I held the knife out in front of her. It was bone Brooke realized, shaped like the edge of a jaw, and Brooke thought that that was exactly what it was, a human jaw bone, broken off and sharpened to a razor’s edge. It didn’t matter who it had once been part of. It didn’t matter. She told herself that she had to free herself as soon as possible, but it was next to impossible with me so close, armed, standing ten feet away and shivering as we watched the sun set.
Brooke wriggled, leaning forward, and one hand slid free but she didn’t pull it in front of her. She kept it hidden behind her back. She waited for me to turn again and draw closer, determined to follow through on the scare I’d given her just minutes ago. She wanted me to try. With one of her hands free, Brooke thought that it would be easy, aided by the element of surprise, to strike me in the temple enough to stun me until she could get the rope free off the drop rod.
Knife or not, she would kill me once she was free, and she didn’t care, for the moment at least, if it landed her in prison. And in a way, I couldn’t blame her.
The day turning to night grew much cooler. Her dried blood on her face itched and Angel’s blood on her shoulder had gone from hot to warm to a tacky frigidness. She forced herself to inhale and exhale normal breaths. She kept her eyes locked on me as I treated Angel’s corpse between us as nothing more than what it was, a piece of meat.
I said, “You have no idea what his body is for, or what it will draw in once dusk claws its way over the far ridge, but you will learn the hard way that this is what life is all about.”
Barely a whisper, but so much force, and it frightened me since it did not sound as my own voice had always sounded, so I can only speculate on what it did to that poor earthbound soul.
“Come and try to do that to me,” Brooke said.
I shook my head, and smiled sadly.
I said, “You think that sacrificing yourself will save your daughter but that isn’t how this is going to play out.”
“Let Natalie go you fucking psycho. Let her go!”
“I want you to listen to me…”
“Go fuck yourself!”
“Angel is going to draw them in and then we’re going to destroy them.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
Brooke’s mind raced over what she had just seen happen but her heart had trouble accepting. She tried not to look at Angel because every time she did she saw the knife flash in her mind’s eye and she saw his blood spray from his throat, and she felt it hit her shoulder, smelled it so strongly at first that it was overpowering and turned her stomach.
She fought her tears, thinking that if she and Natalie lived through this, one day it, along with Angel’s memory, would grow vague to her and she didn’t want it to. She wanted to always remember who he was, and that at the end he had tried to right what he’d done, whether she had pulled him free of my enchantment or he’d somehow done it himself.
She studied my face, calming herself. She tried, and had been for a long time, to figure out the meaning of what I wanted and why I wanted it. It’s easy to believe that if we know what someone wants that we can reason with them…
She said softly, trying a different tact once she realized she wouldn’t be able to lure me within striking range, “What do you want?”
“I want to stop hurting,” I said. “That’s all. I want for all of us to stop hurting. They were my children and I failed them miserably. I don’t blame you for that, or him,” nodding at Angel, “but I can’t put an end to this without your blood. If you need it spelled out, made simple, I can tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try me,” Brooke said.
I nodded, still facing the far ridge. “I gave this town eternal life. One day a boy stumbled in from the desert, different than them. They feared him, for a while. I loved him. But I was lonely. Later, a man blew in from the desert. A bloodsucker, a vampire, according to your daughter,” I said, glancing slowly over my shoulder at Brooke. “And I felt I needed him so badly that I ignored what he was doing at night, bleeding my children dry. He took Peter, the boy of the desert last, and none of these poor souls deserved it. Alone, I can’t stop him,” I said, “but with Angel’s blood spilled they’ll come running once darkness settles in. They’ll flog this carousel and each other to get to the two of you.”
“And then?” Brooke said, disbelieving, breathless.
“And then I’ll use it to trap Julian as he’s feasting on you, and your boyfriend, and your daughter. I’ll reduce him to a child. Once he’s so small and insignificant he can’t defend himself I’ll be able to strip him and drive a stake through his heart. Then my people, and Peter will return to me, and things will be as they were before.”
I wiped my eyes but Brooke, conditioned by a different world, a different life, doubted such a vile woman could cry, but then, she wasn’t sure, and the possibility frightened her terribly.
I dropped my hand and said, “I’ll drive a stake through his heart because he’s made me do it.”
“Because he’s a vampire,” Brooke said.
“To your daughter he is. To me, he’s the Devil himself though you would never know it looking at him.”
“And why didn’t you just stake him through the heart while he was sleeping?” Brooke said, disbelieving any of this insanity, and she’d heard a lot of insanity as a State Trooper. “Wouldn’t that be easy to do? Kill him while he was sleeping?”
I smiled at her. “You would think so.”
“Yes,” Brooke said flatly, “I would.”
“When you see him you’ll know why.”
Brooke nodded, not expecting anymore explanation and not receiving one. She squeezed her eyes shut and did her best not to listen. There was no reasoning with madness. She learned that from law enforcement training, she knew that from crazy people she had known growing up. People get things in their heads and nothing can dislodge them.
