The Messenger of Magnolia Street (26 page)

“One,” she says and pauses. She looks out at the frozen, pensive faces staring at her from the back pew.
They look like little lost children,
she thinks,
even Zadok.
“Two.” She drags the
two
out long and teasing, like they are simply playing hide-and-seek and she is It. Then Obie looks back at the eyes, at the pastor, and sits back on her heels, her palms resting on the tops of her thighs. “You just ain't getting up no matter what I say, are you?” She places her hand on the pastor's back and lets it rest there.

Obie doesn't see where Pastor Brown is. Doesn't see what his eyes are watching. Doesn't know just how many miles he's traveled now for Nehemiah. Or that he won't be back until this is over. Or maybe he won't be back at all. He's somewhere deep, deep into it. And he'll stay that way until the very end.

Obie gets up off her knees, looks again at the faces holding hands like kindergartners on a field trip. She wishes, really wishes, that she could make good her threat and say “three” strong and loud and walk right out that door and light up. It's a curious thing to her why she's, well, alive, and everybody else seems to be if not dead, darn near like it. “Sleepwalkers,” she says under her breath. And if Pastor Brown was in a place to respond, he'd add, “That's how all this trouble got started.”

Below, Nehemiah is walking through the underworld of rock and cave to what he sees below. His eyes are so focused on the light below that he pays no attention to the howling shape that hovers over his every move. “Trice?” he says again with a question in his voice. He stops and bends down, hands on knees. Now he can see that the light is just inside the Treasure Room. The room is hard to recognize.
Even here the water is gone,
he thinks. In the days of their childhood, and long before, all the water had started here. Had bubbled up freely from beneath the rock and had filtered its way up to the people of Shibboleth.

Now Nehemiah sees beyond the absence of water. He sees that the light leading him is Trice.
Is
Trice. There is no Trice anymore. No form or fashion that he would recognize in another place. No arms or limbs or eyes. Simply light. Not glowing around her but from within her. And he moves closer toward it with every step.

Monday, 11:45 P.M
.

Billy reaches out and grabs Blister by the shoulder because right now every fiber of his being, every pore, every bone is screaming of its own accord. Blister tries to point. To say, “Behind.” But the word doesn't come from his mouth. It's frozen there. Billy turns, shines the light on the space behind him, the empty air.

“Blister, there is nothing there but your heebie-jeebies.” He turns Blister to face the darkness as he shines his helmet back and forth to prove he's right. “Now straighten up and fly right.”

“I
seen
him.” Blister wails it. A child's cry more than a voice. He
has left his courage on the surface of the world. Behind with his wrecked truck and aspirations of bravery. Somehow the past,
his past
, has met him here. As if it had been lying in wait for years. For the moment that his bravery would be needed. Counted on. And at this precise moment, his past has unleashed its attack. If allowed, the past can be a most formidable foe.

“Seen who?”

Blister points a shaky finger down at the skeletal ground. “That him, that's who.”

“Look here,
that
him has gone on to be wherever he is.”

“But I took his ring.” Blister wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “I mean, after all, he was deader than a doornail, and it was just hanging there from his bony finger.” Billy looks at him without saying anything. Blister purses his lower lip, thinking. Continues trying to explain, “It was gold so I knowed it was worth something.” He looks back at the skeleton. “I think it might have been his wedding ring.” And he pauses. Billy stands silent. Listening to the howling that is creeping its way through the walls. Then he listens to it closer, as John Robert continues his confession of the soul.

“It's not a good thing to take a man's wedding ring. I mean, just any other old kinda ring, maybe it's not so bad. Like a ring won in a poker game with a diamond stud, maybe that wouldn't be so bad to take from a man. But a dead man's wedding ring…”

Billy turns around suddenly, shines his lamplight on the cavern walls to the left of them. Listens to the howling again with his ear cocked. “Not so good. Not so good at all. That's a widow's ring. 'Course I didn't know the widow. And with the looks of how long he'd been gone when I found him, well, you can imagine she was gone, but still…” And Blister's mind filters off into a calmer
state. He feels the beginning of a clean coming on. “You know what I did with that ring?” He waits. Billy doesn't respond. “Well, do you?” He pokes him lightly in the back.

