“It’s a horrible thing to give up your dreams,” Angel said.
“I agree,” I said. “But you can reclaim them. You can live them. Here in Gossamer.”
“I want to,” he said.
“And why shouldn’t you? Why let other people tell you what is or isn’t acceptable? No one knows that better than you. It’s your life. Too many go about casting off pieces of themselves to others and get nothing in return and they lose themselves in the process.”
Angel nodded, rubbed the line of his jaw, and squinted into the distance. The funnels of sand searched the valley floor. It was almost like they were alive, and he didn’t doubt that in some manner or another they were. But what purpose they served he had no idea.
He said, “Where do you think they’ve gotten off to?”
“They’re close by,” I said. “They’ll be back soon when they see there’s nowhere else to go. And they’ll want you. They’re not going to just leave you, right?”
“No. They wouldn’t do that.”
“Right,” I said. “And when they come, you use that rope.”
“When they come I use the rope,” he said, smiling to himself.
And even to me it was a little frightening, all the glee and assurance that rope offered him. I watched the sky in the west, a thick lump in my throat, wishing I didn’t have to hurt any of them.
*****
Brooke sensed something off the moment they stepped from the back door. But knowing something is not right, and knowing what that something is, are far from the same thing.
She carried the grocery bag in one arm, held tight to her body.
She turned around and said, “Nat?”
Standing outside, the interior she’d just left seemed unusually dark, almost as if she’d stepped from the entrance of a long closed tunnel. Here, in the sun, it should have felt normal, she knew, but it didn’t. It didn’t feel like day at all, nor night, nor did it resemble anything remotely like either one.
The otherworldly twilight, the sick orange of the sky, the burned red of the rock walls surrounding them, set her nerves on edge. But for Brooke there were worse things, more tangible feelings like fear for Natalie who was not there by her side, and anger with Angel for choosing to stay at the carousel. And the woman, Dorothy, pretending to need their help, troubled her, and it reminded her that she wasn’t a good cop, that she never would be one, because she had terrible instincts when it came to judging other people.
Heat waves danced in front of the dilapidated houses where she suspected more corpses stood in open coffins, part of her fearing that they would rouse from sleep once the carousel started. And whatever allure the carousel held for Angel—which she could not for the life of her even begin to guess—she knew she needed to snap him back to reality and force him to step up to her side, not just for the sake of their future together and the trust she knew she needed in him for that future to amount to anything, but also for Natalie’s sake.
The kid needed a man in her life who wasn’t so selfish or needy that he’d always put his desires before her safety or happiness.
Foolish thoughts, she told herself.
When it comes down to it you have to rely on yourself.
“Get a grip,” she whispered. But it wasn’t so easy. Whatever their circumstances, the situation was clearly a dire one.
“Nat?” she said again.
The ground hummed beneath her feet as if some great beast twisted beneath the soil, rising from slumber, hungry after a long hibernation. The sun was far in the west. Farther, she believed, than it should have been. It meeting the far ridge sent a long cool shadow over the town.
She shivered, ready to step back inside the store and find her daughter, when something clicked off to her right. It sounded like someone clicking their tongue. It also shouldn’t have sounded menacing, but in the stillness, it did.
Brooke said, “Natalie, get out here.”
She held the butcher knife loosely at her side, cradling the bag of water, keeping her eyes trained on the buildings for a sign of the sound’s creator.
She slid the bag full of water down her side and let it rest on the desert floor.
Her daughter didn’t answer.
Sweat stung Brooke’s eyes.
The shadow creeping across the town grew cooler.
The click came again, once, loudly. A strange sound in the middle of nowhere, where they’d only seen one other living soul, and as far as Brooke could tell, that soul was far from innocent. Waiting for the sound again, she wondered if it was me, or my partner, continuing our stupid game.
No, she thought. Not stupid. Dangerous. Whatever this is, it’s far from childish.
In the distance, out past the line of houses, she watched the dust devils spin. She eased back to the door, listening hard for any movement behind her, any sign that Natalie was okay. The truth was she felt helpless, the way she had when she came home from work a decade ago and found Bill and their daughter on the couch in the living room. Sometimes she still feared that Natalie didn’t know what was wrong or right, what was harmless or dangerous.
Brooke had tried to remember, at times, what it felt like to be fourteen. But twenty years had created a gulf between whom she had been and who she was. She remembered feeling lonely, misunderstood, frightened. But for the life of her she could never remember what had made her feel those feelings.
Her parents had done a good job raising her; they were caring, supportive and attentive. Her mother always told her it was just hormones; her father always said every kid goes through a search to figure out their identity. She sometimes wondered if they were both right. But the hormones were still there, though quieted and less intense. The search for her identity remained as well, though she believed that growing up and facing the same blandness day after day had numbed her to some of the beautiful things she’d felt and believed as a child.
Adulthood had contained few surprises, which slightly depressed her. Even fewer monsters, which was a relief in many ways. If anything, it was kind of sad how predictable it all was. Yet, she wanted to understand for Natalie’s sake, to help her along, the way her own mother had tried to be there for her, and had failed miserably because Brooke had always been headstrong.