When it came to protecting your own from such madness, laws went out the window, you had to fight to defend yourself and to protect what you love otherwise you’re at fault for doing nothing, for letting it happen without much more than a whimper.
She freed her other hand. She didn’t care if I saw her or not. The rope had chafed her back and ribs and beneath her breasts. The knot on the drop rod was a huge ugly mess, the knot at her breastbone smaller, more delicate. She kept her eyes on me, and I shook my head and said, “There is no escaping this,” as Brooke went to work on the smaller knot.
*****
Natalie had never tried playing sports at school. Part of the reason was because she was somewhat uncoordinated, coltish as one of the custodians teased her, and she was self-conscious enough without having to make a fool of herself on the track, or by any sort of net. Another reason was that the majority of her time she spent reading, and though a lot of people thought that was a foolish way for her to spend several hours each day, she knew what they were missing, only living one boring life while her mind was filled with heroics, scares, tragedy, love, and characters who taught her empathy instead of closing her off.
Reading also taught her about possibilities a lot more than her everyday life at school or home had, not that her time spent during either was so bad. She understood the dynamics, and she believed that all life was dynamics, even if she had a difficult time understanding their intricate and sometimes complicated natures. On the school front people wanted to be cool and fit in, basically just to be accepted, and she wanted that too, but not at the cost of casting aside her true identity. And at home her mother was usually caring and understanding unless her job was unusually stressful for a short period, or if she was lonely, like she had been many times before she’d met Angel.
But reading, that was her love and she’d read plenty of novels about vampires. So standing outside the barn’s dark doorway, she felt the gooseflesh break loose across her arms and shoulders. The rock in her hand seemed exceptionally heavy, but she leveled herself, believing that the longer she took t
o get down to the nitty gritty, the quicker it’d grow dark. And, by the off chance that I had been telling the truth—and by now, thinking about all the possibilities and remembering what the boy Peter had looked like on top of the building—she feared that it wasn’t some big scam.
Even if I had not told her the whole truth, I’d told her at least a partial truth, which she thought was all you could really expect from anybody.
Staring at the darkened barn door and imagining what might wait within, her breath came rapidly. She tried to slow it down and couldn’t.
Vampires, she thought.
Usually she liked her imagination, even one day thought that she would try to write more than poetry, perhaps a short story, but sometimes an imagination could be a curse.
The inside of the barn was so dark, though it felt as if a warm and welcoming air sighed out the doorway. She imagined many things, but the one she feared the most was that inside waited a hundred vampires, cramping every bit of space with their undead bodies, dreaming dreams of endless hunger, until the night kissed each of them on the lips like a lover and their eyes snapped open.
She imagined them hanging from the rafters, asleep, filling the floor and half-poking out from strewn bales of straw, sitting in horse stalls—those horses long ago drained of blood—and she tried to imagine the smell of them, thinking it probably amounted to little more than the scent of a scab you couldn’t keep from peeling off.
Time was running out and she wasn’t sure, couldn’t remember, when exactly they were supposed to awake. Would it be as soon as the sun set, which she feared, or during twilight, or once night spread its thick dark wings over the valley?
Get moving, she thought.
She took a few more deep breaths, heart pounding and had to force her right foot forward, then her left, then her right again. The interior of the barn was dimly lit, the last rays of sunlight like slabs of gold through the slats. It created an eerie effect that caused the dust she’d kicked up to shimmer in front of her eyes and she inhaled some of that dust and sneezed.
She quickly covered her mouth, looking left and right, to see if anything had responded. Nothing she noticed. There was nothing there at all other than the hay she had imagined. She didn’t want to go in any further because she thought either I had pulled her leg, or something was hidden here, or she had the wrong barn.
The wind gusted again.
Through the slats she could see the swirling clouds of dirt idling about the desert floor, but when she blinked they were gone.
Something creaked in the corner to her left.
She clenched the jagged stone and whispered, “Who’s there?”
She felt as if someone was watching her and thought it might be Peter.
She scanned the ground and the darkening wooden beams for signs of spiders.
“Nothing here,” she told herself, though there was something there, watching her from the dark corner, she could sense it, still, waiting. But to approach it and to enter that thick blackness would be about the stupidest thing she could do so she didn’t.
Her mouth grew drier, her heart beating a little faster, she eased backward out the door, stepping slowly, trying not to sneeze again. On the threshold of outside and inside she noticed a pitchfork someone had stabbed and left in a bale of hay. Taking hold of the handle and jerking it free, she trembled slightly, but from relief not dread. The weapon may not be with her long, she accepted, but it was better than facing the unknown barehanded.
Outside, facing the church, she thought, You can do this. You need to do this. Then you can face her and get mom and get out of here.
But it was as if she were rooted to the ground, her imagination bouncing from Gossamer’s welcome sign materializing out of nowhere, to the creepy carousel in the road downtown, to Angel tying her mother to said carousel, to the boy with thousands of pet spiders. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that something like vampires are in that church, she thought. Maybe not vampires, but something just as bad. Some type of ghosts, or ghouls, or a dozen witches like Dorothy.
