by Michael Rowe
“I would die for love. I would kill for it.”
“I know you would.” The voice is soft and low. Smooth, unrushed.
The large, warm hand caresses his cheek with a lover’s knowing, insinuating playfulness. Strong fingers trace the underside of his jaw and chin, then trail off. He feels warm breath against his neck, then he hears a regretful sigh as the hand pulls away.
“Soon, Mikey.”
[8]
His eyes snapped open on darkness.
Mikey looked up at the ceiling of his bedroom. His temples throbbed, and it felt like there was a band of razor wire wound around his forehead. The staleness of the bedroom was stifling, the torpid heat pressing against his chest like a large, shaggy animal breathing damp foulness into his face. He looked at the digital clock on his night table. It was nine o’clock at night. Mikey realized that he had once again fallen asleep praying for love.
How fucking pathetic.
And here he was now, wide awake, sweaty, and with the beginnings of a blasting headache. Mikey looked toward his bedroom window. It was closed, which accounted for the ungodly heat. Switching on his night table lamp, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up, crossing the floor to the window. He fumbled with the bolt, pushing it upward till he heard the click of the latch, then pushed the window wide open.
A cool breeze fanned his face. Mikey looked out and saw that the grass of the back lawn was tinted golden-yellow. The shadows of the yard had receded, and he could see the edges of the trees bordering the farthest part of the lawn, the picnic table, lawn chairs, all with preternatural clarity in the shimmering amber phosphorescence. Still groggy from sleep, he wondered what he was seeing.
Then he looked up.
A swollen yellow moon, full and low, hung heavily in the dark-violet sky. It burned above Auburn like a headlight, the sullen, dying-fire light that pulsed from its dark yellow heart tingeing, rather than illuminating, what it touched. An ocean of empurpled black clouds churned majestically about the moon’s edges like a vast ash-coloured ocean.
Mikey stared at it in awe. “Holy shit,” he whispered. He backed away from the window, bumping his calves on the bedframe. Mikey reached behind him and switched off the light beside his bed, plunging the room into its former blackness, except now the umber light from the moon stole through the glass and crept across the floor. When the telephone rang, he actually jumped.
“Hey, it’s me, Wrox,” came the familiar raspy voice. “Dude, have you looked outside? Look at the moon. It’s awesome. If you haven’t seen it yet, look out your window.”
“I’m looking at it right now,” Mikey breathed. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s beautiful. It looks like it’s about two feet away from the earth. It’s a harvest moon.”
“It’s not a harvest moon,” Wroxy said. “Nobody harvests in August. The harvest moon is in September, the hunter’s moon is in October. The moon you’re looking at right now is called a sturgeon moon.”
“Whatever,” Mikey said. “It’s beautiful.”
“Deborean witches call the August moon the fruit moon, but generally Wiccans call it the sturgeon moon because it’s sturgeon season in many parts of the world. It’s generally thought of as a moon cycle during which witches give thanks. They don’t just give thanks to the Spirit, they give thanks to themselves and one another as well. It’s a magical night, you know. You should meditate. I’m going to light some candles after a while and visualize. You want to come over?”
Mikey was still staring out the window, enthralled. He felt that if he reached out right now, he could touch the moon’s waxy yellow face.
“Um, no thanks, Wrox. I’m going to go out for a little while. Maybe ride my bike, I’ve been cooped up all afternoon in the house. I fell asleep and woke up with a massive headache. I think some fresh air would be really good for me about now.”
“You don’t want to come over?” She sounded disappointed. “You want me to come with you?”
“No thanks, Wroxy. I really do think I need to be alone for a while. How about tomorrow?”
“Okay, suit yourself,” she said petulantly. “Have a good night. Call me tomorrow if you want. We should hang out. School starts in a week and a half, and we’re going to have to deal with those assholes soon enough. We should spend some time together before it happens.”
“I’ll call you, I promise. Night, honey.”
