Scowler (30 page)

Time to. Move. He touched the. Fire to the tree. It. Caught immediately. This would show. Him. The boy. Who’d fought him. Somehow won. Though there had been. Another one. Hadn’t there? Hadn’t he. Seen? A little? Beast? Chewing at? His Achilles tendon? As he had. Once. Cut a man’s. In prison? He wasn’t sure. Nothing was. Certain. Just. Smoke. And look—so. Much. Fire, so. Quickly. This. Would show. Them. What. Kind of. Man. He.

T
he secret key ring of Marvin Burke had never been found. Not during the trial, not after he had been sent to Pennington. So Ry did not make a big thing of it: He turned the bedroom doorknob and it opened easily. The one called Jo Beth and the one called Sarah both shrunk their shoulders and whipped their heads in unison.

They were trying to leave out the window. A sensible idea, given that the porch was right below; if they weren’t too clumsy about it, they could escape without anything worse than a stubbed toe or a jammed finger. The problem was that Ry had nailed shut the troublesome window on Sunday afternoon. The room was a coffin.

Ry entered feeling like an owner. This bed, these walls, that window, this house, the whole farm—it was all at his mercy, just like Scowler said. He strode forward with the cleaver extended in one hand, Scowler in the other, and caught a glimpse of himself in the dresser mirror. He was coated with so much gore that it looked as if he had been skinned. He turned away from this promising vision and placed Scowler upon the bed, even taking a moment to situate him on a pillow so he could watch. Scowler whimpered and began burrowing. As surely as Sniggety could sniff out roadkill, Scowler could smell the old blood on the flip side of the mattress.

The one called Sarah backed herself into the corner nearest the window. The one called Jo Beth tore her eyes from the creature on the bed and moved an arm’s length from the pane so that her body stood between her two children. She held up a hand as if believing that the cleaver wouldn’t
cut through it like butter.
Tk-hraw! Tk-tk!
Ry advanced and thought how wonderful it was that their final confrontation would take place here, in this room, the secret dark heart of the farm. The females would be split open and who knew if sawdust or something else would fall out.

“Stop,” Jo Beth said. “You stop right there.”

Ry did stop. Her voice had changed since he’d last heard it. It puzzled him. The tone was not the delicate china arrangement he recalled from the crater. Nor was it the screeching falcon from when she had slapped him. He searched his memory, an act now as effortless as paging through a phone book, and traced the tone of voice back to nine years ago in this very spot.

Things that emerged stronger from suffering were to be mistrusted.

“Now you’re coming after me.” Her voice was as flat and simple as a plate. “I understand that. I hate what I did to you. You should know that. I hurt you—you think I don’t know that? When the teachers stopped believing in you and the therapists stopped believing in you, I stopped believing in you too. That’s all there is to it. All right? Now put that thing down.”

On the bed, Scowler ceased his hunt for blood.

Jo Beth’s lips curled up against her teeth. She looked ready to bite. This right here, her normal face, Ry realized with fright, was the woman’s monster form. It had been brazenly displayed right in front of his eyes all these years.

“I kept you here when you should have been out there, moving on, doing I’m not even sure what. College?” She shook her head once, and the sweaty mat of her hair flung
and returned like houseflies caught on flypaper. “That’s my fault and I know it. But it’s your fault, too. You understand? If enough time passes, the world ruins everybody.”

Scowler broke his silence with a lowing. His cornmeal guts began to rattle.

Sarah appeared to hear it. Her nose crinkled and she flapped her hands as if they were covered with wasps. Ry took a step back, the cleaver growing heavy in his fist. No one but him, the special boy, the one true fighter, was supposed to be able to hear Scowler. But that wasn’t what Sarah was detecting.

“Smoke.” She was sniffing the air. “Mom, smoke.”

Jo Beth’s hand veered toward the girl, but her eye line did not shift.

“You need to lower that,” she said to her son. “You know who you’re acting like?”

Scowler’s lowing intensified. Ry remembered a snippet of something a therapist had once suggested, a ridiculous assertion, that Scowler, more or less, was Marvin. If that were true, who killed whom downstairs? And if Ry was becoming Scowler, didn’t that mean … Ry pressed a hand to his forehead. A strip of crusted dress fabric fell away. The wound beneath had scabbed, though when he touched it the scab slid away on mucus.

