Sons of Dust

by P. Dalton Updyke

  “I hate her,” he said. “I hate her. I hate her. I hate…”

  The nun let him cry it out. She didn’t touch him. She didn’t stroke his hair. She didn’t offer comfort in meaningless words or empty actions. When his sobbing had dissolved into a thin hiccup, he felt curiously drained. His heart was still heavy, but the feeling of pressing weight had eased.

  “You have a great burden, Marcus,” the nun said. “And also a great gift.” He lifted his head from the desk in astonishment. Gift?? What was she talking about?? The nun was looking at him patiently, her eyes serene. “God has given you a challenge. You must accept your mother for who she is. You must learn to understand that her problems are not your own, that you make your own way in this world. Your gift Marcus, is that you have been given an opportunity to learn what you can make of yourself, in spite of the obstacles you face now. God graced us with free will. Your mother has chosen her path and she alone will decide when to leave it. You can’t choose that path for her, but you can choose your own way. You can use your own free will to decide what you will become. Free will is a wonderful gift. Perhaps the best one of all.”

  When he didn’t speak, she turned back to the blackboard and lifted her hand. The chalk squeaked as she began writing. “You could let your mother’s disease make you bitter and angry. You could grow up hating not only her and the life you led in her house, but also all that can be good in life. You can shut your eyes to hope, Marcus. But you don’t have to. Don’t make the mistake of blaming others for what you choose to do.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. He was confused, angry. His stomach was burning and he wanted to lie down.

  “You can go now, Marcus.”

  He pushed his chair back and stood up, reaching for his book bag.

  “One more thing,” the nun said over her shoulder. “Free will extends to homework, as well. You can choose to allow your mother’s illness to prevent you from doing your homework and you will continue to get zeros. Or you can choose to complete the work given to you and raise your grade to a C by the end of the quarter. Free will, Marcus. Not excuses.”

  He didn’t get a C. He got a B-.

  How often had he thought about that day in Sister Patrice’s class? How many times had he remembered her words, free will is a gift and recognized that he was in charge of his own destiny and he alone?

  Gina’s eyes were closed, her cheeks shiny with tears. Vinny looked like an old man, hunched over and sick. When Kate came back into the room, she had a slip of paper in her hands. Vinny immediately straightened up.

  “Well? Is she still at St. Stand’s?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Kate said. “She’s buried there.”

  Gina pushed herself up to a sitting position. “She’s dead? When?”

  “That’s the part…” Kate stopped and took a deep breath. “Sister Patrice died last Friday. She had a massive stroke.”

  Marcus’s heart stopped.

  “Friday?” Vinny repeated. “But that’s…” he didn’t have to finish the sentence.

  Sister Patrice died on the same day as Bo.

  Chapter 39

  Kate

  The heavy ledger Vinny had found in her father’s office was next to him on the couch. Kate saw it, sticking out between the cushions, leaning against Vinny’s hip. She wondered if he’d brought it with him to the church; the binding looked damp. Staring at the ancient journal reminded her of the book she’d bought at the Historical Society and without a word to the others, she went back to the hall and rummaged through her bag until her hands closed on the slim volume.

  The room was silent when she went back in; the others, lost in their own thoughts, grieving or stunned, or terrified, or maybe all three, she thought. “I bought this,” she held up the book, “at the Historical Society. Maybe now’s the time to go through it.”

  “This, too,” Vinny said as he lifted the heavy journal. It thumped when it hit the table.

  “Which first?” Marcus asked.

  “The journal,” Gina said. No one contradicted her.

  Vinny ran his hand over the leather cover, wiping away dust. Letters had been hammered into the leather, but the journal was so old now the letters had all but faded. “So what is this,” he murmured, “What’s the name of this thing?”

  Marcus got up from his chair and crossed the room to kneel at Vinny’s side. Kate sat down next to Gina. The movement made Gina grimace and turn a whiter shade of bleach. “I’m sorry,” Kate said, and Gina took her hand and squeezed it.

