Decatur (41 page)

“Your hunt is nearly complete,” J. J.’s voice was in Gar’s ears and sounded like the tide raking over stones. “Take her and be renewed.”

Revulsion for the creature washed over Gar suddenly. It ripped into his inner emptiness like another layer opening up and deepening. Because of him, Gar was turning more into the monster he hated and he couldn’t help himself. Gar seized Marilyn by the throat. He was damned, and it was time and she would become one of them.

Gar’s warm fingers closed over Marilyn’s throat muscles and she gagged. She thought of Rowley and the diamond marking on his coat. She had saved him. She thought of Max and his student, it would be okay. She really liked Max, there might have been something there another time. She thought of the Surrey, and her apartment and knew they were gone forever from her. Father Weston: he too would be leaving. And Gretch, well, it was all too late now. She loved them all and she would hold onto that, no matter what.

Gar leaned down; fastening his famished mouth on Marilyn’s, he rolled his tongue and felt for it as he moved over her, feeling like he was dying and being reborn. “I love you more than you know and want to share this forever. In order to live, you must join the hunt.” he said as the first thread pulled and he swallowed it whole, his being lighting up like a star exploding.

The sound of Marilyn’s soft moaning tightened Max’s forefinger around the trigger of the gun. His heart nearly ripped out of his chest as he saw Gar bending over Marilyn. Despite the danger of hitting Marilyn but knowing he had no choice, he fired again, feeling all his love for her even as Gar was trying to consume the very thing that made her who she was.

Gretch’s spirit self was holding J. J. at bay as he tried to move across the room, a powerful positive and negative charge kept them both on opposite ends. Her body down in the entrance way was starting to want to pull her back into it, it was supremely difficult to maintain the concentration needed, and she knew J. J. was working on having her reconnect with her damaged flesh.

J.J. willed Gar to devour Marilyn. It was disgusting, these people were using their love of one another to resist him. The white Guardian was keeping their thoughts on each other.

Marilyn felt the shimmering net that had been her invisible chain mail since the beginning being slowly lifted out of her body as Max fired again; this one was deadly accurate and it plowed into Gar’s back as he bellowed like a bull. Marilyn felt herself in Gar’s mouth, felt him in her body, felt her own soul wrapping around them, knowing that she had only moments before it was gone and she was an empty vessel.
A vessel waiting to be filled.
The amphora was still in her hand, she could feel J. J. trying to will her
to let it go, give it up, join the hunt, turn.

Gar shuddered. “This isn’t what I wanted, my lady,” he whispered into Marilyn’s hair. And Marilyn felt the truth of it, like the bullets in him were in her too.
They had loved one another, love one another
. The hole in his back was oozing blood, dripping down over them and Gar felt the bullet where it had lodged somewhere in his right lung, the thing was starting a ragged whistle.

The rumble of the late afternoon storm was getting louder so that no-one noticed when the closet door opened again and Father Frank Weston charged into the room, behind him a freezing breeze. “Let her go!” he shouted at Gar feeling the ghost of Kiki behind him. Gretch saw the ghost of Kiki rush at J. J. as she felt her own body calling her. Without warning Gretch lost the thread of her concentration and fell back into herself two floors down with a thud.

Gar gently let Marilyn go; it was her time to feel the emptiness, feel the choice, and come into the hunt.

Marilyn slid onto the floor out of Gar’s embrace and saw J. J.’s awful pleasure at the ruin of them, the loss of their souls that had been meant for each other so long ago. He was inhaling the shreds of their lost love and savoring every corrupted bit. She was scoured clean by his awful look and in her emptiness she felt something else rising as the fossil soul memory of Isabella suddenly pulsed bloody and alive. This demon had cost her so much. She felt a fury erupt where her heart once was.

J. J. felt the power coming off Marilyn and rejoiced, she was furiously turning and it stoked everything awful inside of him. He gritted his teeth in pleasure, his toes with their long yellowed nails curling in the point of this boots.
It felt so good. Baby, get angrier, it will only hasten the turn, and my renewal. Think- you could have loved him, Gherio and you forever, your children would have been golden lovelies, but I took it all from you to make it mine.

Marilyn felt a telescoping hole open up in her solar plexus, in the middle of her forehead, in the whorl at the top of her head and she held it open, like the Portal it was. She was an Instrument, a channeler of the life force and now without her individual soul in the way, it came howling into her, into the room, into Decatur, Illinois.

J.J. felt the enormous rush as the unknowable made itself known in the tower and he doubled over for a second and then threw himself open.
Come on, you will know me
.

The words
I will
came like a breath into the room and Marilyn held herself open wider, all her nerve endings, the light in her spine, every pore, allowing the life force to keep coming, scouring through her like a comet.

