She took another drag from her cigarette, crushed it out, immediately brought out another one. Offered one to Natalie. She accepted.
“I just, um,” Lexi said, “found out I was pregnant this morning. I was going to wait for the perfect time this weekend to tell Shawn and then we got there and he went into the bathroom and I was lying there on the bed and . . . something just didn’t feel right. I can’t explain it but I’ve never felt that way before. It was like there was some voice in my brain that said if Shawn and I were to return home as though nothing had changed then . . . I don’t know, my life would just increasingly worsen. It was inarguable, that feeling. I know what you’re thinking and, no, I’m not crazy. I’m probably one of the sanest people you’ll meet and, I know, just saying that in and of itself makes me sound a little bit crazy but it’s true. I’m not saying I’m perfect. I’ve just always been pretty . . . I don’t know, rational, I guess. Practical or something. I guess it doesn’t help that I have no idea if the baby is even his or not.”
Now Lexi looked like she was practically on the brink of tears. She blinked them away, her face kind of cracking and twisting with some sort of, Natalie didn’t know, internal struggle maybe?
Lexi waved her cigarette in the air and pointed at her beer. “And,” she said, “before you say it, I know what you’re thinking. ‘Should you really be smoking and drinking if you’re pregnant?’ Well, the answer is, it doesn’t matter because I’m getting an abortion. That’s what I have to figure out come Monday. Then of course I’m going to have to start the divorce proceedings against Shawn. I don’t think he’ll ask for any money but, you know, if he does, I’ll pay it just to get rid of him. I just want this whole thing to be as quick and painless as possible.”
Natalie took a sip of her beer and felt almost . . . stunned? She didn’t really know. This woman was completely batshit crazy, she thought. Or going through something Natalie couldn’t even begin to understand.
Now the woman was crying. “It just feels like . . . fifteen years of my life down the fucking toilet, right? Maybe the best years.”
Natalie hadn’t really had any serious romantic relationships and tried to search her brain for some bit of advice that didn’t sound completely naive.
Lexi dropped her cigarette and clutched the railing, made a sound like, “Oof.” A pained sound.
At first Natalie thought maybe Lexi had just had way too much to drink and was getting ready to throw up.
“You okay?” Natalie asked.
“I think so,” Lexi said before another look of pain streaked across her face and her hands went to her stomach.
“Ow,” Lexi said. “Oh, fuck.”
Natalie put her cigarette in the ashtray and threw an arm around Lexi’s shoulders.
“Is there . . . anything I can do?” Natalie asked.
Lexi was nearly doubled over.
“Oh . . . shit,” Lexi hissed. “I need to get out of here.”
“Okay,” Natalie said. Somewhere in the back of her brain was the thought that she knew she shouldn’t have approached this woman. Shouldn’t have talked to her. Stepping back into that situation was exactly what she’d been trying to avoid. “Where, um, where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know.” Tears dripped off Lexi’s cheeks and Natalie could sense the groups of people turning their interest to the two of them.
“Do you need a hospital?”
“No!” Lexi almost howled.
“I can . . . I can take you back to my place.” She really didn’t want to do that, but she was at a loss.
“Okay. Okay,” Lexi panted. “Let’s just get the fuck out of here.”
Natalie kept her arm over Lexi’s shoulder. There was a gate at the end of the patio near the entrance to the bar and Natalie led her over to that.
“She okay?” a tall guy in one of the groups asked.
“I think she will be,” Natalie said.
Lexi whimpered and sobbed, trembled in Natalie’s hold.
“Do . . . do you have a car?” Lexi asked.
“No, but it’s . . . not too far from here.”
“Take mine. Please. I can’t walk. The keys . . . keys are in my pocket.”
They stopped long enough for Natalie to reach into Lexi’s pocket. It felt burning hot in there. She clutched the still cool keys in her fingertips and fished them out. A violent tremor ran through Lexi and she opened her mouth so she looked like that famous painting of a person screaming only she just made a weird growly sound and a rivulet of something dark ran from her bottom lip. Natalie could tell it wasn’t bile or spit because it darkened Lexi’s pale chin.
Shit.
That was blood.
This was not good.
There was no way she was taking Lexi back to her apartment. She felt like she’d just end up having to call 911 if she did.
“Where’s your car?” Natalie asked.
Lexi tried to straighten up long enough to gauge the three cars in the parking lot. She sort of flapped her arm at a red one. Natalie looked at the key and saw the Toyota logo indented into the plastic and thought maybe Lexi was right.
“I’m going to take you to a hospital, okay? I think you need help.”
“No,” Lexi gurgled.
Natalie got her to the car, opened the passenger side door and Lexi kind of fell in, immediately curling up into a tight fetal position. Natalie crossed around to the driver’s side and gave a quick look around, half hoping to see a cop or something.
Nothing.
What else did they have to do?
This was the only bar in town open this late. It seemed like a cop should have been parked in the lot until they closed.
Phil was leaning out the bar’s front door.
“Everything okay?” he called.