She watched the backs of houses stretching off in front of her, zeroing in on what she hadn’t felt a moment ago, but was becoming a more prevalent feeling by the second.
Surrounded, she thought. It was all the spider husks everywhere. They made her skin crawl with uneasiness. Something had either killed all of them, or they were all here somewhere, larger than when they’d outgrown their skins and left them behind.
She stepped through the doorway quickly, expecting to see Natalie as a small girl, playing with her toys on the living room floor of the house her and her first husband had owned then, her daughter so innocent, fragile, and tiny, but the room she stepped into was not where she should have found herself. She held the knife in front of her. The blade gleamed in the bright light. She saw Bill on the far side of the room. He wore a convict’s clothing. He held the corpse of a child on his lap in the corner of the bare room, hugging it tightly, laughing as he said, “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you…”
“You’re not real,” she said, trying to regain her equilibrium.
He didn’t hear her, or simply ignored her.
“Natalie?”
She spun around again, looking for the door, but the room spun with her and whichever way she faced, her ex-husband was in front of her.
Brooke swallowed, thirsty, her limbs shaking with exhaustion, her mind clouded with confusion. She wanted to ask him who the child was, but as if hearing her thoughts and feeding on her fears, Bill looked up and said, It’s the first one I murdered. The first one I cut up into a million little pieces…
*****
Natalie couldn’t find the door they’d come through to find the little store. It just didn’t exist. The front door that led out to Main Street and the carou
sel was still there but buried beneath a mass of cobwebs. The air had a strange tint to it, sulfurous and foul, as if she walked the border of a toxic swamp. But there were no swamps here in the desert.
She did her best to focus on what she felt, but it did little to combat what she saw.
She stepped into the center of the room. The three bags of water were still on the counter. She wondered if she’d never stepped into the bathroom at all.
No, she knew she’d walked in there.
She could still feel the texture of the thin, brittle toilet paper.
It flipped some kind of switch, she thought. Things were more normal before I went in.
She wondered what would happen if she went back in there, played with the sink, and came out again. She didn’t see how it could change anything or even begin to reverse it.
She called out, “Mom?”
“Natalie?”
“Mom?” Seeing that the back door still failed to materialize, she rushed to the front door. The cobwebs appeared to be three feet deep. There were small blotches of dark brown riddled throughout the strands and she nearly tore into it before she realized these weren’t remnants of the dead.
They scurried sideways.
She jerked her hand back, nearly stumbled.
“Mom? Help me!”
“Natalie!” Her mother’s voice was muffled as if she were inside the wall to Natalie’s left.
The spiders poured from the webbing, out from the ceiling, a thousand tiny legs speeding along the walls, pooling at the floor beneath her feet, and those above dropped down onto the frenzy rushing forward along the scarred wooden planks, and those on the walls dove in mass upon those, until the front door was barely visible.
She screamed, hands held out in front of her, until someone behind her grabbed her by the shoulders and jerked her off her feet.
*****
Angel had his hands deep beneath Brooke’s shirt in his dream. Her breasts were firm and small. He loved her breasts. She sometimes grew bored with him trying to play with them, which he didn’t understand because he thought if it felt good to him then it should also feel good to her. Standing on the carousel, he stroked one of the thick metal ropes that a frozen centaur clung to. The metal was damp and sticky. He wiped his hands on his pants. He thought he heard Brooke yell something far away, which pulled him from one dream and into another, and he knew he should go see what was wrong, but she’d be back. I had said she would. He thought that I was probably working on driving them back here even now because it was apparent that I needed them to ride the carousel as much as he wanted to.
Poor souls like him needed a strong mother and father figure. Left to his own imagination he’d become some type of pervert, unaware and unguided, forever seeking pleasure in whatever he guessed could get his rocks off. His own father and mother could have used more solid examples as well, but sad, pathetic creatures that they were, they boiled away in their toxins. He never understood how that happened either because they had tried to work and be like everybody else.
He’d spent a lot of time praying for them when he was young, thinking that if God really existed he’d do something, and if God wouldn’t listen to the prayers of a desperate child then he wasn’t anything worth respecting to begin with. But they rotted away, from the inside out, no matter how much he prayed, and no matter how much he tried to help (which, trust me, wasn’t nearly as much as he liked to believe.)
He cried for his parents while he clung to the carousel.
His family had meant something to him once, but for some reason he hadn’t meant much to them. He couldn’t wrap his head around it.
Listen to me Angel…
Prayers can’t save the dying. We pray for ourselves, our grief, our fears. As it was in your world, so it was in Gossamer.
