Decatur (40 page)

“Welcome back. I’d knew you’d come,” J. J. said. Gar looked weak to him, but Marilyn had the amphora: there was time, it would happen as he had planned. “Take her, and your hunger will be released, and drinking the pure soul’s tears we shall both be renewed. You, baby girl, this is your turning, I kept the boy for your first taste,” J. J. rasped, raising his arms like he was conducting a symphony, his red rimmed eyes glowing as the afternoon darkened all around them and the rumblings of a coming thunder storm off the prairie could be heard through the tower window.

Gar looked at Marilyn then, her white skin, silky black hair, the way her pulse throbbed in her neck, memorizing her sweetness, loving even the way she was trying to back away and hold the soul’s tears from them. He was just so dizzy and exhausted from the climb, he thought, as his big paw ineffectually tried to keep her close.

Marilyn felt a horror come over her as she saw the kid with tousled hair and bloody ripped clothes hanging from the ceiling in the iron cage.
She was not going to ‘turn’ like this
. She backed away from Gar and concentrated on opening the door to free the kid.

The iron cage had been made for pain, and had held a lot of it, but when it had been forged it had been made of the very materials that had exploded when the universe began, so when it felt a connection with the woman calling it to open, it couldn’t help itself, it had been so long since anything other than pain had communicated. It swung open its door and let the man child fall out onto the floor made of milled tree planks.

Max opened the black mahogany door and froze. Gar was reaching for Marilyn who was bending over a student, his student, on the floor looking up in terror, clothes ripped, a medieval looking iron cage hanging open above him. Dressed in a camel suit with red and grey striped tie and pressed white shirt, J. J. stood with his back against the window, arms upraised, as Max’s mind flooded with images of Lawrence, his now dead student, another victim of
his research, his precious work, his fucking ego, and he couldn’t raise the gun, what was the point now.

Rowley was letting out a canine battle cry as he rushed past Max standing stock still in the open door, holding his head in one hand, nearly weeping.

“Go on, bite me, that’s what you want,” J. J. breathed to Rowley in a voice that sounded like scraping nails, and suddenly Rowley swerved. He had been heading for Gar but now biting the old man felt exactly like the right thing to do. Rowley leapt towards the window and took the outstretched hand in his mouth and bit down ferociously even as Gar was stumbling towards Marilyn. The electric jolt through his teeth as he bit into a flesh that tasted like a thousand burning deaths made him howl in surprise, and suddenly he knew what it like to be a rabid dog, because he was turning into one and he just wanted to rip things open and tear at them and destroy everything in his path, starting with Max.

Rowley saw Max through a rush of red, a red threatening looking man with a gun in his hand telling him to stop,
well he wasn’t stopping
.

Max saw Rowley’s head come down, saw the foam at the corner of his lips pulled back in a canine snarl and he lifted the gun that Gretch gave him and was about to fire when he heard Marilyn pleading with both of them to stop.

Marilyn saw her dog’s eyes, his beautiful brown eyes, go wild with shock as he bit down on J. J.’s hand and she knew what it meant, she saw suddenly her sweetheart boy becoming a vicious attack dog, a hound of hell. Using all her strength she pulled away from Gar even as he came at her and, not knowing what she was doing, moving entirely on instinct, she inhaled and then exhaled. All the love that she had felt for Rowley since finding him as an abandoned puppy in an alleyway came into her exhaling breath like a gift she had just discovered and it carried into the room and landed like a glistening net over him. Gar had her now, but Rowley felt the love that they had for each other descending on him like a gentle mist. He turned and saw his mistress reaching for him, knowing she would risk everything to save him from this new awful self, and he let her love into his heart and, whimpering, went down low and into himself. The boy on the ground needed a dog to hold onto then, and Rowley lay beside him, panting, and licking the kid’s hand. He would lie here and protect the boy for Marilyn.

