking back the tears, his eyes stinging from the smoke, Vinny followed the others out the door.

  Chapter 38

  Marcus

  No one spoke as they walked, in heavy rain, back to Kate’s house. Mute agreement, Marcus supposed. They walked close together; a pack. The rain fell and splattered. The sound it made was like wind rustling through dry leaves. When they reached Shurtliff Street, the scream of sirens overrode the noise of wind. A fire engine roared past, lights whirling, siren screeching.

  Still no one spoke.

  Maybe, Marcus thought, Maybe they’ll get there in time. But in time for what? To save Alex? Marcus lowered his head and walked. The rage that filled him when he stood on the altar facing Lucien was gone. He was empty now, drained of all emotion except sick acceptance.

  How could they win?

  How could they even think it was a possibility?

  They couldn’t beat Lucien. They didn’t have a prayer. A picture of Alex, bloody and dying, rose in Marcus’s mind. How could they beat that? You just did it, Bo spoke in his head. And you beat him before. You’ve done it; you’ll do it again.

  No, Bo, we can’t. He’s getting stronger all the time. Stronger, harder to fight. He nailed Alex to a cross, Bo!

  Remember me, she said, Remember Teddy, remember Alex. And then fight.

  Marcus rubbed a hand over his eyes. I don’t think I can do it, Bo. I’m not strong enough. I don’t have the ability.

  Yes, Marcus, you do. If you stand together now, if you believe you have strength, you will have it. Her voice broke off, and for the first time, Marcus was glad. He couldn’t think. Didn’t want to think.

  Vinny pushed Gina in the wheelchair and when they moved under a streetlight, Marcus saw how pale and weak Gina looked…and how dead. When you came right down to it, wasn’t that true? They were all dead. It was just a matter of time.

  Gina glanced at Marcus and he wondered, Does she see it? Does she know that we’re walking dead?

  They reached Kate’s house and entered, one by one. Kate first, followed by Vinny with Gina in his arms, and Marcus last. He knew he should offer to carry Gina up the stairs, just as he knew the offer would be futile. Vinny needed to take care of Gina. Vinny always needed someone to take care of. Maybe that’s what made him such a good friend.

  Marcus slid his coat off, feeling tired beyond measure, sick beyond words. He hung his coat on the peg next to the door and followed his friends -- his mind tripped over the word, replayed it – friends – into the parlor.

  Vinny put Gina on the couch. Pain flattened her expression, agony made the muscles in her face still and set. Marcus knew that look. He’d seen the expression of pain held tightly in check. She was holding on, but by how much of a thread? For that matter, how thick was the thread holding any of them together?

  They were friends, but old friends. The ties that held them were being sorely tested, frayed…broken. Friends. It wasn’t a strong enough word anymore. They were not friends of his. Friends were people you shared a couple of beers with, saw a movie with, told stories to. People who laughed with you. A friend wasn’t someone you helped pull nails—

  nails made out of—

  Marcus choked off the thought, closed his eyes.

  A chink of glass, and then someone was pressing a glass into his hand. He opened his eyes, saw Kate handing an amber glass of liquid and nodded his thanks. Vinny took a long swallow. “How did it happen? What did Alex do?”

  Marcus drank deeply, the liquor lighting his belly, white fire. He shuddered, then drank again. The shaking was starting to ease. The fire in his stomach rolled, settled. And was the fire burning in St. Stand’s settling down? Was Alex—

  “I can’t believe Alex is dead,” Gina said. “I just can’t seem to get my mind around it. “

  “How could it happen to Alex?” Vinny’s voice rose, became incredulous.

  Kate looked down at her hands and Marcus had the feeling she wasn’t going to say anything, so he was surprised when hers was the voice to answer Vinny.

  “We all saw Lucien today, Vinny. All of us. In one form or another, and yet the only one to pay the ultimate price was Alex.”

  “But why?” Vinny’s voice was thick and hoarse.

  “Because he didn’t see the nun,” Marcus said.

  Vinny looked across the room at Marcus. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t think Alex saw the nun, Vinny,” Marcus replied. He tried to keep the emotion drowning him from spilling over, drenching his words. “Even though Alex was a priest, I don’t think he really believed. You heard him earlier. He didn’t think any of this was real. He thought it was just all a figment of our imaginations.”

  “So you’re saying because he didn’t believe, he didn’t see the nun, and it’s the nun who helped us?”

  “She helped me,” Marcus replied. “That’s all I know, Vinny. I heard her voice in my head and I pictured her standing with the Bible in her hands and somehow, that gave me strength.”