Every night more would turn. Those who returned from death shared his hunger, and they were weak at first, until he shared a fresh kill and the hot blood quickened the undying pulse of life in their core. The barn became their church, their slaughterhouse. A week passed, seven more lives. Seven more ghastly things floating outside dark bedroom windows, tapping softly, whispering, “Come with me…”
It didn’t take long for the Devil to bleed the town dry, for the demons to shake loose dirt from their garments and rise from their graves, and blot the moon with their wretched forms, to shatter the night with their horrible, child-like screams of hunger.
And that was all they were, hungry: the most basic human curse, as well as the most basic undead one. Only their hunger was taboo, and they were my children, mine, feeding upon their brothers and sisters, stealing the promise I’d given them, destroying the purity they’d had, their innocence.
At first, those left were terrified, as you can imagine they would be. Many of them prayed to all sorts of gods, even to Satan himself, to be spared a bloody death, and then later, the ghastly resurrection.
But it’s easy to give in when you know you don’t stand a fighting chance. And they didn’t. And I couldn’t save them, because I still believed I loved him.
But what is love? Is it letting your lover butcher your children? Is it flowers and candy? Is it understanding your partner’s nature and accepting his darkness? Is it seeing the light in someone and trying to help them bring that forth, so it overpowers the night living inside them as well?
Like you, my parents weren’t good examples. My father sold my mother out to save his own hide. My mother… well, she died for her sister. But it was foolish. And it was also selfish because she embraced death too willingly, to flee my father, to flee me, to flee the gray ashen streets and the debts.
Tragedy, that demon we all know. But love? Where does it hide its face?
I thought I loved the Devil, but maybe I only loved being touched. And he took all that had loved me and trusted in me. He molded them into his image and the forever they had known, that I had given them, turned into something horrific, blood thirsty, and uncontrollable.
After last night there are no more souls here filled with the wine of life.
They’ve drank the last cask, my dear, sweet son Peter. He thought himself a man but boys of sixteen are far from being men. It’s for that reason that I hate my lover, not what he has done to me or our paradise. He stole my son away. He made a monster of him, something demonic and unforgivable, something that will look at me and only see sustenance of the most basic kind, without any textures or depth. A morsel to sustain him.
And as much as I love Peter, I equally hate Julian.
I believe the prophets spoke of him, and the Devil, though he wears many guises, is not beyond my reach, though it terrifies me to witness his power.
So I need you, sweet boy, and your family. More than I ever needed anyone.
*****
Brooke said, “You’re not real and nothing you do is going to make me believe that.”
She had kept tabs on Bill while he fell apart in prison. As much as she hated herself for it, she was glad that he was being molested, treated like a thing instead of a person. She’d hoped it would change him for the better, but she also suspected that a part of him that hated himself and all humanity would only use the horrific things that befell him in prison as an excuse to be the way he’d always been.
Brooke had temporarily dated one of the guards until she’d come to suspect that he wasn’t much better than her former husband. Guards, like policemen, who can have a very dark side to begin with, fall into the debauchery of failed lives like pigs in shit. Alone, at home, they bathe themselves in the detritus they struggle to keep at arm’s reach when they feel other people’s prying eyes upon them.
She had never understood men’s attraction to brutality. In a way it broke her heart because she worried that that brutality resided in all of them, which wasn’t an optimistic way to view the opposite sex, but a belief she also knew she had no control over. So she did her best not to think about it at all, to just do her job, be the best mother she could be, and hope that she di
d enough, whatever that meant.
From the other side of the room, Bill said, “Ah, but to be alone. It’s the time for the defenses to drop! You can run around naked, you can scream like a child, you can suck your own cock the way the giants did before the sweet Lord grew angry! It’s safe here. You’re alone right now. Be yourself. Pull your armor off.”
Brooke shook her head. “You’re not real and you’re talking gibberish.”
He stood, his hand buried in the back of the child’s skull. He worked the mouth like a puppet. “You’re not real either, and you’re talking out your ass.”
He giggled madly.
“You’re insane,” Brooke said. “This whole place is insane.”
“Wait,” Bill said, standing perfectly still.
She listened hard, not sure what she was supposed to be waiting for, every nerve on edge and burning, burning, burning, the knife heavy in her hand.
She thought, If he comes near me I’ll cut his goddamn head off.
“Wait,” Bill said.
“I’m not waiting for anything.” She turned her back on him, but he was still there in front of her. She stabbed at the wall, but it fled from her.
“Let me out of here!” she cried in desperation, until her scream died off and they were again lost in the stillness and the preternatural quiet.
“I’m trying to protect you,” the dead child said.
Bill held its face close to his. They whispered among themselves.
Bill said, “I’m not trying to protect you. I want you to know what it’s like to suffer.”
Brooke said, “I’ve suffered enough, and so has our daughter.”
*****
Natalie tried to break the grip on her shoulders.
When he first seized her, she knew it wasn’t her mother, because her mother didn’t possess strength like that.
She fought, tried to spin around, but only caught a glimpse of a gaunt bone-white face, black eyes like extinguished stars, bloodless lips like dried worms.
He said, “You need to leave before it grows dark.”
Natalie screamed and fought harder as the spiders skittered closer.
Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy Page 13