“What?” Billy isn't really listening anymore. He is thinking.

“I sold it for liquor money. 'Course that was back in my drinking days, before all the trouble.” He rubs the scarred side of his face. “Sold a dead man's widow's ring for a bottle. Ain't that something to be proud of?”

“No. I guess not.”

Blister's shadowy past is dissipating. And the figure following him through the entrenched places of his heart and mind is fading.

“And you know something else I'm not too proud about?” Blister pauses. “I took all the coin money, too. Now, ain't that a low-down desperate thing?”

Billy pauses from surveying the cavern walls and tries to place exactly how that wailing is reaching their ears so clearly when it shouldn't be. He hears Blister with one ear, but something catches his attention and he turns around again. “What coin money?”

“What coin money you think? Coin money from this cave we're standing in. Spent it all.” Now the look on Billy's face changes so quickly, becomes so full of righteous wrath, that John Robert shrinks back some but keeps talking. He's a watershed of guilt now. A confession that can't be stopped. “Spent all of it. Just a little at a time.” Billy's eyes appear to glow blue fire. Blister's voice drops lower. He speaks slower. “Just a dollar at a time.”

The clock for Shibboleth has expired. The hands have come completely to a standstill. Only a reflection of Shibboleth remains. An image floating precariously on the surface of eternity.

Monday, 11:58 P.M
.

Trice is standing in the Treasure Room. Normally, in the old days, before their time and beyond, a slight light would filter its way down here from the sky. More a memory of recent light than light itself. It would follow the path of dreams to their holding place. Trice finally pulls her eyes away from the cavern floor and looks up toward Nehemiah's voice.

 

“You took the coins from the cave?” Billy is so incredulous, so heavy with the importance of this, so ashamed of how time has gone by, how he has forgotten his duty, that he forgets to be angry. He isn't sure whom to be angry at.

Blister pulls himself up by the bootstraps. Pushes his chest out. He will not cower now in the face of truth in the telling. His apologies lie elsewhere. “I ain't proud of it, but I did it. Sure did. It's a sorry thing but what's done is done.”

“Lord have mercy.” Billy runs his hand across his helmet because he has forgotten that it was there and meant to run his hand through his hair. “We got to get to the Treasure Room. Quick.” He turns around, surveys the wall again.

“What Treasure Room?” Blister shakes his arm. Asks again, “What Treasure Room?”

“The one where you stole the
money
.” He surveys John Robert again. “That wasn't just ordinary money. Didn't you know that?”

“Well, I guess not. And to tell you God's truth, I reckon if I had, it wouldn't have made a difference at the time.”

“We've got to get there with a quickness, I tell you. This is not good.”

“Well, why didn't you say so? It's right through that tunnel.” Blister points, but Billy doesn't follow him. “I'll show you,” he says,
but first he kneels down next to the skeleton. “Buddy, I owe your widow a ring. And I sure am sorry about that.” Then he stands and strikes the Zippo, holding it out in front of him with his right hand and cupping it slightly with his left. “C'mon, Billy,” he says, “I'll lead the way.”

John “Blister” Robert has left the shadows of his past on the floor of Hell's Jungle. He won't be needing them anymore.

 

Cassie Getty pushes away the briars. Pulls at the overgrown vines covered in thorns. She has lost her raincoat and they rip and pull at her polyester shirt. Her heart begins to tremble, her lips to shake. She is so very tired. Ready to cry. She takes her pocketbook in her hand, and for a moment it looks like she will give up. Because for a moment she thinks about it. For a moment the shadow circling Nehemiah sends thoughts Cassie's way. They are thoughts that say,
No hope. There is no hope.
But Cassie remembers that if she has been born at the end of all days, there must be a reason for it. One greater than her sitting and crying in a briar patch. Alone and afraid. So she breaks out in a wavering song. It is the first song that comes to her mind. This is the song of Cassie Getty in the dark of her dimension: “Get up, get up you sleepy head. Wake up, wake up the sun is red. Live, laugh, love, and be happy…” The voice filters through the moonless night, as she wanders singing her way.

