“Wish I had a watch. I wonder what time it is.”
“I got an internal clock. I say it’s four A.M.”
“I’m hungry. You hungry?” Stony asked.
“Well, I see you recovered nicely from your starvation diet.”
“Do you think they miss me yet?”
“Maybe.”
“I know my mom’ll miss me.”
“Your dad, too.”
“He doesn’t miss people all that much.”
“He’ll miss you. I guarantee it.”
“Van I won’t miss.”
“You stole some money, remember? They’ll at least miss that.”
“She’ll understand.”
“Will she?”
Stony snorted. “What’s she ever gonna do with it, anyway?”
“Well, it was hers to decide that, wasn’t it?”
“I think it would have just sat there till kingdom come. That’s what I think. I think she would’ve squirreled it away until she was sixty or something, and then she wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“You think sixty’s ancient, don’t you?” Nora grinned.
Stony bowed his head. “All I mean is, it isn’t young.”
“Your mother was once your age. I wonder if she ever stole from anybody so she could be happy.”
“It’s not the same,” Stony said. “I’ll pay her back. Somehow.” Stony went over to the small pantry, and glanced around at its contents. “You don’t have any good snacks here.”
Nora laughed. “You’re feeling guilty.”
“If I told you I was, would it matter?”
“You’re just going to wait here till morning when Lourdes shows up, feeling guilty because you stole your mama’s secret savings account from right under her nose.”
“She’s a drunk.”
“And drunks should be robbed? You got a peculiar kind of morality. She’s a drunk, you’re a thief.”
“I didn’t ask for this,” Stony spat. “Will you just quit with the nagging?”
After he heard the echo of his voice, he said, “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“For sounding like my dad.”
“Maybe now you understand him a little better.”
“I don’t want to be from them.”
“Can’t help how we’re brought up or who by.”
“Like it never bothered you. You were raised by humble angel saints.”
Nora laughed even louder. “Oh Lord, Stony, you are gonna have me bustin’ a gut in a minute. Stop!” She laughed, waving her hands about. When she quieted, she said, “My father was a decent man. He never laid a hand on us and he worked hard. But he drank and caroused and more than once my sister and I had to go into one of the bars over in Somerville and pull him off some woman just to get him home in time for supper. And mama was one of those long-suffering women. She worked her fingers to the bone. But martyrdom is its own kind of hell, too. She turned suffering from a hobby into a lifelong mission. Martyrs usually take down a few people they care about because they want some company to suffer with. That was mama. Family is putting up with each other’s shit sometimes I guess.”
They were both silent.
Then, Stony said, “How much shit are you supposed put up with?”
“I guess whatever you’re willing to,” Nora said. “Why’d you come to me tonight, Stony?”
“You know why.”
“To run away with your girl and have a baby in some lonely place? To steal your mother’s savings, just so you can get out of town for a couple of weeks?”
“I guess.”
Nora sighed. She wiped her long fingers across her face. Then, she patted a space next to her on the bed. “Come on, sit up here, Stony.”
“I’m fine where I am.”
“Of course you are. I forget sometimes that you’re nearly a man. Remember when you were a little boy and you’d come out here to hear all my spins? We’d sit on the rug in front of the stove, or up here in my quilts, or out on the porch...Those sweaty summer nights. I’d tell you all my stories. Seventy years’ worth.”
Stony nodded. He walked over and sat down beside her on the bed.
“Well, I miss those times. Can’t turn back any clocks, but I miss that little boy. But you can turn the clocks forward if you want. I want you to think of yourself in fifteen years. You’re thirty. You have a good job maybe. You and Lourdes are happy. Your boy is your age now. And he’s going to ask, ‘Dad, how did you and my mama meet up?’ And what are you gonna tell him? How you fell in love with his mama? About the purity of that kind of love? About how you never loved any woman except his mama? About how men do the right thing, no matter what?”
Stony looked down at his hands, curled upward in his lap. He remained silent.
“I’m not going tell you the right thing. All I’m going to tell you is you’re welcome to stay here till morning. When Lourdes comes, you two need to talk. Then you need to think about the boy or girl of yours in fifteen years and what you’re gonna say to that child.”
Stony got up and went to fix a peanut butter sandwich at the table. He glanced out into the dark night. If there’d been a phone, he’d have called Lourdes and told her that he was going to come get her. He would’ve told her that it was all right to steal his mother’s money because it was worth a little time in hell for their happiness. It was worth some guilt. It was worth a little lying and stealing and pretending that they were doing the right thing. The universe wanted them to. The universe was made for those who took when the time was right; who jumped and grabbed what it was they needed for happiness. Happiness was all.
He saw his reflection in the dark window. It barely looked like Stony Crawford anymore.
* * *
15
* * *
The calls of night birds in the woods punctuated the more distant horn and warning bells of the train as it passed up from Mystic on its way north to Providence. The temperature dropped to thirty-eight, a jagged wind grabbed the last leaves on the trees along High Street, rushing down the narrow lanes that grew perpendicular to it. The oaks and maples held onto their colors for a future fight with the early winter wind off the sea. Clouds moved across the face of the moon like bridal veil, to cover her beauty, to protect her chastity, to increase her mystery.