No, Natalie thought. Everything is not okay. This woman is not okay. Call somebody. Get her some help. What the fuck am I supposed to do?
Instead she said, “I think so. See you soon,” and ducked into the car.
In the passenger seat, Lexi had her knees pulled tightly to her chest, rocking and moaning.
Natalie reached a shaking hand into the skintight pocket of her shorts to extract her phone and . . . shit.
No phone.
Fuck.
She’d probably left it in her uniform pocket.
Okay. Think. She could go back to her apartment, run in and grab it. It wouldn’t take too long.
“Oh God!” Lexi wailed from the passenger seat.
Scratch that.
The bar was right off Route 68. She could get on that and go toward Xenia. She was pretty sure there was a hospital there. She would start to see signs for it right away.
Natalie pulled onto 68 and began driving, the nature reserve to her right.
Then, unexpectedly, she made a right hand turn at the end of the nature preserve and began winding around it.
This wasn’t where she wanted to go.
Her heart began hammering even faster with the thought of where she might be going.
Lexi had turned away from the side window and, still in the fetal position, the front of her shirt dark with whatever she’d been spewing, stared out the windshield.
“Where are we? Where are we going?” Lexi said.
Natalie didn’t say anything. Lexi wouldn’t want to hear it.
Neither one of them wanted to go where she was taking them.
THIRTY
Lena felt wrung out and exhausted and . . . content. Content for the first time in years, possibly ever. It reminded her of waking up the morning after she’d been with Lucas, a contentment that was shattered only hours later by the horrific car crash. It was still hard to hate Grant for that. Maybe this was what he’d been striving for even back then. This unity. This togetherness. This . . . strength. Because, as exhausted as she felt, she did feel strong. A hunger now gnawed at her insides but it was something she felt no immediate desire to satiate.
The crotch of her underwear and jeans
was soaked and she regretted not stripping off her clothes like the guys. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t disgusted by it. It was her. It was the result of that dam breaking. She’d get it tattooed to her if she could.
The guys had all pulled out of Lucas and now stared at him as though he were some kind of totem. She didn’t know. Maybe he was.
She stood up on shaky legs and said, “Let’s go out to the fire.”
Grant sat between Shawn and Edward, focused on the dying flame. It was impossible to describe what had happened during the Lucas encounter. Maybe because there wasn’t anything to describe. He had maintained a sharp focus on the act at hand and, while he had foreseen that vast emptiness returning to consume him as he raced closer to his orgasm, he instead felt an overall lightening of his spirit, as though Lucas’s insides were torching away the heaviness that had infected him.
Because they were all connected, plugged into Lucas while Lena absorbed the current radiating from them, he thought he could feel it coming from the others, as well. Like they all found some mutual rhythm the longer they thrust into the corpse. Together, that singular rhythm was trebled then quadrupled with Lena’s ecstatic moans.
He looked around at the faces of his friends in the meager firelight. Each contained an almost beatific expression.
Grant cleared his throat. “Is it over?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Edward said.
“I feel . . . different,” Shawn said.
Lena smiled broadly. Grant couldn’t even recall seeing her smile as a teenager. Oddly, it suited her.
“I feel great,” she said, the lifting of some weight nearly palpable in her voice.
“What do we do now?” Edward asked. Grant wasn’t sure if he meant, like, right now or if he meant the rest of their lives.
“We’re going to have to get rid of Lucas,” Grant said. “I think the easiest thing would be to burn the house down.”
They stood up on stiff legs, each of them kind of dazed, as though walking through the aftermath of some kind of disaster that, Grant thought, they kind of were. But it felt like a beautiful disaster. A perfect disaster.
The three men remained naked. Grant was beginning to feel this was his natural state.
Shawn was the first to approach the house, tentatively placing one foot in front of the other as though the ground might break away and send him plummeting into some kind of abyss. He slowly began ascending the rise of the lawn, Lena afterward, followed by Edward and, finally, Grant.
Part of Grant wanted to explore and rehash what had happened over the past several hours, but another part of him wanted to simply move forward. He couldn’t think about going back to the clinic and wasn’t really sure he would have to. Maybe he would have to start small. Go back to Pete’s and try to get a job. He wondered what the others were going to do. Pick up where the dreams had left off, maybe? He hoped, in some capacity, they would. He wondered if they would stay in touch. He felt like it would be essential. While he still didn’t know exactly what had happened to them it felt . . . special, somehow. And they’d gone through it together. That was important. They had shared the experience—a powerful experience—and that should make each of them feel less alone. If any of them had come searching for answers, he was sure they would be disappointed. There weren’t really answers but, instead, a kind of truth that had been revealed. Personally, he would trade that for black and white answers any day of the week. More than anything, it was the feeling that the truth, the experience, bloomed inside of him. He tried not to feel the full effects of it. He wanted to savor it, ration it, draw it out for as long as he possibly could.
As soon as they all made it through the sliding glass doors at the back of the house, there was a crash at the front door and they collectively turned to look in that direction.
“It’s not over,” Grant said.