“It’s outside,” Sarah said.

Ry gazed out the window, and yes, there was smoke, mushrooming upward along with the soft whooshing and crackling munch of fire. He contemplated whether all of them should take this outside and sift through their complaints while at a safer distance, but Scowler brayed, digging into Ry’s mind with a single desire: Blood. Ry’s vision paled with the overlay
of Scowler’s blindness, and his teeth began to divide, multiply, and sharpen.

“Ry, you look at me. You listen to me. I had Sarah to protect. I had me to protect too. Just because you’re about twenty years younger than me, that means I don’t matter? I’m all alone out here. In the middle of all this worthless dirt. I’m practically old. And what have I done, what do I have to my name? And still,
still
, I know that I must matter to someone. Doesn’t that have to be true? Isn’t it possible it’s you? I needed you here, for me, for
me
, and if you had to be hurt some of the time, well, so did I. We took turns, Ry. Now put that
down
.”

“Oh, no!” Sarah pointed at the floor. Wisps of black smoke were eking through the warped boards, and she danced to avoid stepping on the slithering plumes. It looked like fun and Ry felt a brotherly compulsion to play along. His feet—his feet of flesh, not steel—were leaden, but they began to run through the motions, up, down, up, down.

Scowler shrieked his displeasure at this juvenile behavior and Ry clutched at his skull, the cleaver nearly performing a self-scalping. He felt the beast tightening the marionette strings of his arteries and veins. His skeleton was manipulated and the cleaver began to rise. Ry fought it; his whine became a cry. Sharpened seashell teeth began to emerge from his gums and he bit down on his lips to delay their arrival. The pressure built. His lips began to peel apart and quickly, bloodily, in the seconds before Scowler’s jaws took over, he mouthed Sarah’s word:
No. No. No
. Its repetition made it come easy, as easy as
tk-tk-tk
, as easy as an Indian chant, as easy as recited facts about meteors that would never, ever fall. Blood poured from his right nostril before he could finish. He licked it from
his upper lip, feeling against his tongue a single remnant of a phony mustache.

“Fire! Fire!” Sarah’s exclamations came rehearsed from school safety lessons. “The stairs! The hall! Fire!”

“That doll on the bed.” Jo Beth’s voice was strained. “That stupid doll.”

Ry sobbed in pain. The soft marrow of his bones was being threaded by serrated steel. He doubled over—he was shorter now, much shorter—and watched his nosebleed pour into black smoke until the drainage ceased because he no longer had a nose, while his head—top-heavy, conical—swirled with noises every bit as compelling as Jo Beth’s.
Tk-ch-hwr’ch-tk-tk!

“You think I kept those dolls for you.” Her every word dizzied the smoke. “You’re so wrong it makes me sick. I kept them for me. I kept them to cover my ass, because I was worried I’d fail my kids as bad as I failed this shit-hole farm. I kept them as a way out. For me, Ry. Not for you.”

The fire in the hallway ate some floor, rolling their way. The heat doubled.

Smoke could not hide Jo Beth’s heartbroken expression. “It was that goddamned woman, Linda. That woman who barely knew us. She was a better mother than me; she’s the one who convinced you that you were special and smart and had a future and could do anything you wanted. And I hated her for it because you believed every word.”

Was it true? That Ry had ever had such uplifting thoughts?

Even more incredible, was it possible such things were true?

Jo Beth nodded. “That woman was right.”

Scowler’s shriek shattered the mirror. Ry recoiled and spotted the tiny troll pulling himself across the bed the fastest
way possible—by his two withered arms, his razor leg halving the mattress behind him. The carnivore mouth widened, nearly ate its own head, but its hysterical sounds were swallowed by the hurricane howl of the blaze. All at once the fire was everywhere, twisting like serpents over the floor, reaching like vines across the ceiling.

Sarah screamed, threw herself at the window, and tore at the sill.

Jo Beth grabbed her son’s collar. Here was the physical contact Scowler had wanted. The parts inside of Ry that pined for violence, the bones and the teeth, drew together like magnets and the cleaver hopped to striking position. Ry clenched his muscles but some of them had turned into traitorous, jellified cancers. The blade teetered in the balance.