JOHNNY MIRACLE! The voice boomed from the gathering clouds. JOHNNY MIRACLE! Again, like a clap of thunder through the trees that scraped the hazy moonlight.
Johnny Miracle stood shivering on Water Street, just outside the Blue Dog Tea Shop. The voice was both inside and outside of him. It boomed louder than any surf he’d ever heard.
“What?” he asked, looking up to the sky. “What?”
The sky was swallowing every utterance from his mouth until he was sure it just sounded like the bleating of lambs. He glanced at the passersby with their baby in a stroller, and at the old lady watching him from behind the Harper Real Estate Office sign. Oh, but they were ghosts! It was late—no one was watching him, no one was on the street, but in flashes of lightning he saw them—people standing there, mouths open...He blinked, and they were gone, these Watchers, these Spies for THEM.
THEM were the evil ones, THEM were the people who made him DO IT, who made him DO IT. Johnny often struck matches against them, struck matches to the burned bits of leaves, set fire to small trash cans, burned his fingers at times, too. Fire chased off THEM, fire made THEM scared. He always kept his pockets and busted-up old shoes full of packs of matches just so he could strike THEM in the face with the fire if it got to that point. THEM were so scared of fire it amazed him sometimes. God told him fire purified things, sometimes. God told him fire defeated the darkness and if anyone was darkness it was THEM.
Alone again, in the night, he raised his hands up to the sky as the first drops of rain began to fall. He tried to strike some matches against the dark, but the rain wouldn’t let him. “LORD GOD!” he bleated, “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE HERE?”
And the voice that came back to h
im was a whisper, tickling his ear.
The voice was always inside his head.
Every night for the past fifteen years.
* * *
16
* * *
In his head the images roiled and spun like multicolored taffy, turning in upon itself:
The man with the red eyes like rats, holding his hands as he stood in front of the church, as the people in the church raised their hands up—
As he, a boy, looked up at the man with the red eyes, who was dressed like a priest but not really a priest, the boy knew, not a priest like the way he remembered priests—
And how they’d pressed the blade to the lamb’s throat—
He was seventeen, working for the Butcher Shop, a strapping young man, ready to take on the world. The Crowns had paid for his upbringing and he now lived in their caretaker’s cottage. The world was a terrific place, and Stonehaven, the home of his ancestors, was the only place for him. And then, they brought him, that night, that night of Halloween, that night—
The flashes grew more intense—
That night—
“It’s something you must do,” Mr. Crown had told him as he unbuttoned Johnny’s shirt, a starched white shirt that Johnny had bought for twenty dollars from the mail-order catalog. Diana was there, such a pretty little girl, smiling up at him. Mr. Crown gave him the piece of paper and told him to lick it. “Like it’s a stamp,” Mr. Crown said, and Johnny licked the paper that had a sugary taste to it. Then, he started to feel funny, the faces in front of him became flowers and then it was like everything turned into a big cartoon. “Lick it more,” Mr. Crown said, and then someone pressed Johnny’s face into the paper, and his tongue swirled around on it.
Someone said, “We should’ve just put it on a sugar cube.”
“Or injected it,” a woman chuckled.
OH, Johnny screamed inside his skin, I WISH I HAD MY MATCHES! I’D BURN ‘EM ALL TO HELL IF I HAD MY MATCHES ON ME, I WOULD!
“Shut up, he’s like my son,” Mr. Crown said, and this made Johnny feel proud. “He’ll take it all.”
But Mr. Crown now looked like Mr. Magoo, and Diana looked like Little Orphan Annie with blank eyes and some of the people in the chapel looked like they were out of the Flintstones and the Jetsons.
Johnny hadn’t even struggled as he was told to pull his jeans down, too. The blue jeans melted off of him, they went like seawater around his feet—
Naked, he stood at the altar, and four of them held the struggling woman down—
Struggling?
Was she?
Was she struggling?
She shimmered, too, like a ripple on a golden pond—
Like silver fish darting beneath the surface of a glass lake—
The screams began and he looked at her mouth
But they didn’t come from her
(She’s not a her. She’s an IT.)
It was the cartoon characters that held her—their skin blackening and crackling—
But Johnny was gone somewhere too, he was in the swirling pattern of the stained glass window, the window with the picture of the angel holding the flaming sword to shut off the Garden of Eden.
And then he felt the rumbling within his flesh, as if his molecules were bubbling and transforming and getting all twisted up and bounced around until for a moment as he felt the intense heat all around him he thought—and this was one of his last coherent thoughts—that his skin was ripped off and he stood there at the altar, a figure of blood and bone and meat, looking out at all of them, all the cartoon characters as they sang praises and as he felt his brain scramble—
And then, nothing.
* * *
17
* * *
“Johnny,” God said, or was it Mr. Crown and Mr. Magoo together telling him things? It may have been the man with the red eyes, but it seemed like God. God had so many faces, and Johnny could always see through the normal face to the inner one where God lived. Sometimes he was so jumbled on the inside he didn’t know who was who, but God always came through. “Johnny, remember what time of year it is?”
