Shine Your Light on Me

ALSO BY LEE THOMPSON

As I Embrace My Jagged Edges

Before Leonora Wakes

Iron Butterflies Rust

Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children

Down Here in the Dark

Immersion

When We Join Jesus in Hell

Within This Garden Weeping

The Dampness of Mourning

The Collected Songs of Sonnelion

Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy

A Beautiful Madness

Earthly Things

It’s Only Death

The Devil Gave Them Black Wings

With Fury in Hand

The Lesser People

After the Fog Clears

Massachusetts
•
Pennsylvania
•
Rhode Island

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover art by Mikio Murakami

Digital layout by K. Allen Wood

Digital Edition Copyright © 2016 by Shock Totem Publications, LLC

Established in 2009

www.shocktotem.com

Printed in the United States of America.

For Rae

CHAPTER ONE

The power had just gone out in LeDoux’s Bar & Grill, and the last thing anyone expected was a genuine miracle to illuminate the darkness. The air outside was in the mid-thirties and snow fell softly, and inside the bar, forty people’s lives took a turn toward the unexplainable.

Aiden, Jack LeDoux’s sixteen-year-old son, was sitting at the bar drinking a Coke with his girlfriend Emmy, his cousin Connor, and against his father’s wishes, Elroy O’Connell. Jack had been watching the O’Connell boy intensely, never worrying about hiding his rage at what Elroy and his brothers had done to him a few months prior. It had been humiliating and had crippled him, and moments before the power went out, as Aiden was walking to the men’s restroom, his father scowled at him and rolled his wheelchair into the kitchen and slammed the door behind him. Things would have gone differently for him if he had stayed in the bar and not closed himself off from the others like he had been doing more and more the past few months.

Aiden knew that his father was ashamed of what he’d done to call the O’Connells’ wrath down on him, and he thought their nailing his dad to the tree more than a bit excessive, but there were lines a man wasn’t supposed to cross.

As he approached the bathroom, he glanced over his shoulder at Connor and Emmy and Elroy, and thought that in another two years their lives would change upon graduation. And he realized that he loved them, and couldn’t understand why he felt this strange unease that he would soon part their company forever.

He told himself it was just the storm. He had one or two bad experiences with them in his short sixteen years. Then the lights flickered and he thought he heard his father throwing things around in the kitchen.

Most of the people in the bar were talking quietly. A few, drunk, were noisier, but they quieted down when the lights flickered again and the snow plastered the large window by the exit and made it impossible to see outside.

Aiden relieved himself quickly and was in the process of washing his hands when the power died. He dried his hands on his pants and groped for the door. He heard a few people laughing nervously and saw the flames from several lighters and the faces both lit and lost in shadow behind them. He didn’t know why it made something inside him seize up, but he paused there near the bathroom door and gave his eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom.

But then the lights came back on, at what seemed half power.

Aiden stumbled back to his bar stool disoriented.

Connor said, “Slam your drink and let’s get out of here before the storm gets any worse.”

He finished his own and looked at the clock above the bar.

It was seven-thirteen.

He slapped Aiden on the shoulder and smiled. His cousin had always been trouble, but in a good-natured way. Aiden slammed his drink, thinking that Connor was right; they needed to hit the road before the fresh snow made the street any slicker. It seemed as if thinking about it made his stomach hurt because all the sudden it was burning like there was a fire inside him. The voices in the room all seemed far away, and so did Connor’s laugh before he said to Emmy, “I told you.”

She said, “Real funny.”

Aiden said, “Something’s wrong with me.”

Elroy was looking at him from his wide, cherubic face, with both amusement and pity. His voice was muffled, but it was always muffled, as if he was afraid of speaking at normal volume: “Connor spiked your drink.”

His cousin said, “We need to loosen you up...” and he slapped his shoulder again, and Aiden wanted to tell him: Quit doing that, something’s wrong...

But he was embarrassed; any man in town, any boy on his way to becoming a man, all seemed like they could handle their liquor, yet when he’d tried it with Connor and Elroy on the water tower last summer he’d puked over the side, his head spinning, scared to death that he’d fall and plummet to his death.