  Vinny lifted the book, squinting as he turned it toward the light. “I can’t read it. Too damn old.”

  “Book of Life!” Gina said suddenly. She touched the cover, tapped her fingernail. “You can just barely make out the B and the L.”

  Now that Gina had said it, Kate looked for the letters. It was like the pictures Sister Patrice used to show them, abstract pictures in black and white that were supposed to hold Christ’s face, only back then, Kate could never seem to find the Savior’s resemblance in squiggly lines of ink. She’d squint and stare and finally gasp, “I can see it! I see it!” just so that the others wouldn’t know she couldn’t. Admitting she didn’t see Christ’s face would have felt like a sin.

  This time, though, she did see something in the worn and buckled leather, a pattern of letters and could make out B-O-O-K…

  “Christ!” Vinny said, and the book jerked in his hands, “not Life, it says Lies! The Book of Lies!”

  Marcus took it out of Vinny’s hands. He held it under the light and as the cover was illuminated, Kate could see what first looked like f-e was really e-s.

  Book of Lies.

  Suddenly, she was freezing. Shaking, and couldn’t seem to stop. Don’t open it, she wanted to tell Vinny, burn it, quick, throw it into the fireplace but don’t open it, don’t! It was too late.

  Vinny opened the cover, the binding cracked as if in protest and the pages, little more than brittle dust packed into sheets, broke as he turned the first one.

  From where Kate sat, she could make out the ink, faded to a pale, pale brown on parchment. The handwriting canted to the right, the cursive penmanship full of circles and curlicues. It’s a child’s writing. The thought turned her stomach cold and she must have made some sound because Gina looked up at her.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Kate nodded. “The penmanship…it looks childish.”

  Beside her, Marcus inhaled. He leaned so close to the light his hair brushed the lampshade. “It does. Like a kid wrote it.”

  “But what does it say?” Gina asked.

  Marcus frowned, the lines around his mouth deep. “Thee wages of sin is death. Thy willingly give thy life for thy sins and pray for forgiveness of God. May God have mercy on thy soul and protect thy brethren from Daemon.”

  “Christ,” Vinny muttered.

  “Anything else?” Gina asked.

  “I can’t make much sense of it. A list of names with dates next to them.”

  “Hold on,’ Vinny said. “It’s not just names. There’s more written.”

  “What year?” Kate heard herself ask. Her voice sounded faint, like it was coming from far away.

  “Year?” Vinny repeated, but he didn’t lift his head or look up from the book. “1626, best I can tell.”

  The feeling of light-headiness expanded. The edges of the room grew darker and Kate leaned against the couch. Vinny’s voice washed over her. She didn’t, couldn’t, speak.

  “There’s a name inside the cover,” the couch shifted as Vinny moved. “Y-v-a-.”

  “Yvanna,” Gina said. “Yvanna…the last name begins with a N, but I can’t read it.”

  “Never mind the name,” Marcus’s voice floated with impatience, “What else is there?”

  “I can make out…relations wife thee devil; death by hanging. Oh forgive me, Lord.’ And then down the page, ‘daemon a man of God.’ ”

  The history book was still in her hand. Kate opened the c
over and turned the pages, her mind curiously numb, her hands hesitating little. She came to the end of the book and a section marked “Legends and Tales” in script. The picture under the title was a pencil sketch of a woman reading to children. The children were smiling, their pencil-drawn arms wrapped around their pencil-drawn legs.

  Stories, the picture implied, we’re just going to hear a story.

  Kate skimmed the first few paragraphs and turned the page. Her hand froze in mid-air.

  The pencil drawing was of a scaffold. Seven chairs were lined in the center. People colored in black clothing stood at the base of the scaffold, their faces craned up to the wooden stage. The sky in this drawing was heavy, leaden with gray clouds. Behind the brick buildings of the square was a glimpse of the harbor. Kate closed her eyes, the light-headiness more acute now. She wondered if she was about to faint and forced her eyes open with an act of will she didn’t know she possessed. Pull it together! she thought, Get your shit together NOW!

