He shook his head, wishing he could shut up, but even as a small child, quiet for the most part, he let things build up until they came pouring out of him, and when that happened, he always rediscovered that he didn’t want to withhold what he really wanted to say, what he really thought or felt or believed.
“What kind of example did he set for me? I never really thought about it until we came here. I look at every kid I ever knew growing up and their parents either prepared them or deceived them.”
He sighed, looked at his hands. They had done nothing great, not once in his whole life. Sweat slicked them. His hands trembled. He glanced at Brooke again, sheepishly said, “I don’t know that I can set a good example for Natalie. Sometimes I think she’s more grown up than I could ever hope to be.”
Brooke frowned. He didn’t know why. It didn’t make him feel good though, because he suspected she searched for something to disprove his feelings. At last she said, “Sometimes I think she’s more grown up than I am, and I don’t know what to make of it either.”
Tears spilled on her cheeks. Angel waited for her to go on, thinking that it would look weird to anybody who stumbled upon them: him only wearing his shirt, she tied up, both of them sharing a moment about their doubts, their adulthood, which he thought just a sham, an act, and Brooke saying she had her own moments of uncertainty.
Angel said, “I really want to trust you.”
“So untie me,” she pleaded. “Whatever is happening we can face it together.”
His fingers toyed with the knots of rope around her wrists. They were firm, solid as the rock bed that the town itself was built upon. He’d once read a Clive Barker story in a book Natalie had left lying on the arm of Brooke’s couch. The story was about the undoing of knots, how terrible creatures that were bound in magical entanglement, were loosed upon the world once the rope was unknotted.
The wind gusted and threw sand against the carousel, up over his bare legs. He thought he should put his pants on, soon, before Natalie came back, but his brain felt like it was stripping itself of beliefs he’d clung to his entire life and he didn’t want to break that moment with any distraction. It felt utterly important.
He said to himself, “This place is something like that,” thinking about magic knots, about secrets revealed, and then loosed.
“Like what?” Brooke looked over her shoulder at him.
She appeared so harmless, so pale and scared. It made him want to protect her, though in truth he knew that if anybody was going to protect someone else, it would be her doing the protecting. More shame rose with that admission. Books and movies had always told him that it was a man’s job to protect and provide for the women in his life, and he’d never cared much for doing either, and how could he when he barely acquired the skills to do so for himself? It didn’t seem fair, the you-musts that society put on you, when women cried for equality. They were more than equal, and he knew that too, so why did they make all that noise about it being otherwise? Searching his memory, every woman he had known was stronger mentally and emotionally and spiritually than any man he’d been even half way close to.
The physical was nothing.
Brute force tired.
His fingers worked at the knots and he felt them loosen bit by agonizing bit and he heard Brooke whispering, Yes, yes, yes, almost sexually, and it made him hard hearing her panting. Another weakness, but a forgivable one he imagined, since the world ran on sex and blood, love and war.
He found that he wanted to untie her and he wanted to make love to her there on the dark carousel with daylight fading, the two of them wrapped in each other’s arms and legs, slowly grinding, catching glimpses of the sunset from their prone, sweating positions.
But she wouldn’t want that. She wanted to find Natalie, and he found that he wanted that too, very much. This was no place for a child though he would have loved it as a kid, and yet, he had been nothing like Brooke’s daughter. The part of him that still retained his childhood imagination and dreams longed for it. It wanted to believe, almost fatally, that magic existed in the world, that true love prevailed, that there was a specific and important design behind the gears of life, those gears put in place by some higher force who understood what mere mortals could only guess at.
The specifics of the purpose didn’t really matter, just that there was one in place, and that the purpose was incorruptible.
His fingers worked mindlessly at the rope around her wrists.
Brooke panted, Yes, yes, yes…
The knots loosened further.
The sun was so low, nearly sitting on the rock wall to the west that he squinted, looking in that direction, and he noticed the growing silhouette at the end of the platform.
His fingers ceased moving.
It felt like someone had dumped a cold bucket of water on his back.
The wonder he had felt only a half hour ago morphed into terror. He had never been one for violence and did his best to hide any traces of it that cropped into his mind from time to time. And he found it especially difficult to be brave when under pressure.
This moment was no different as the sun sunk a little farther, blazing furiously, and I sprang onto the platform.
Angel thought, Brooke was right, as his insides shuddered.
*****
Brooke thought, Yes, yes, yes, muttered it, praying he’d not change his mind and stop from untying her. Her heart thumped heavily. Tears stung her eyes.
She thought, I’m going to find you Nat and get us out of here, imagining her daughter’s dirty, tear-streaked face in her mind, imagining the embrace they had shared behind the little store when the water they had planned to carry out disappeared.
Angel was mumbling to himself and she suspected that he wasn’t aware of it. He talked about how incredibly powerful women were and how tired he was, he said he was worried about Natalie, that this was no place for children, and he whispered, I’m sorry, so sorry, over and over as his erection pressed into her hip. But she didn’t care about any of that, she only cared about being free, finding her daughter and leaving this place to rot in memory.