Monday, 11:59 P.M
.

Nehemiah steps into the Treasure Room alongside Trice. He is wondering what part of her to touch. How to hold onto some
thing made of light. Then he feels her hand on his face, and he closes his eyes and thanks God for the life of Trice. When she speaks, her voice is melodious, but the words cut through him like a knife. “The treasure is gone.”

“Gone?”

“All of it. Years of it.” Trice looks down again. She still wears her headlamp, but it isn't necessary. It is the light inside of Trice that shines now. And Nehemiah looks down with her. Where once there had been years and years and years of coins, years of hopes and wishes, there is nothing but bone-dry rock.

The wailing howl begins to shift. The shape begins to grow darker. Begins to materialize.

“We were the protectors, Nehemiah,” she says with the innocent honesty of a child. “And we failed.”

The shape begins to laugh. It is not a human laugh. It is something I hope your ears have never heard. Something I hope they never will. It is a laugh fueled by pain. And loss. And ending. The ground shifts, threatening. A sulfurous wind blows. The laughter increases in intensity until it is spitting in the face of what once was. And what was meant to be. And what is gone.

 

Obie shifts her attention away from the pastor and walks to the back of the church, where she closes the door. She turns around and approaches Zadok and Rudy, Ellen and Trudy. Then she gets in the pew in front of them, turned backwards facing them. She climbs up on her knees with her elbows resting on the pew and begins to tell them a story. It is a story of earth dirt people who had once upon a time almost come to the end of their days. When time stood still and then began to go away. When a great thief had surfaced and stolen what once belonged to them while they were sleeping. “But the people didn't ever give up faith. Not all of it,
anyway.” Obie looks over at the prostrate pastor. “Nope, they kept right on believing. Right up until the very end.” And as much as she tried to tell a lighthearted tale, it came back to her in one word,
Believe
. And finally, she let her story rest there.

 

Billy and Blister are making a posthaste escape. They are moving as fast as their bodies can carry them toward the small round room that once held majesty and miracles. That once held the soft whispered wishes clasped tight in baby hands. Those hands so new or hands so old—all are babies' hands in the end. All wishing with the heart of a child, with the faith of a child, for dreams to come true. For the passage of time to take its intended course. For hearts to be healed and mended. Wishing. Believing. And then tossing in a coin of mystery and faith that the Well would hold safe and sound underground until the time came for them to bloom. A hundred years of wishes. A thousand wishes worn and carried in heart pockets. From generation to generation. A thousand wishes stolen and spent. A dry hole where dreams were once born and hoped for.

The laughter of the beast grows in magnitude. A rocky, dry sound.

Blister stops in his tracks, his Zippo still before him. “I think I caused this,” he says to Billy without turning around.

“We all caused this.” Billy lays a hand on his shoulder from behind. “Keep moving, Blister.”

“But we don't have the money to put back when we get there.”

“It's not about the money, Blister.” Billy's voice softens. “It never was.”

They are closer now. Have come up through an interior passage that Billy never knew existed. A shortcut from front to middle. A walk through Hell to the other side.

And they enter the room at a lower level. They step to the en
trance of the Treasure Room, close enough to see inside. But what they see is not of any familiar form or fashion.

Nehemiah reaches for the light. And as he and Trice embrace, the shadowy shape of the beast begins to pull itself into this earthly realm.

A blasphemous stench rises in my nostrils.

This is what Billy and Blister see. The dark wings of a dog-like creature. A snarling, dripping mouth. Red eyes like coals that laugh at them as the earth trembles. As, somewhere above and near the entrance, Kate and Magnus hold one another in an increasingly tight embrace that means good-bye. As Obie spins the story of
Once Upon a Time in Shibboleth
, within sacred walls. As the pastor lies prostrate in prayer, seeing the same thing Billy and Blister see, just as if he were there. He is watching the beast have its moment in time. And he is so close to them that he begins to shake with cold. If Obie would turn and look at his nostrils, she would notice that the pastor is breathing frigid air.