Max was in the desert, on the moon; the room was flying apart and coming back together. The dog and boy on the floor were huddled together like the storm had moved inside. Father Weston was pressed flat against the wall.

The air pressure in the room dropped and the light turned a sickish green and everything went still as the window behind J. J. exploded.

Gar felt like he was in molasses, he couldn’t form the words in his mind as he watched the window fly apart, he ducked instinctively.

The life force kept on cascading out of the Instrument, not some thread but an enormous throbbing presence pulsating through her as Marilyn stood like a medium to the galaxies. Normally a smashed window was a lovely thing to J. J. but not now, it was too much and he wanted things to stop, and be still, everything, not caring anymore if the Instrument turned. He held out his hands trying to push it back and felt the skin peeling away as a pain so intense he wouldn’t have believed in existed caught fire in the nerves of his all too mortal flesh. “Stop it,” he screamed to Marilyn but the fear choked his voice so the sound was guttural and unintelligible. Then the unknowable wrapped itself around J. J. and knew him.

The Instrument kept holding the Portal open as his skin ripped off, his camel suit shredding, pieces of his face lifting off like it had been sliced away as the life force came howling through J. J. and rushed out the smashed tower window back up into the Infinity. Marilyn was as pitiless as the stone angels at the cemetery.

J. J. fell back, hating his ripped flesh as the glass showered onto the lawn below. He centered his mind, he would transform; he still had power. He went small and dark, winged and hungry, and went flying back, turned from man into locust to join the pestilence he had laid in the fields.

Gar lowered his head feeling for his renewal now that his master was gone. His strength was beginning to return. He would show Marilyn how to begin the hunt. Together they would be unstoppable. Consuming Father W seemed like it would enhance him immeasurably. He stood up, bloodied, shot but still standing, and swung an arm out to grab Weston.

And just as suddenly as it happened; the openings closed in Marilyn and she was back in her body fighting the emptiness from the ripping out of her soul. Her hand curled around the ancient amphora. Gar was going to take Father W’s soul. She couldn’t let that happen, she knew what it would do to him. She would lead Gar away from his prey and have that honor at least, since she had nothing else. Gar
would pursue her like he always had. It was encoded in them. It was all she needed now.
The storm was beginning, the trees scraping against the windows.
It felt just like it should. Her legs were an animal’s now, the ember of her soul burning bright as the tears washed through her.

Gar had Father W and was pulling him close when he saw Marilyn opening the closet door with the pure amphora still in her hand. What was she doing, she was escaping,
without him
.

Marilyn slipped into the linen closet with amphora in her hand again, just as she had when she was nine.

Max saw Marilyn rise with the soul’s tears still in her hand; he would give her cover to escape, maybe Gar hadn’t taken her after all. He began to fire at him. Gar screamed as he went through the closet door and began running down the back stairs after Marilyn. He didn’t feel renewed, his knees were shaking and legs rubbery. Damn it, he had waited too long, now he had to have everything.

Marilyn was intent, taking the steps three at a time, the amphora in her hand quivering slightly, the cork vibrating.

She was down through the kitchen and the splintered back doors and out into the yard, with the thundery clouds massed overhead, the rain just beginning to fall, the long scarves that had decorated the tents sailing around in the storm like little hazard flags. There it was, directly in front of her.

The big back yard was in front of Gar, and just beyond his grasp Marilyn was running towards the big pond.

Marilyn sailed out over the stone edges, smelling the ozone mixed with moist spring air, the burning crops and the processed soybeans, and the cork lifted straight up and she tipped the little bottle back, remembering all the stories she had told herself as a child. The liquid trickled out wet into wet, releasing all its scouring sadness as she dove into the black pond.
This time she wouldn’t fail. This time she would finish it.

Gar jumped feet first and dropped like a stone, the blood from the shots spurting from his shoulder and back as he fell.

The storm clouds towered up above them, the rain spattering the pond’s top but they were in their private sea below. The koi pond welcomed them and felt the strange fluid moving though it, changing and charging it.

Marilyn moved like a mermaid, swimming to Gar who was momentarily stunned. Their eyes locked on one another and for a millisecond it was like it always was and should have been. She smiled, her black hair moving around her like a nimbus, beautiful in the water. He reached out to her then, ignoring the red starting to stain around himself. She looked so tender, holding onto the ancient vial of soul’s tears.
They were meant to be together always
. Marilyn wrapped her legs around his torso and kissed him. He felt love in that moment, she was loving him and it was miraculous. It was just getting so hard to hold his breath with the one lung full of blood. He felt light-headed
. If he could just have a sip of soul’s tears.
He smiled at her, thinking she might be reading his mind because she held the vial up, just out of his reach. His legs kicked to keep his body moving but his muscles seemed rubbery and flaccid. He felt like he was beginning to sink
. Give me the tears
, he said and the bubbles rushed up to the surface as the cold pond poured in. Then she pulled back, stroking his hair, and bent again so close to him, rolling her tongue, like she had been born to it. Marilyn took herself back out of him with one long sip. He felt all the light go, the opening rawer than it had ever been, the silvery shimmery connection to the Divine and the eternal gone. It was worse than when he had first lost it so many years ago. She dropped the amphora then and he saw it sink as she kicked her shimmering self away, and he felt the shaming uselessness of continuing. She had finished it. Suddenly oxygen seemed beside the point. He watched Marilyn swim up and away as the red clouded all around him. He knew it was over when he felt grateful for that last kiss, as he sank below to where the amphora would be in the stone pond bed; taking in big drinks of the water she left him so kindly behind.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Road Houses