Slowly, as she gathered her resolve, she did something she seldom realized. She asked herself what her mother would do in her shoes. And it wasn’t hard to guess, her mother would go inside and face her fears down because she was brave. She would look the Devil in the eye if he was waiting for her.
And deep in her soul she knew that something was in there—just like there had been something in the corner of the barn—as the shadows stretched longer across the valley floor and she looked to the sky, noticing for the first time that she had not seen a single bird since they arrived in this cursed place.
Before her imagination could slow her down again, she walked toward the church, stuffing the jagged rock in her pocket and clenching the pitchfork, walking as quietly as possible, and afraid.
*****
Natalie stood on the church’s wooden steps. Someone had painted them black like the timber of the walls and the wooden slates they’d used for shingles. There were no windows, at least on this side, which she found both odd and interesting, but most of all disturbing.
How dark is it going to be in there, she wondered, and how easy to escape if I have to?
She choked back a bit of her fear but not all of it, which was okay, because she doubted if her mother would have been able to set aside her emotions either.
A musty odor assaulted her nostrils as she opened the door on the right a sliver. It had the scent of long-closed tombs. The interior lay thick with shadows but she noticed there were windows, high on the far wall, above the murk surrounding the altar and the black pulpit. Nothing but the windows and the shape of the pulpit were discernible until she stepped inside, which took much more effort than she had hoped it would.
She swallowed hard, carrying the pitchfork she’d found in the barn, and gave her vision a moment to adjust to the interior’s darkness and hoping that it didn’t take too long because her silhouette against the open doorway surely made her an easier target to whoever, or whatever, waited inside.
And there was something there.
She could feel the cold, dead heat of it.
It was like falling into a lake up north in the winter, so cold it felt as if it burned, so shocking that a nervous system shut down and the mind wandered.
She heard gentle breathing, urgent prayers, if only in her head, of a long forgotten deity. She had never thought much about the Christian God, or any others, but here in the dank void of space where prayers were once whispered fervently, she tasted bile in her throat and a knot forming in the pit of her stomach.
Whatever creature they had worshipped here lay lost in the passage of time, for even isolated places like this went through changes in doctrine and faith. Science replaced them. Or miracles. Here she knew it was the latter. Dorothy’s lies contained partial truths. She had given this place something incredible and for decades they had no need to cling to the archaic gestures of penance.
The realization wasn’t as much of a shock as she felt it should be. She clinched the pitchfork tighter, took a step further inside the suddenly quiet stillness. The pews seemed to materialize, the first rows just a yard in front of her, their once highly polished and dark grain buried under years of dust and neglect.
It was sad, she thought, for whatever being had once come here to sup with its servants. She thought that the sounds she’d heard moments ago, the urgent ache of longing, may have been nothing more than a god praying to its wayward acolytes to once again bring their hearts to the altar in pursuit of a higher connection, something grander than the temporal pleasures and afflictions of the flesh.
Natalie thought, A godless place must be the worst place to die.
She pined for her mother’s touch. Her protection. Her laughter and her hope. Just earlier today things had been so different. Earlier today she would have never imagined that she’d be standing in a decrepit church, in the heart of darkness that pulsed and whispered things in a foreign tongue. And she wante
d to know, when the whispers came, what exactly they meant.
If there was a god, it owed her that, didn’t it? Just to understand what it all meant before slipping into the forever blackness where she feared she’d remember nothing of the short life she’d led, barely old enough to dream and struggle, and for those dreams to slowly die off the way they did for most, because life was nothing more than struggle, she knew that now, a struggle to land the right job, to keep it, to make good friends and ignore those who judged you, a struggle to find something to believe in even if all that stood before you proved that the only thing constant was chaos.
She placed her free hand on a pew. The wood felt dry and warm, comforting.
In another life she imagined she would have gone soul searching, the way many must, to see if any religion fit her, if any teachings resonated, and leant her an edge her life would not otherwise have.
But there was no time for that now. It was dark and she heard things moving upon the dusty streets, shambling things, like zombies, or things still fighting to regain consciousness, and shake the death-sleep from their weary bones.
Slowly, her heart thumping, she noticed the sanctuary had lightened.
Votive candles flickered at each side of the altar.
Her hands trembled.
Her breath came in ragged gasps.
A wooden cross hung beyond the pulpit and the candlelight seemed to shine from it. To either side of the cross hung two young, plump, naked girls. Thick chains ran down from the ceiling’s open beams to their necks and the collars bound around their throats. Both of them were suspended roughly three feet off the altar’s floor. They appeared to be twins, both of them pale, heads bowed as if sleeping, or deep in prayer, and blood trickled from dozens of puncture wounds riddling their bare arms and legs.
Natalie glanced left and right, expecting a trap, already growing wiser in the ways of the world. She kept thinking that they were bait to lure her forward, but she couldn’t leave them up there for she knew what they were…
Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy Page 19