Mikey hung up the phone before Wroxy could even say goodnight. He was dimly aware of the fact that this had likely hurt her feelings, but he was less bothered by the possibility than he might have been at another time. His overriding need and sole driving purpose at that moment was to get out of the house and into the night, under that moon, away from the town and into the hills above Auburn where he could experience it in all of its glory.
Mikey stepped out into the hallway and glanced toward his parents’ bedroom. The door was closed, and no light shone beneath it. The hallway was similarly dark and silent. Neither of them was home, clearly. He went down the stairs. The house was exceedingly dark and quiet, the heavy air unmoving. From the living room he heard the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner by the fireplace,
It was Wednesday night, and he remembered his mother saying that she would be late coming home from church. As for his father, it was anyone’s guess where Larry Childress would be at this hour. Lately, he had been spending less and less time at home with his family. Mikey had noticed a growing tension between his parents, owing largely to his mother’s involvement with the Assembly, yet Mikey felt guilty about it. He supposed, as unpopular children often do, that it was somehow connected to him. He felt his parents’ disappointment and opprobrium with every one of his mother’s long, deep sighs, and with every wince from his father when Mikey burst out with something excitedly at the dinner table—usually something that had to do with a horror movie he wanted to see, or a new Anne Rice or Stephen King novel he had just read, or an actress he idolized.
“Boys don’t squeal like that, son,” Larry had told him once when Mikey had interrupted a conversation he and his mother had been having about an illness in the next-door neighbour’s family. Mikey had been thirteen, and he’d thought his parents’ conversation was over. His father had banged his fists on the table, and Mikey had flinched. “They speak calmly and steadily, and they think about what they’re about to say. And they don’t giggle.”
“Dad, I think about what I want to say,” Mikey had replied, chastened. “Sometimes it just comes out in a hurry.”
“You need to learn some control, Mikey. You can’t just go through life interrupting conversations at the dinner table with a lot of babble that you haven’t thought out.”
“Larry, please.” His mother’s voice had been pained. “Can we just have a nice dinner as a family for a change?”
Mikey had looked gratefully at his mother, but there was no warmth in her face, just tired irritation, and embarrassment at her son. It was also obvious that she blamed Mikey for provoking his father, not just his father for reprimanding him. Mikey looked down, shamefaced.
“Mikey, Brother Cowell and I were praying about you the other day,” Donna began. “We were asking the Lord to help you with your loneliness and your isolation from the other boys. Brother Cowell thinks that maybe if you played more sports or joined the church’s young men’s club, you might be able to find yourself.”
“Why were you talking about me with your pastor?” Mikey was confused. He had only seen Kelvin Cowell once or twice, and he doubted very much that the man even know who he was.
“He asked about you, Mikey,” his mother said proudly. “He says he takes an interest in you. Maybe you should come to church with me next Wednesday. You might like it. There are very nice kids there.”
“I don’t think so, Mom, but thanks for asking.”
“Well, you think about it, Mikey. Brother Cowell says it’s never too late to turn to the Lord. With your prob
lems,” she added pointedly. “And your questions.”
“I’m trying to teach the boy how to get on in the world, Donna,” his father said, raising his voice. “He can’t go on thinking it’s okay to giggle like a girl or interrupt conversations with a lot of bullshit about Hollywood or crap horror books. Sometimes I think we have a daughter, not a son. Pray about that next time you’re at that church of yours, but don’t drag him into that freak show. The kid has enough strikes against him already.” His father had made a disgusted sound, thrown his napkin on the table, stood up, and left the room. Donna had sighed and begun clearing the plates.
And then, like all other such encounters with his parents, Mikey had simply folded the memory of it into a cache of memories so similar that he wondered if some day he would cease to be able to tell them apart.
Mikey walked along the downstairs hallways, crossing the living room floor in the dark. He didn’t bother to switch the light on. His mother believed that leaving lights on was a waste of electricity, which was also why they didn’t have air-conditioning in the house, but not turning the lights on had nothing to do with obeying his mother. He simply preferred the darkness. In the dining room the moonlight surged through the windows like an orange tide. He walked through the dining room’s swinging doors into the kitchen. He opened the kitchen door that led to the backyard and stepped outside.