  “Instant
power,” Kate said. “It was the same for me. She was a shot of adrenalin. She said a Biblical verse and the next thing I knew, her words were coming out of my mouth and Lucien was gone.”

  Vinny said quietly, “Why do you think Alex didn’t see her but we did? She was there at the church at the end. Wasn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Gina answered. “She was there. But maybe Marcus is right, Vinny. We saw and heard her, but I don’t know if Alex did. She was there because we were.”

  “But Alex did hear her!” Vinny said. “At the end, he did. He finished the verse she was reading.”

  Something in Marcus’s chest moved. A weight rolled off. “He heard her?’

  Vinny nodded. There was no uncertainty in his look. “Yes.”

  “Maybe because…” Gina hesitated, took another swallow from her glass. “Alex heard her at the church because he believed then.”

  “So,” Vinny said. “What do we do now?”

  No one answered. Marcus closed his eyes but immediately opened them again. The images of Alex, Bo and Teddy were there, just behind the closed lids and he didn’t think he could bear it. Not now. Maybe not ever.

  “So what do we do?” Vinny asked again. “Wait for Lucien to come calling? Because he has to know he’s got us on the run. We don’t know what we’re doing. We’re down in numbers. We’re…vulnerable.”

  “Two out of six,” Kate murmured. “There’s only four of us left.”

  “Five,” Marcus replied. “If you count the nun. At this point, I think we have to count her.”

  “What do we know about her? Is she still teaching at St. Stand’s? And how come she’s helping us now” Vinny asked. “Seems to me she wasn’t too keen on us in sixth grade. Sister Patrice, if I remember right, didn’t think highly of kids who didn’t do their homework or follow the rules of the class, which meant us: the Essex Street Suckers.”

  “How does she do it?” Gina asked. “Is it like ESP or something? She knew we were in trouble and what to do to help us?”

  “Maybe it is just a version of mass hysteria,” Marcus said wearily. “Sixth grade was the only year we were all together. Every other year, we were in different classes. And Sister Patrice had a way of knowing when we were in trouble back then. She helped us out of more than one jam when we were in her class.”

  Kate smiled, but it was just a ghost of one. “She did tend to look the other way for us. She didn’t cut us any slack when it came to schoolwork, but she did help in other ways.”

  “Like that time we had the fight in the school yard with Nick Vespucci and his friends,” Gina said. “Remember, Vinny? It started with Nick throwing a punch at you and then we were all in it, swinging fists.”

  “And Sister Patrice came flying out of the school, her black robe flapping around her, arms out like she was trying to fly.”

  “She broke the fight up, yelled at us all for like an hour--”

  “—but she never told Monsignor Colmarek. We could have been expelled,” Gina said. “She didn’t even call our parents.”

  “Maybe,” Marcus said, “because sixth grade was the only year we were all together, and sixth grade was also the year of the Ouija board, we’re making a subconscious link to the woman who stood so strongly for faith: Sister Patrice. I doubt it’s ESP, Gina, or a psychic connection, it’s like…wishful thinking mixed with memory.”

  “Hey, the comic books have Batman, maybe we have a psychic nun.”

  Gina leaned back against the cushion. “I wonder if she’s still at St. Stand’s.”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Kate said as she rose to her feet. “I’ll call the convent and ask.”

  When Kate left the room, Vinny stood up and turned the TV on. A picture of St. Stand’s filled the screen, smoke billowing from the broken stained glass windows, flames jutting from the roof. Marcus didn’t have to look around to know that the others were staring at the screen with sick concentration.

  They were grieving, but there was no time to mourn. Not yet. Marcus closed off the part of him that wanted to dissolve into sorrow; he allowed only a moment of raw pain to fill his head and soul. He forced the thoughts circling through his mind to stop. There was work to be done.

  Sister Patrice.

  Marcus hadn’t thought of her in years, but he didn’t have any trouble picturing her as she was when he first knew her.

  “Your mother was in today, Marcus,” she said. She continued to write on the blackboard, her back to him. Dust motes swirled in the light spilling from the long windows that faced the street. When he was a little kid, he used to try to catch the glittering motes, but now that he was in the sixth grade, he didn’t even stretch out a hand. “I noticed she hurt herself.”

  Sister Patrice didn’t turn and Marcus didn’t answer. He watched her hand, blue veins visible beneath the white skin, as she wrote in neat capital letters BOOK REPORT DUE NEXT WEEK.

  The chalk made a thin squeaking noise as it moved across the blackboard. Marcus watched the hand move, sweat trickling down his back. What does she want? He thought, How come I’m here after school?