She’d found that some things in life did their best to cling to you, but if you buried them daily, shined the cross above their grave to remind you that they couldn’t hurt you anymore, eventually the ground would settle beneath your feet and you’d find in yourself the strength to walk away.
Yes, she thought, feeling circulation again. It was one of the most wonderful feelings she had ever felt, as if being held underwater to the point of your lungs burning and then being released, slowly drawing your head from water, tasting the sweet air on your tongue as you gagged, reassessing what it meant to be alive.
Angel’s fingers fumbled.
Brooke looked up as he gasped.
They had both noticed me standing at the edge of the platform. To them, and perhaps to myself, my face looked even more ancient than it had earlier, as if I’d aged another decade in the last three hours, which Brooke knew to be impossible in the ordinary world she’d come from, but here?
Gossamer, whatever the place was, it wasn’t normal.
It sat on the edge of forever where the murk of hell met the beauty of heaven.
It was a place of testing, she believed, a place of extreme desolation.
But, she thought frantically, we can find a way out. We have to.
She tested the rope. There was quite a bit of give but she wasn’t free yet. Her shoulders burned as feeling came back into them, as blood flowed again through areas that had been denied it.
She gasped for air as I stepped closer.
I carried something in my right hand, and the sheer presence of something my fist was nearly enough to loosen her bowels. And for good reason.
I was five feet away before Brooke could see what I held clearly. It was small, no more than a couple inches long, thin, a bone-white knife that caught the dying sunlight and caused the polished edge of it to gleam. A part of my mother’s corpse.
&
nbsp; Angel’s hands dropped to his sides.
Brooke wanted to scream for him to put his hands up, keep one out in front of him to take the cut so he could use the other to poke me in the eyes or the throat, but there wasn’t time for any of that, because I was an arm’s width away, my heart breaking as much as theirs, looking from Brooke to Angel before I said, “I only have one use for you now, sweet boy...”
And the knife flashed in the gathering gloom beneath the canopy.
Angel’s blood sprayed from his throat, splashed over Brooke’s shoulder and the side of her face, and she screamed as he staggered forward, clutching the wound with one hand, then the other, blood burbling up from deep inside him and between his fingers as he hit the deck on his knees and leaned forward.
Red drops splattered against the highly polished platform.
He choked out something that wasn’t a word, more of a sorrowful surrender.
Brooke didn’t know if she screamed because her hearing seemed to fail her as if her eyes were the only sense her faculties had the power to keep functioning. A second later she tasted the bitter red sands. Heard the heavy and quick thump of her heart, felt the tears, the ache of her jaw, the throbbing in her shoulders and the dead weight of her fingers.
I watched Angel die as I stood next to Brooke who felt herself tumbling inside despite how hard she struggled against fainting.
Angel tried to use his shirt as a bandage, the shirt quickly saturated and darkening much the same way his eyes were.
The sun lowered until only a sliver of it shone above the far wall of the valley.
Angel’s blood glowed in the twilight: pooling beneath his body, on her shoulder, dotting her engagement ring. She tried to focus on his blood, the ring, the soft wisp of my dress as I knocked her baseball cap off, grabbed a handful of Brooke’s hair and jerked her head back, exposing her throat.
She struggled to find her voice, and when she did, only a second later, she whispered, “Please God,” praying that Natalie had found her way out of the valley and back to the road, already consigning her fate to that of Angel’s.
I could have loved her for that, I could have let her free, but I couldn’t. Hundreds of lives, lives I loved and had watched sweat and breed and cry, and laugh, depended on the trap me and Peter had to set for Julian…
*****
Natalie heard a faint scream in the distance.
She stumbled, realizing it was her mother’s. It caused a dull echo through her memory, tickling into remembrance the only time she had ever heard her mother scream, Brooke usually being so composed and priding herself in the fact, and it was so long ago that it took a minute for Natalie to remember when it had taken place.
She had been young and her dad had been home, back before her mother became a cop. Something awful had happened back then, followed shortly after by her father going to jail, court, and finally prison. And her mother had screamed at night sometimes, in her sleep, and it’d startle Natalie awake, and she wouldn’t be able to sink back into sleep until the following night despite Brooke telling her that it was nothing more than a nightmare she’d had. But the child knew that the nightmare had stemmed from something real.
Time seemed to fix her mother’s horrible visions, but that too was a long time coming. Natalie took to sleeping in her room until she grew too large and it became uncomfortable for both of them.
Hearing her mother scream now got her moving again. She’d went out the back door of the photography studio but had somehow ended up on the other side of the street, back near where she and Brooke had first went into the house and seen the spider husks and the living corpse that only rested until night had fully fallen.
Taking a deep breath, regaining what physical and emotional footing she could, she forced herself to move…
She shivered, trying to focus on the task at hand—that of finding the church and the barn and the proof they would either present or disprove—instead of worrying about her mother. If something had happened, worse than what had already taken place, by the time she ran back there it would already be too late and she would only make herself a possible victim.