It took Shawn a moment to process what he saw staggering into the kitchen, if he ever really could.
It was Lexi, hunched over and in pain. Standing behind her, inexplicably, was the maid from earlier.
Lexi had one arm clasped around her stomach, which seemed weird and distended, and she continued to stagger forward.
“Shawn!” she said. “I think I’m in trouble. I might be sick.” She placed a hand between her legs and held it out to him so he could see the blood. “I’m bleeding.”
Shawn’s stomach lurched but not with repulsion.
With hunger.
He took a couple steps toward her, intending to bring her into him, intending to comfort her, but Lena grabbed his arm.
“Shawn, wait,” she said.
“No,” he said. “This is for all of us. Aren’t you hungry?”
THIRTY-ONE
Natalie’s insides felt like they were on fire. She didn’t know what she expected. Somebody here to help the poor woman, she guessed. But that wasn’t right. If she were concerned for the woman’s safety, she would have taken her to the hospital, but she’d instead brought her here to this madhouse. She hadn’t been given a choice. Hadn’t she started for the hospital? Yes. She thought so. And then she’d been conscious of not going where she wanted to go and it was like some dark hand reached out to quiet her brain and now she was again bathed in the clarity of the situation and couldn’t even wrap her head around it. There was the creepy woman from earlier and the other three men, including Lexi’s husband, standing around naked and covered in blood. It felt like she’d interrupted some ritual or orgy. It didn’t make any sense to her and yet . . . she felt like if she stuck around for a minute longer, she would be sucked into it. She could feel it. Dark energy like some kind of vortex. She could see herself succumbing to it, if only to try and figure it out. But she couldn’t. She felt like she’d lived her life in the shadow of that dark energy. Waking up to her adoptive father standing over her, lash in hand, shouting “Out demon! Out!” Spending days locked in a church basement, the congregation overhead praying for her salvation. She could hear their stamping and murmuring through the ceiling. Her adoptive father, the one known to a large segment of the Long Island population as the Bringer of Light, never brought any light to her. Only darkness. And maybe that was why she had such a hard time convincing her legs to move. Because if one who professed to bring so much light into the world could bring so much darkness then maybe she could find the light she’d been searching for in all this darkness happening in front of her.
No, she thought. She’d already served her purpose for the time being. She’d brought them here. She’d gathered them here. Now her place was out in the world. Back out into the world where she belonged.
She didn’t need to see what was happening. She’d feel it. And she’d probably see it eventually. In horrifying visions. In snippets of dreams. In movies she’d felt like she’d seen before. In passages of books written decades earlier.
The one named Grant turned to look at her and she saw the hunger in his eyes and . . . something else too.
Recognition?
That was the scariest thing of all. That’s what it took to get her moving.
Out into the damp night.
Out past the car and the driveway.
Out into the woods, not even knowing if she’d ever return to her apartment.
Out into the world.
Out.
THIRTY- TWO
Edward watched the maid run back toward the front of the house. Part of him wanted to go with her. Or maybe just chase her down, pin her to the ground, and . . . the hunger was intense.
Shawn led Lexi over to the kitchen island.
So this was Shawn’s wife. He’d never had the chance to meet her. There was still so much about each other they didn’t know. That was what he’d been hoping they’d get the chance to do over the weekend but now . . . this. And this was so much better.
Shawn lifted Lexi onto the island.
“It hurts really bad,” she said.
Shawn placed a hand on her cheek. It was almost a loving gesture.
> “I know it does, baby. It’s about to get better,” Shawn said. “Just lie back.”
“I think I need a doctor.”
“This will be better. A doctor can’t help you right now.”
Lexi obediently lay back. Shawn slid her shirt up to just below her breasts. Edward thought he could see movement beneath the surface of the skin. He licked his lips.
Edward thought about that thing he and Shawn had encountered that one night.
What would have happened if he’d never let it out? Now he didn’t even know if that mattered.
What made a holy site holy? he wondered. It wasn’t any kind of mystical power. Places were just places. They didn’t contain any mystical powers. It was the history of the place that mattered. The history of the people who were there. They were the ones who people remembered.
Lexi wasn’t there.
She was just a vessel.
Shawn hooked his fingers into the waistband of her leggings and slid them over her hips and down her legs.
“What are you doing?” Lexi said.
She was sweaty, nearly unable to hold her eyes open, on the brink of unconsciousness.
“I’m doing what I have to do,” Shawn said.
Edward’s eyes fell to the flow of blood between her legs. It was heavy, obscuring the crack of her ass and running onto the granite of the island.
Edward moved closer to Shawn, the hunger knotting his stomach.
“You were the one who let it out. Do you want to go first?” Shawn said.
Edward’s mouth was too full of saliva to answer.
He kneeled before Lexi, moved his head between her legs, and drank deeply.
He heard Lexi’s faint voice. “This isn’t right. This isn’t right, Shawn.”
Edward continued lapping at Lexi, nothing sexual in his motives. He was just so hungry.
Once his hunger had been slaked, he stood, nearly lightheaded.
Lena eagerly took his spot.
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