  In trouble, a voice answered, you’re in BIG trouble. Sister Patrice never asks anyone to stay after class unless the trouble is BIG.

  “The bruises looked painful,” Sister Patrice said. Her tone was matter of fact, level. She night as well have said, “The grass is green.”

  Marcus stopped breathing.

  “They looked like they hurt Marcus.”

  And the way she said that was the same. The same level tone, the same statement of fact, but he wondered where she put the comma. Did she mean, they look like they hurt, Marcus? But the way she said it was, ‘they looked like they hurt Marcus.’ Like the bruises on his mother’s legs were hurting him. But—

  “She bumps into stuff a lot,” he said, and his tone wasn’t controlled or level at all. His voice cracked and he cleared his throat, aware now of the heat in the room, the sound of the radiator clanking, the dust motes swirling in rectangles of sunlight. “My Dad kids her all the time about being clumsy.”

  The nun still didn’t turn. Her long black dress swayed as she took a step sideways, still writing. “Yes,” she said. “My mother was clumsy, too. She had bruises on her legs and knees.”

  And just like that, Marcus knew the nun understood what made his mother a klutz and it had nothing to do with being uncoordinated.

  “In fact,” Sister Patrice went on, “my mother was so clumsy people in our neighborhood thought my father helped her be clumsy.” The sound of the chalk scratched as her hand lowered again, and she began a second line. “Many people, Marcus, believed she didn’t fall by herself. Do people think your mother isn’t clumsy on her own?”

  He shrugged and then realized she couldn’t see him. He cleared his throat again. “I don’t know what people think.”

  “Yes, you do.” Still, she didn’t turn and Marcus was grateful. If she looked at him now, she’d be able to see the truth burning in his eyes. She’d see the red in his face. She’d know the shame of it because people did think his father hit her. They did think the bumps and bruises were from his Dad.

  “He doesn’t hit her,” Marcus blurted “He’d never hit her. He…he helps her when she falls.”

  Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. The chalk slid across the blackboard, words and phrases and questions but the letters held no meaning for him anymore. The board was streaked with white symbols that may as well have been hieroglyphics.

  “I know,” Sister Patrice said. “My father would never have raised a hand to strike my mother, either. What people don’t seem to know is that some bruises are self-inflicted and clumsiness can be poured out of a bottle.”

  Marcus closed his eyes, a fist knotted in his stomach.

  She knew.

  She knew.

  The words hammered at him, drilling in his brain.

  Sister Patrice knew his mother didn’t fall because of a balance problem. Okay, maybe she did, but Sister Patrice knew the trouble with ba
lance was Absolute. Clumsiness poured out of a vodka bottle.

  “When I saw your mother today, Marcus, I understood why you have been doing so poorly in school. I understood why your papers are late, and why you come to school with puffy eyes like you haven’t slept.” She turned around then, finally, and the compassion in her eyes made his own fill with tears. “I understand what most people don’t. I know the signs of a drunk aren’t found just in red noses and blood shot eyes. “

  And Marcus knew she was right. Folks thought they could tell a drunk by their faces, by the scent of booze pouring from their skin, but there were other signs that marked a drunk.

  And they were bruises and cuts on the skins. Black marks on hips and thighs.

  “It’s from bumping into furniture and stuff,” Marcus said between sobs. “She trips over the table and bangs into the desk and her legs are always black and blue because she stumbles when she walks and she crashes into the wall sometimes.”

  “I know,” Sister Patrice said, and her voice was not unkind. “She stumbles because of the alcohol. She falls because she is an alcoholic. But Marcus, right now, she can’t see a way to help it.”

  “She can!” Marcus lifted his head but couldn’t see the nun’s face; his vision was blurred by tears. “If she wanted to stop, she could! She could throw the stinking bottles away and she could…she could...”

  “She could what, Marcus?”

  “She could be a real MOTHER!” he shouted. “She could be a MOTHER!”

  “But she is a mother. She is your mother.”

  And that was the worst part of all. He lowered his head again and let the sobs come because he was so tired suddenly, so tired and scared and lonely. He was sick of lying, of telling his friends that they couldn’t come over because his mom was “sick.” He was tired of eating peanut butter and saltines because she was too drunk to cook or shop. He was sick of the smell of her, the sweet-sour stench of her, and God help him, he was tired of cleaning up after her so his father wouldn’t be angry. Most of all, he hated the desperate despair he heard in father’s voice. “Jesus, Margaret! Can’t you even make it to the bathroom to get sick?”