Gretch reached down, undoing her brace: first the top, where it was lined with sheepskin so it wouldn’t cut into her leg where it encircled it like a steel hand, then down the side, latch by latch, lifting her nearly useless right leg out with both hands. It was numb and shooting sparks of pain from being walked on. She was down alone in the entrance hallway, the others making their way upstairs, leaving her behind. Fine. She would join them in her own way.

She meditated and hovered for a second and then lifted herself clean up and out of her body, leaving it and her leg brace on the velvet ottoman, and easily began to climb the grand staircase after Max and Rowley. She was aware now of all the unseen things in the house: the rodents in the basement, the bird’s nest on the turret, the way the floors were slowly settling at a slant making the dishes in the china cabinet roll centimeters to the left every so often. But she also knew that Kiki’s ghost was in the house, moving like a cold wind, aware of each of them and not liking it. Matter looked different now, it had streaks of light seeping through it, you could see the spirit world through the cracks of reality if you knew how to look.

Father Weston moved stealthily up the back staircase, hearing the sound of a door opening and closing at the top. They must have reached the turret room. Just as he was thinking this he felt an icy-cold breath on his face, and he stopped. It was the ghost, the woman who committed suicide, and she was standing right in front of him, a freezing image of fog like river smoke coming off the dark wood stairs. Her hair hung down in wet waves. “I have been condemned, help me,” she wailed.

Father Weston knew he should be scared, but the Monsignor’s ghost had saved him in the funeral parlor and he knew this one was just trapped in the half world because of her pain. But he had no remedies for this. “I can’t help you, I’m sorry” Father Weston said. The truth slipped out before he could start with the customary lies, the prescriptive Hail Mary’s and the like.

“But you’re a priest, you must help me,” the ghost wailed.

“I’ve lost my faith, I’m sorry, you’ll have to get someone who…” Father Weston trailed off unsure of who the ghost could turn to.

“Help me! Pray for me,” the ghost wailed again, weeping now, a truly pitiful sight.

Why had he become a priest? If not to give comfort, and yet how
?
The tools seemed so useless
. He began saying the Our Father out of pure hopelessness but the ghost stood there and listened. “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil
.”

It was like he heard the words for the first time. They no longer felt hollow. Things broken could be repaired. Then he thought of Father Troy and bowed his head again. Not everything. Some things were past repair. But still, imperfect and marred as life was, it still had hope; there was still hope of redemption, if not for everyone, for some. The Church might be a flawed and unworthy vessel for this hope but it didn’t mean that it wasn’t worth working for. But he had to forgive the flaw in the Divine, the beast in the angel, the dark in the light, or there was no getting over it, just as he had to forgive his own clumsy thick-headed stumbling on the path.

The ghost rose from where she knelt and touched him lightly on the shoulder.

“You may pass,” she said and stepped aside, the freezing air dissipating. He would take his hope to the tower room,
God help them
.

Gar saw Marilyn’s essence come out of her, she was so rich with it that she could spread it around the room, onto her dog, change the air, it was wonderful! It would transform him and he had to have it.

Gretch came into the room then in her spirit self and J.J. found himself surprised. There was a white Guardian all light and silver in front of him, and she was battling his will.
The lux was putting up a fight. Well, good, he liked fights. Come on, you old bitch.

Max felt a rush of relief come over him suddenly and he remembered the gun in his hand, and he aimed it at Gar and he pulled the trigger, feeling its legendary power once again.

Gretch could see the dark hunger of the demon coming at them and she pushed her own light back out against it.

Gar didn’t see it coming. The shot came tearing across the room and slammed into his shoulder, splintering his collar bone; he could feel the bone chips erupting as blood spurted up
. Jesus, nothing ever hurt like that
. This isn’t the way he wanted it to happen at all; he thought about pulling his own gun and shooting back at Max but there was no time now. He was close to dying himself, so, giving a sad little grin to Marilyn, he said “I wanted it different.”

Gar grabbed her by the shoulders, pulling her back into him, but now she was struggling, scratching, kicking. Max clutched the black humped handle of the revolver, his flesh throbbing, and fired again