Mikey imagined he could feel the moon’s weight as he opened the garage door and pulled out his bicycle. He wanted the wind against his face. He climbed on and began to pedal as fast as he could away from the house, into the arms of the night.
[9]
There are monsters in small towns, but you have to look hard to find them, especially after dark. They hide with the sort of cunning that would be unnecessary in a large city where it is infinitely easier to blend in, where the sheer number of people who live side by side forms a sort of barrier, a camouflage of humanity among which the inhumane can burrow during daylight hours, rising at night to pursue their carious, savage hungers on dark, unlit streets and alleyways. In small towns, though, red mischief tends to hide behind closed doors—the horrors of incest, of wife battery, of emotional cannibalism and neglect, or the crushing of dreams by parents who thought they were doing the right thing when stamping the light out of their children with raised, shaming voices and stinging slaps.
Mikey had no sense of this as he pedalled his bike through the shadow-dappled streets of Auburn that smelled of late-summer roses, past the sensible, prim brick houses with the neatly tended lawns whose very probity was an insistent declaration of virtue. He pedalled past those houses, slowing down and pausing when he saw shadows moving against the soft lamplight behind drawn curtains, or when he heard the susurrus of muffled voices, or occasional drunken laugh, coming from behind a patio fence where respectable people might be enjoying a barbecue.
He pedalled on through the night, the yellow moon overhead like the all-seeing eye of God.
Mikey would have no way of knowing, for instance, that buried in the fields that lay half a mile directly behind Stash and Yalda Verbinski’s impeccably maintained split-level on Dagenais Street lay the bodies of three cats, a raccoon, and a dog that Dewey had killed over the past three years, or that this act of ultimate power over smaller and weaker creatures gave him a thrill unequal to any he had ever known. Or that inside the very presentable house, as Dewey went through the day-to-day motions of trying to be a dutiful son to his parents and somehow earn his father’s love and approval, a separate reality existed behind his eyes, running like a movie full of slaughter, a movie in which Dewey was the hero of a world on fire, with rivers of blood running at his feet. Or that sometimes he wondered if Johnny Treleaven would make the same helpless squealing sound the raccoon made when Dewey had plunged the knife into its belly and watched its insides tumble out like soggy red rope, or if a person sounded different when they died.
Mikey swept past the Verbinski house, pedalling a little faster, sensing danger as he always did when he was in close proximity to Dewey.
He turned left from Dagenais onto Welland Avenue, then pedalled out toward Main Street.
He similarly would have no way of knowing, for instance, that the Reverend Kelvin Cowell, whose rigorously plain house he had just passed on Welland, kept a stack of violent bondage pornography in a locked trunk in his basement. Or that although he had made his prison-to-Jesus conversion story the engine that drove his ministry, the fact that he’d been in jail for burglary, not murder, was an irony that never ceased to tickle him when he thought of the two female hitchhikers he had raped and stabbed to death in the back of his Ford truck in Saskatchewan and British Columbia in 1953 and 1957, respectively. He’d buried the first girl, a bouncy, fat redhead named Brenda, in a swampy muskeg beneath a copse of coniferous trees that he could still picture in his mind when he masturbated, thinking of her decayed face and the moss that now likely covered her unmarked grave and maybe even her skeleton; the second, a sad, jaundiced, wormy-looking girl named Melanie, who had given him similar thrills, lay beneath six feet of stony earth in the heart of a dark forest in the mountains outside of Invermere. Knowing that he would die with the sole knowledge of where the bodies had been buried made him feel like a god, and he had an artist’s pride in the fact that he had never been caught.