  She focused on the page, on the words, and began to read aloud, “Long before the Salem Witch Trials, it is said that there were a series of similar trials here. According to legend, in the early 1600’s, six children living in what would later be named Chelsea accused as many as twenty of their neighbors of witchcraft. The children told their stories to the charismatic leader of their church, who reported the tales of Satanic worship to the congregation. Hysteria ensued. The church leader was named the Chief Judge of the investigation and the accused were ordered to stand trial in the center of the Town Square. During the public trial, the children relayed stories of Satanic worship and unspeakable evil. All of the accused were found guilty and hung. Their property was turned over to the church. After the last victim was hung, one of the children, a young girl, confessed that the whole thing had been a lie. She wrote her tale in a journal for the townspeople to find. In it, she said that the stories she and the other children had told came from the leader of the church himself! In her journal, she also accused the leader and the wife of a prominent member of congregation of adultery. She wrote that the lovers had instigated the investigation out of greed and malice, with the intent of getting back at anyone who had slighted them and being rewarded with their property. The child begged for forgiveness and wrote that she never intended to lie. When she told the stories, she believed them to be true. Later, she came to realize she had been led astray by the man and his lover. After writing her confession, the young girl took the journal to the house of a Town Elder and then went back to her own home, where it is said, she committed suicide in her father’s barn. Her body was found by the other five children, who had come to tell her they would stand with her and tell the truth about what had happened. While trying to take the dead child down from her post, a fire erupted in the barn, trapping all five children inside. They perished in the flames. The Townspeople jailed the Church Leader and his lover and the two were ordered walled in. Like most legends, this story has some ties to the truth. Bricking people into walls was a form of punishment used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and could have been practiced in Chelsea. However, no evidence has been found to corroborate the legend. Historians dispute the claim. The story, passed down through generations, has become an obscure Chelsea legend.”

  Kate closed the book.

  “The proof is right here.’ Vinny touched the journal gently, almost lovingly. “It’s been right here all along. In your house, Katie.”

  “I saw it.” Tears spilled down Gina’s cheeks, tracking wet trails to her chin. “When I touched the wall, I saw the children. They were in a barn, and one of the children told the others they had to get help.”

  There were other parts to the legend that didn’t appear in the Historical Society’s little book, weren’t there? Like the fact that Lucien and Magdalena had been chained together not with links of metal, but with circles of bone. Kate knew now whose bones had been forged into a chain. The townspeople had taken the bones of the dead children out of the burned barn. They’d taken the bones and cut them into circles. They’d hollowed the bones out, sanded the inside edges to form a circle. And then they’d linked the bones together, piece by piece, to form a chain.

  Lucien had been held captive by the remains of his youngest and most innocent victims.

  She saw it now. Understood, finally, why Bo, why her. “Yvanna, the child who wrote the book hung herself in her father’s barn,” Kate said. She turned her head and looked at Marcus. “Yvanna,” she said again, and understanding dawned on Marcus’s face.

  The light headedness expanded; the top of Kate’s head grew lighter, freer, and then the room tilted into darkness.

  Chapter 40

  Gina

  When Kate fainted, there was a flurry of panic. Vinny, next to Gina gasped, “He got her! She’s dead!”

  “She’s not dead,” Gina snapped as she struggled to sit up higher. “She fainted. Get a cold facecloth, Vinny, and put it on her forehead.” Vinny disappeared as Marcus laid Kate on the couch. By the time Vinny was back with the cold cloth, Kate was coming around.

  “Give her room to breathe,” Gina commanded. “You’re crowding her.”

  Kate opened her eyes and touched her head.

  “Thank Christ,” Vinny muttered. “I thought you were dead.”

  Kate said weakly, “Dead people don’t need cold cloths.” She struggled to sit up, but Vinny stopped her.