“I’ve kept you in a little box, just like them, so you couldn’t escape.” Jo Beth’s forearms extended from the smoke, took his face, not caring that his teeth were sharp, his skin leathered and frayed. “But I’m letting you go. Right now. This is your chance, baby. Make me proud.”

The wall cracked in two. Patterns of wallpaper became instantly mismatched. The lamp swinging from the ceiling tore free, its electrical cord ripping from the plaster across the ceiling, down the wall, an endless umbilical. The floor opened up with an elephantine sigh, and decorative lamps, a jewelry box, and a half-dozen dusty bottles of perfume skidded across the surface of the dresser as it pitched. Red embers billowed up from the first floor and attached themselves to everything like hellfire insects. The dresser dipped like a seesaw, then paused on its fulcrum. Floorboards caught beneath the weight snapped and fired across the room like spears. Sarah took one in the back, Ry the shoulder.

He straightened, for a moment a man and nothing more or less. Death, violence; survival, violence. These equations were jumbled, had been in his classroom history books, would be till humankind’s dusk. The meteorite had changed nothing about these problematic rituals; its silt had merely acted as the sugar that made ordinary poisons go down easier. The decisions, all of them, remained his, and Jo Beth was right. It was now or never.

Long ago in this room he had cut his mother free.

At last she was returning the favor.

The cleaver flung backward, slicing the smoke into two continents. Ry hurled himself forward, the blade taking only a few hairs off Jo Beth’s head and a single button from the sleeve of Sarah’s jacket. The edge of the cleaver struck the very center of the window. Glass shattered, hot wind sucked inward. Ry reeled and Scowler leapt onto his back, sinking one thousand teeth into his spine. Ry went blind and clung to the frame, gobbling down noxious fumes, anything to suffocate the parasite. The initial implosion of smoke roared over his head, and he felt an inrush of cooler temperatures and glimpsed only stray tongues of fire below. The north side of the house had a favorable wind. They could still make it.

More of the floor caved in with the sound of steers making a final mad dash through the corn.

Scowler tunneled inside of him. Bones were chipped, organs pierced, fluids boiled. Ry kept focus by taking advantage of Scowler’s finest classroom talent: Math. He counted the curved segments of glass still clinging to the frame and recalculated them into fractions. One-third of the surface area of the window still survived, sharp enough to bleed all three of them. He raised the cleaver to do some simple
subtraction but Scowler took hold of his rib cage and rattled it. Ry gasped and the cleaver toppled from his hand, cartwheeling over the sill. For a single moment he knew absolute loss. Then he saw a faraway flash, the cleaver stabbing into the lawn below, and realized that all he needed to do was follow suit.

Ry backpedaled for a running start. His final step landed upon air where there was no more floor, and he tipped backward to meet the firestorm, the meteorite, what was left of his father. But Jo Beth’s fingers snatched his wrist and pulled with canny timing, and he found himself balanced upon the same heel that nine years ago was broken and minutes ago had been savage metal but now was a man’s strong and healthy foot, and he turned on it and drove from it, and did so without a word or look of thanks, because such manners were unnecessary between mother and child. Lost deep inside, Scowler continued to scarf his host’s intestines, but it was a loser’s feast. Ry had the advantage of glorious momentum, God’s gift to the young. He wondered if he always had.

His form was spectacular. Not a single inch of his tall-for-his-age body touched the frame. What glass remained was blown outward by his elbows and shoulders and hips, and the storm window never had a chance. Ry went head over feet, end over end, and before landing believed that he glimpsed his mother, way up above, already helping Sarah through the opening.

Why was the air so much cooler on his trip back down to earth?

Why was the weight of the world finally gone?

L
ife drained from him as steadily as if from a spigot. The last memory he carried, the one of impact, was no different from the ash raining all around him, picked up in the breeze and stolen. The only impressions left were sensory. How the breaking of bones sounded like the rending of steel, how the scuffing of skin felt like the tearing of cloth.

But he was not scared—angels were smiling at him. Their eyes were crazed and imploring. One of the angels was called Sarah and her words were too quick and too many to follow. The other was called Jo Beth, and she slapped his cheeks and through a manic smile moved her lips in the same pattern until Ry picked out the syllables:
Stay with me. Stay with me. Stay with me
.