When he’d been arrested and incarcerated for his break-and-enter in Ontario in 1963, it had naturally not occurred to the police to connect him to the two unsolved murders on the other side of the country. Why would they? Kelvin Cowell had no previous record, nor had he ever been accused of, or charged with, any violent act. He’d served his sentence at the penitentiary in Kingston, patiently planning how he would “find Jesus” toward the middle of his incarceration, then spin it into a career once he was out. After all, a man needed a job and a purpose, and Cowell knew he wasn’t getting any younger. If any of his congregants caught him glancing wolfishly at their whey-faced daughters, their budding breasts concealed beneath smock-like modesty dresses, they would ascribe it to a man’s natural hunger, also a gift from God. They privately (and not so privately) wondered when the Lord would send their handsome, God-fearing pastor a helpmeet to aid him in his wondrous work. For even as Adam cleaved to Eve, they said a man must leave his mother and cleave to a wife.
If any of the Holy Stripers had seen the true shape of Cowell’s desires, or the pointy communion he dreamed of late at night when he touched himself, thinking of the two dead women who had given him so much pleasure, they might have doubted God’s love itself.
But Mikey wouldn’t know any of that as he pedalled past, and out onto the open dirt road that led out of Auburn. When he passed the abandoned graveyard at the very outer edge of town, he turned his bike toward the cliffs of the escarpment that framed the grinning yellow moon like great fingers of rock.
[10]
Mikey smelled the bonfire before he saw the shower of sparks exploding in the air above the meadow as he crested the brow of the hill. He squeezed the brakes. The bike stopped so abruptly that it almost threw him. He regained his balance, putting both feet on the road, then crouched on the side of the road overlooking the meadow. Though Mikey didn’t immediately realize what he was looking at, his heart still caught in his chest with some primordial knowledge. Then, when he saw the figures in black robes undulating slowly around the fire—Mikey counted eleven—he knew it consciously as well.
He was looking at the witches of Auburn, in the flesh.
Much later he would wonder how he had known so surely how to navigate the moonlit roads in that weird yellow twilight, but in that instant he knew only that he was actually seeing something that he’d only ever heard about in gossip, or dreamed about when the day-to-day reality of his life had grown too unbearable.
And he was suddenly very, very cold.
Mikey wrapped his arms around his torso, wishing he had worn a sweater or a jacket, only barely remembering that the night had been suffocatingly hot in his
room an hour earlier, and that there had only been a slight breeze when he’d stepped outside his house to get his bicycle from the garage. His t-shirt had been dampish and had dried slightly in the night air as he’d pedalled. Now it clung to his torso and back, chilling him. The temperature seemed to have dropped several degrees in the spot where he was standing, and he began to shiver. Acting on instinct, Mikey moved his body around the boulder toward the distant fire burning about fifty yards away from where he crouched. The instant he moved from his spot, the air warmed perceptibly. Then the spectral cold reached for him again, pulling him back into its chill grasp like a possessive suitor.
When he felt gelid fingers caress the skin of his neck and trace a line down the centre of his back, he barely stifled a scream.
Mikey whirled around, turning his head from side to side, but there was no one standing behind him. For a moment he thought he heard mocking male laughter carried on the breeze, but whatever the sound had actually been, it tattered away into the dark, and all he could hear was the wind high in the trees at his back and, now, the rising murmur of chanting voices coming from the black-robed figures in the meadow swaying rhythmically, hands joined, faces raised to the moon, and the shower of sparks that burst from the bonfire, shattering against the black night sky.
As his eyes became accustomed to the division between firelight, moonlight, and darkness, he saw a cluster of vans and cars at the outer perimeter of the bonfire.
The crowd parted as a twelfth figure, taller than the others and wearing a crimson robe and some sort of crown decorated with what looked like antlers or horns, walked toward the group at a stately, measured pace from beyond the edge of the firelight.
Mikey watched as the figure—he guessed it was a man, based on its height and the breadth of its shoulders—dragged something along on the end of a rope behind him. For one horrible moment, Mikey thought it might be a white dog, but then he saw that it was a goat. The animal seemed confused and frightened by the fire. It bleated occasionally but otherwise seemed trusting, as though it were the man’s pet. He led the goat into the centre of the crowd, next to the fire, as the others formed a semicircle.