It shamed her, feeling like she was leaving her mother to some horrible situation or another, to face it on her own, when Brooke would have done differently if the situation were reversed.
She wiped sweaty hair from her forehead and shivered again, listening hard for a second scream, turning back that way, thinking that she should find her but afraid Angel would hurt her if she did. She listened for that second scream. None came. The valley was quiet but for the sound of her breathing which came raggedly.
She felt winded though she’d barely begun the journey. Surrounded by the sun-bleached houses and their vacant windows and the blowing dust and setting sun, she feared hyperventilating from fear and it only scared her worse because if she did hyperventilate she had no idea how to stop the process. She’d seen on some old television show that people breathed into paper bags or something but she had none on hand and she wasn’t convinced that breathing into a paper bag would help her feel any better.
She listened a moment longer but didn’t hear anything.
She clenched and unclenched her hands, scanned the roofs of the buildings. The Explorer was still stationed up there but there wasn’t any sign of Peter. She moved forward, walking at an angle toward one of the houses and watching between a group of them for any sign of a steeple or a barn loft. It had seemed she’d seen the church on the north side before they’d descended in the Explorer but she couldn’t be sure of what she remembered, or if her memory was correct. All she knew was that it wasn’t on this side of town and logic dictated that if she made a sweep of the perimeter she would catch sight of them, the barn and the church. Only she had to hurry if Dorothy was telling the truth and it wasn’t simply more misdirection.
The sun was nearly gone.
She shuffled her feet, swung her arms, telling herself that it was up to her now; her mom wasn’t going to be able to help.
No one would be able to help.
It was a sobering and nearly paralyzing thought.
She scooped a jagged piece of shale-like rock from the ground. It was nearly four inches long, shaped like a triangle. She didn’t know if it would disappear on her the way the butcher knife, the cane and the water had, but she wanted something to help her defend herself.
The houses she passed were blank, uninteresting, and each had an open window. She imagined a specter floating outside one of them late at night, rapping softly, whispering, “Come with me…”
Walking faster, she hit the far wall in ten minutes. Another dirt street ran east. She followed it, afraid she’d never find the place before dark, but then, as if rising beyond and above one of the houses, she caught sight of a dark wooden cross over a steeply perched roof. She ignored the open windows, ignored everything she felt twisting in her guts and the coolness settling against her clothing, as she jogged around the house and entered a long, shallow lot. Houses surrounded it, all their back porches facing the eyesore. It was rundown worse than the houses. She figured the townspeople, after riding the carousel, had little reason for mass prayer or any reason for a god.
The church had thick double doors and cast iron finishing, leaded panes and a spire with a cage-like window. The barn was nondescript. It squatted off to the right, a large door open leading into a wall of darkness. She squeezed the piece of rock hard, felt it digging into her palm and the soft joints of her fingers and it felt good. Felt so goddamn real that she almost couldn’t believe what proof she was here to find.
Vampires, she thought.
She gazed at the blood red horizon.
A soft clicking sound filled her throat.
Natalie took a deep breath, let it out, and glanced from church to barn trying to figure out which one she should enter first. The wind brushed against her clothes and she jumped as it shifted and felt like a woman’s hand sliding along her right arm.
She circled, watching the h
ouses for any sign of me or Peter, lightheaded and tense. A sense of vertigo almost overpowered her. It was the heat, she thought, and lack of water, and the beginnings of hunger settling into the pit of her stomach. She blinked as the breeze came again and dust peppered her shins and she nearly jumped, thinking of all the spiders that had tried to climb on her in the store when Peter first appeared.
She decided to enter the barn first being that it offered the easiest way of escape, if needed, with the large open door.
She repositioned the rock in her hand and walked into the shadow of the barn, doing her best to pay attention to any sudden movements that were not her own.
*****
Brooke’s body froze but her mind flew over what had happened and what options remained for her as I released her hair and stepped back, studying her intently for a moment. And during that moment Brooke could feel the entire weight of her past, all of the could have-would have-should haves and all of the paths taken and all of the others rejected. I sighed next to her, suddenly as tired as she appeared, yet knowing that our battle hadn’t truly begun yet, these moments were just the calm before the storm.
Then I moved away, hovered over Angel’s corpse for a moment before stooping, and to Brooke my face looked pale in profile, and I lifted Angel as if he was only drunk and I intended to carry him to a car. I carried him to the edge of the platform and then back, shaking my head.
Brooke sobbed, knowing that she shouldn’t make a sound and remind me of her presence, but she couldn’t help it. This was the man she’d meant to grow old with, the man she’d trusted enough to spend time with her daughter, because she knew, god, she knew, that he would never hurt Natalie, and any things he’d do to hurt Brooke would have been so minor as to have been forgettable.
His blood slicked my shoulder. I threw him over one of the centaur’s backs like a felled deer. I wiped my bloody hands on my dress and looked over at Brooke who felt her heart run cold and the burst of adrenaline coursing through her veins, but it was for nothing since she couldn’t use it with her hands still bound behind her.
Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy Page 18