  “Whoa,” he said. “Take it easy, kiddo. You just scared the living hell out of us.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve never done that before. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “Sure you do,” Marcus said mildly. “Lucien is what’s wrong.”

  Gina reached over and took Kate’s hand. “You okay?”

  “Yes. I’m fine,” and Gina noted that Kate’s voice was firmer, stronger.

  “Yvanna.” Marcus cleared his throat. “Yvanna is an old family name in the Caveleskas, passed down to each generation. Bo’s sister is something like the fourteenth in the line.”

  There was some color back in Kate’s cheeks now. “Bo is descended from Yvanna. That’s why he needed her.”

  Still holding Kate’s hand, Gina said, “The story Kate read in that book sounds like what we saw when we were kids. I believe it. Do you?” Three heads nodded. Vinny, the last, reluctantly. “But how much do we believe?” No one answered. “Do you think Lucien was a church leader?”

  “Why not?” Vinny asked. “It makes sense, in a twisted way. If he was the leader of a church, then he had power. Legitimate power.”

  “I believe that part, but I’m not sure if I believe the part about Magdalena,” Kate said slowly. “I don’t know if it’s true Magdalena was married to anyone. It says in that little book that they committed adultery and the child wrote about it in her Book of Lies. Did she?”

  Vinny turned the parchment pages slowly. Brittle edges broke off, drifted down like confetti. “I don’t think so. There’s a lot of names in here, but I don’t see Lucien or Magdalena. There are a lot of blank pages, though. And it looks like there’s something written on the back page, but the sheet is stained too bad to make out what it is. Water damage, most likely. Bottom line is, I can’t read any of it.”

  “Why do you doubt Magdalene’s role?” Marcus asked.

  “Because Lucien told the truth.”

  Vinny let out a hoot of laugher. “Where have you been, sweetheart? He lied!”

  “No, not about everything. Some of what he said was true.”

  “Like…”

  “Like telling me he was chained to Magdalena for crimes against the people. Like showing me what happened before they were chained. I believe that happened the way he showed me. Lucien doesn’t lie in the normal sense of the word; he twists the truth to suit his own purposes. My mother used to call that ‘reconstructed history.’”

  “Who do you think Magdalena was? What was her role?”

  “When I saw them together,” Kate said, “on the scaffold, Magdalena was str
onger than Lucien. She was…righteous. I can’t think of any other way to describe it. I think she was tricked by Lucien, too.”

  “When you saw her,” Marcus asked, “was she like Lucien described to you? Was she beautiful?”

  Kate nodded.

  “Maybe that was it, then.” When Kate continued to look at him, Marcus went on. “Maybe she loved Lucien and he used her. If she was beautiful, he would have wanted her anyway, right?”

  “Probably,” Vinny muttered. “From what I remember of the Bible, the devil’s deep into physical pleasures. Not the kind of guy who’d deny himself a beautiful woman.”

  “Do you think she knew the stories the children told were lies?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. “I don’t think she did, though. I think she believed him – and in him. She was so sure on the scaffold. So…virtuous.”

  “Another thing,’ Vinny said.”How did Lucien get the kids to tell those stories?”

  “It worked with Bo and I, Vinny,” Kate said. “He told us his story, we believed him and we wanted to help him. It was probably no different for those children. Whatever Lucien was – or is—he has the power to make you see things. I can believe he had the power to make those children believe their friends and neighbors were evil.”

  “Magic,” Marcus said, “for want of a better word. Whatever Lucien is or isn’t, what he does is a magic trick. And when the townspeople found out what he’d done to those children, they somehow…tapped into that magic. How else could they have held him prisoner for so long?”

  “Lucien isn’t human,” Vinny said slowly. “He’s a demon or devil or something else evil.”

  Marcus nodded. “He’s not human now, but was he human then?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said.

  “You couldn’t tell when he showed you the past?”

  Kate shook her head.