And his head was spinning again, and it felt like everybody was looking at him, and he knew his dad would tan his hide if he came out and learned that he had anybody underage—especially his son—drinking in his bar. His old man didn’t toy with stuff like that, the fines were too high, and the cost of doing business wasn’t cheap to begin with.

Thinking about all of that only made his head ache more and his ears felt stuffed with cotton until he heard a distant roar like a jet taking off, and it grew louder and louder, and he pressed his palms over his ears but couldn’t drown the noise.

He sensed Emmy on one side of him, felt her gentle fingers, like his mother’s always were, on his elbow. She was good to him, good for him, and he wasn’t even gone yet, but he already missed her; thought that no matter when the time came for them to part ways, that they’d always be friends, the way they’d started when she’d been dating Connor.

On the other side of him, Connor or Elroy, said something, picking their cell phones off the bar and pointing them at him, and laughing again, and he knew it was Connor causing this strange, helpless feeling, and he wanted to say to him,
You know I don’t like that shit
, but he didn’t have the strength to knock the phone away and make him quit recording...

The pressure grew inside him and the room darkened further, and he cried out, “Oh, God, I’m going blind...” and his stomach continued to burn and he found it difficult to breathe, and he whimpered, sweating and shaking, afraid of the sound of his voice and the words on his tongue: “I’m dying...”

But nobody took him serious. He had been a theatrical boy at times, before his dad’s crucifixion, so the room watched him: his friends laughed and people in the bar murmured at the beginning of a spectacle none of them yet understood...

• • •

Jack watched the lights flicker in the kitchen. He’d owned this hell hole for almost twenty years, and he considered barring the front door and burning it to the ground with everybody inside it. Only problem was, his son and his girlfriend Emmy were in there. If he could replace them with Pine O’Connell and his father Mickey, it’d be a done deal. They’d all burn with him. Especially Aria and Mitch O’Connell.

He could picture himself in the kitchen doorway, in his wheelchair with the flames licking around his brawny shoulders, catching in his hair, as he watched them trample each other to escape. One of them would break the window and the cold gush of air would supply oxygen to the fire, and the snow coming in the broken window would hiss and steam, and the wind would scream horribly, like the harrowing voices of his victims.

He brushed the stubble on his chin with the back of his hand and looked down at his useless legs. Well, it wasn’t the legs that were useless, it was all those shattered bones in his ankles and insteps. It was a night just like this one when Pine O’Connell waited for him to close the bar and walk out to his car. The other brothers were there too. The oldest one, Mitch, who was in the process, if rumors could be trusted, of taking over his father’s business due to Mickey’s health issues; and the chubby one named Elroy, who didn’t lay a finger on him, just watched and cried out there in the dark woods as Pine, just a boy of eighteen, laid the side of Jack’s head open with an Estwing hammer, and then trussed him up to a century-old oak with a piece of dirty clothesline, insanely gleeful as he pounded the landscape spikes through Jack’s feet and into the base of the tree.

Mitch, the older brother, was out in the bar now with his stepmother Aria. Jack gritted his teeth every time he saw them, yet the nerve they had to come into his place of business after what they’d done to him, sometimes made him wonder if he’d deserved it.

But hell, his wife Janice had called them animals, and she knew why they’d crucified him, the weight of his sins as thick and undeniable as the blood that had run from the tips of his toes and fingers.

Aria O’Connell
, he thought.
Goddamn her. Goddamn me for falling into that endless chasm. Bitch knew what she was doing
... and the hell of it was he couldn’t understand what he’d ever done to her. She’d been coming on to him for weeks and when she kept touching his shoulder and his thigh, her hand inching up toward his crotch, this young beauty who was in her mid-thirties but looked no older than twenty-one, he knew the risk he was taking not only with his marriage, tossing it on those hot coals of desire where his corpse would slowly burn in the heated night, then only figuratively or emotionally; but there was Aria’s husband and his sons to contend with, and somehow, like the fool he knew he sometimes was, he brushed those concerns aside for the taste of her lips, her slim fingers curled around his shaft, the hot pant of her breath against his neck, her energetic grinding, and the way she made him feel wanted again.