The Brown Jug’s hash browns were magical, Marilyn decided, taking a long sip of her rum and coke between crunchy soft forkfuls, the potatoes perfect with the charred steak. Max and Father Weston were enjoying their own steaks and onion rings as much as she was, she noted in satisfaction. Of course they couldn’t quite feel things the same way she did since her swim in the pond at Charlesworth Place two weeks ago. It didn’t matter: she loved them each for his own special being, and that was good enough for now.

Max looked at the glowing woman beside him. She had never been more beautiful than she was with her shoulders sun-kissed in a raw silk tangerine halter and wide-legged white linen pants. The roadhouse regulars were nudging each other and whispering, trying to figure out who she was. Max had drawn all over the back side of one of the paper placemats: there was Gretch’s sphere, with the rings of power and he was pointing to it in full professorial mode.

“So, as far as I understand it, first you inhale souls, then you can cast yourself into others when you gain more power, and the last step is to be released from the body completely and become pure dark spirit, or the Infernity. We stopped J. J. from achieving…”

“Max, why don’t we just enjoy dinner together? We aren’t going to have this chance again anytime soon,” Marilyn said softly with an amused smile. “It’s over, let’s pay attention to now. How is Agent Tooley doing, Father W?”

Father W launched into a story then about visiting their FBI friend, who was sitting up in bed with crossword puzzles all around him, while he chewed on his ice and fought back the memories of making the rounds at St. Mary’s without Father Troy.
Life was in transition, but still life.

When their plates had been cleared Max pulled out a map of Chicago and laid it on the table.

“So you’re all packed?” he said, “Gretch will be expecting us no later than six p.m. tomorrow so we should get an early start, especially since we’ll have pee stops for Rowley.”

“Rowley loves a car trip,” Marilyn said, unwrapping a mint.

“Think of me, I’ll be packing for Baton Rouge. I haven’t decided, of course, but when a bishop calls, a bishop calls. Food’s good, I hear. ” Father Weston winked and waved for another bourbon.
Hell, he was going to get smashed. He deserved it: battling evil wasn’t easy.

The Brown Jug was packed; school was letting out, it was a Friday night, the community was breathing a sigh of relief, the violence and crop fires of a few weeks ago already beginning to fade just a bit. The waitresses brought out relish trays and pork chops, ice cream sundaes, and of course the bartender was constantly hopping. The juke box was playing some good old soul from the sixties and the whole place was jiving to its ordinary beat. But Max, Marilyn and Father W’s table was especially full of laughter and grace. Anyone could see it was a very special night among close friends.

The sixteen-year-old prostitute, Gracie, was used to being pushed around. She had been forced into almost anything, so when the old creep pushed her head down over his open fly in his car, she took one long look into the cozy Brown Jug and wished she was there before he slapped the back of her head down.

Marilyn sniffed the air. “I’m gonna get some smokes before dessert,” she said and smoothly got up, heading for the cigarette machine in the vestibule.

She walked into the vestibule, and put in the change, pulling on the silver knobs, and a pack of Marlboros tumbled out. Still sniffing the air, she opened the outer door and drifted across the parking lot to the battered sedan.

It all happened so fast, the bastard never saw it coming. The door was yanked open, and the girl pushed off him. A woman that looked like she was somebody smiled brilliantly. She rolled her tongue then and the thing that was most damaged inside of him pulled forward wriggling. She was still smiling as she pulled on it and then let it go, with a catch and release, so that it reminded him that he was human in a way he hadn’t felt for a very long time, ripping something open as he fell back through the seat cushions and feeling his heart, even through all his own damage.

Marilyn looked at the little girl staring at her from the passenger seat. “This one’s on me,” she exhaled, and something glistening came out of her mouth for a second and wrapped the girl in a feeling of something she would have called love if only she knew that word, and then as gently as the woman shut the car door, it was gone.

Marilyn stood for a moment in the empty parking lot, smoking, looking at the moon and then, letting the cigarette drop into the black asphalt; she turned and went back into the road house.

THE END.