He nodded.
“It’s time,” God said. “What happened was wrong. What we all got caught up in. It was a terrible thing to do. But it has to play out. We can never go back, can we?” God handed him a plate of food, which included a Burger King Whopper and coleslaw. “I got you some things. I forgot about the pear. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Am I a sinner?” Johnny asked, his voice emerging like a bleat.
“No, you’re not. You’re a good man. You’ve always been a good man,” God said. “We just reached too far, that’s all. It’s something we should’ve stopped years ago. Maybe the moment it started. I was too caught up in it. I’m the evil one. But to experience it—”
“No you’re not,” Johnny giggled, picking over the cole slaw. “You’re God, you can’t be evil.”
God gave him a look that he couldn’t figure out. “I just wanted you to know that I am sorry for what we all did.” Then God pulled his hat on and got back in his car.
God drove a Thunderbird, and kept the windows down even as cold as it was.
Johnny watched the T-Bird dissolve along the road, and then the air shimmered with its vanishing.
Chapter Nineteen
FLESH AND LUST IN THE OCTOBER PALACE
* * *
1
* * *
Diana Crown stood in the half-light of the hallway naked, and put her hand on the back of Van’s scalp. She grasped his hair in her hand.
“Drink the blood which is holy,” she whispered.
Forced him down on his knees before her. Brought his head to her thighs.
Smeared the blood on his face.
“Did you love it?” she asked.
“Yes. God yes I loved it,” Van Crawford, his eyes wild and quivering in their sockets, his hair matted, his face crimson. “Baptize me, baby, baptize me in the holy blood!”
Diana smiled. Almost innocently, she said, “I think you may have killed her, Van. That’s very very bad.”
Tears sprung from his eyes. “No, I loved her, I promise I loved her and I gave her red poppies to wear all over her face and body.”
“She’s dead, Van. Her heart stopped beating,” Diana said, her voice firm and cold. “But I understand, baby, I do, come here.” She let go of his scalp, and held her hands out to him. “Come on to me, Van.” And as he rose up, her arms enveloped him, pulling him to her. “How I love you, my strong killer. Driving your knife into her, the heat I felt, the thrust in every wound, the taste of her life—”
“Oh, yeah,” Van said, his tears drizzling down across his bloodstained face, pushing the rusty liquid into his mouth, down his throat. “Oh god, but I didn’t mean to hurt her—”
“Hurting is good sometimes,” Diana whispered, pressing her lips against his ear and biting down ever so slightly. “Pain is a ritual we all must endure.”
* * *
2
* * *
Van didn’t know what came over him, but he was chasing her up the stairs, up to the master bedroom where he’d first entered her, first made her feel like a real woman, she’d told him, taking her on the bed she’d said had been her mother’s. Even that had excited him further, and now, bounding up the stairs, two at a time, after her bloodstained flesh, watching the curves of her small, high breasts bounce as she went, her ass like smooth melons, he was going to have her again.
He was going to conquer what seemed just beyond his grasp.
She was giggling like a schoolgirl, her hair red, her skin red, too, slick and shiny as he pressed himself to her. She had surrendered, his Diana, his Diana of the Hunt who had stood by and watched him press his knife into the garden of Lourdes, had—
Remember what you saw?
Remember when you turned in the dark?
Turned and saw something there—
Something other than the girl you know as Diana Crown?
The voi
ce was like a worm in his mind, but he ignored it as he took her up in his arms, and the room was spinning. Her legs surrounded his waist, and his pants began dropping to the floor almost of their own accord. He felt more powerful than any boy of seventeen had ever felt before. He felt lightning inside him, muscles of steel as he held her, as he pinned her—
Beneath her face, in the dark, in the moonlight, you saw her.
You saw the cracks along her eyes, along her lips...
What was it you saw Van Crawfish?
As you push yourself into her, into her depths, into that woman who changed in the October moonlight as if she were not a woman at all, but something made of red bright lava—
It was the blood!
No, it wasn’t blood, it was something else, something that looked out at you from the skin you now hold—
LAVA
IT WAS LIKE A FUCKIN’ VOLCANO BURSTIN’ OUT AT YOU—
And there it was again, as he held Diana in his arms, awkwardly shoving himself into her flesh. There it was in her eyes, as if the thin layer of her iris were pushing outward and something that looked like the pink of inner flesh showed through. Pink and then orange then red then... And as she pushed him backwards, onto the bed, he saw lying next to him the body of Lourdes Castillo and he screamed, “What the fuck have you done to her?”
Chapter Twenty
THE TALES OF THE STONES
* * *
1
* * *
When the sun came up, Stony began to regret his decision to run off, but he still didn’t think he could go back home. He stood on the little wood porch that overlooked the bog, a mug of Cat’s Claw tea in his hand.
“Second thoughts?” Nora said. Nora had gone back to sleep for a bit, and had only just awakened. She emerged from behind a screen where she took her sponge bath in a large aluminum basin filled with cold water and hog-fat soap. She looked refreshed in a pale pink sweater and dungarees, and poured herself some tea before joining Stony outside.
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