The Revenant Road (11 page)

16

Wings Over

Central Park

Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I feed the pigeons.

Believe it or not, giving bread to disease-ridden, winged vermin actually helps me gain perspective.

I was still struggling with the destruction of my reality when I found myself wandering through
Central Park
the next morning, burdened with a heavy heart and an extra large loaf of Wonder Bread.

The things I’d seen at Kalakuta had put me in one Hell of a lonely spot. Who could I turn to? Who the hell would believe me? Even if I was crazy enough to tell anyone in the first place. My mother? She was no help. Kowalski?

Kowalski’s dead already, O-dog. He just doesn’t know it yet.

I couldn’t tell my father’s partner without revealing what Vulpe had told me: That Death had put Kowalski’s name at the top of her “To Do” list.

The date was the 23
^rd
of July. If Vulpe was right, Kowalski was scheduled to die in less than forty-eight hours.

But telling Kowalski meant admitting that everything I’d experienced was real; that a superwoman stood frozen in a basement somewhere in
Yonkers
; that flesh-eating monsters stalked the night, and that my father had really been some kind of...

Stop it. 

I sat down on my favorite bench, in a shaded spot near the Sheep’s Meadow. With its sweeping views of the
Upper East Side
, the Sheep’s Meadow was where I went when I needed to think.

The day was dreary enough to require a raincoat but I’d left mine back at the apartment. As a result, the thin drizzle sought out all my dry spaces.

“What difference does it make, Frank?” I said.

Frank was my favorite of the Sheep’s Meadow pigeons. Charcoal gray with a distinctive white stripe down the center of his chest, Frank was elegant in an understated, avian way. Frank was always there for me.

“It’s all bullshit,” I continued.

Frank cooed and pecked at my right shoe.

I tore open the Wonder Bread, broke off a piece and dropped it on the ground. Frank pecked at it, and I shuddered, swallowing the surge of bile that rumbled up my throat. I hadn’t actually eaten bread since I was twelve years old. Even as a kid I’d loathed the idea of chewing the stuff; its doughy pliability repulsed me. The idea of it, wet and pasty, sliding half-chewed down my unwilling throat, was enough to ruin an otherwise serviceable meal.  

     Lenore, on the other hand, believed in Wonder Bread. She regularly force-fed me long and grueling lectures about its “Wholesome Goodness,” the number of vitamins and minerals with which it had been impregnated by its sadistic creators back in their mysterious laboratories in the
Deep South
.  As a result, I was forbidden to leave the table until I’d eaten at least one slice.

In retaliation, I’d gleefully imagined myself choking to death on the stuff; saw myself gasping for breath and turning gray while it swelled and clogged my throat. In my most cherished death scenario, Lenore would return to the kitchen only to discover me dead, my throat swollen to three times its normal size.     Later, at the morgue, forced to identify my cooling remains, she would throw back the sheet and discover that my dead flesh had actually turned into Wonder Bread: There before her would lie the results of her maniacal obsession with my vitamin-enrichment. How I would savor the sound of her screams, and the irony: my mother, that lover of White Death, betrayed by its image as an “All American” staple, now ruined, morally bankrupt, and bottom-heavy. 

     At the same time, I'd always been fascinated by its texture, especially White bread, which seemed like the bland, urban cousin to the more wholesome (but morally ambiguous) Wheat. When I was ten years old, my teacher caught me trying to ignite a ‘crude plastic explosive device’ I'd cobbled together, using white bread, Elmer's glue, three lumps of charcoal and a tin of lighter fluid. The teacher, a child-hating sadist named Miss Lily, had suggested, in front of the class, that the reason my father was absent was because  I was “...a snotty little know-it-all who didn't
deserve
a nice daddy.” In retaliation, Lenore made me eat
two
slices of white bread every night for a month. She also made me compose an essay: “The Evils of American Children Who Waste Perfectly Nutritious Food on Boneheaded Terrorist Activities.”
     It was only after years of therapy that I understood that my lifelong habit of mutilating bread was really a declaration of war: a line drawn in the shifting sands between me, my mother, and the emptiness I felt in Marcus's absence.

Frank pecked at it thoughtfully.

“I mean, what’s it all about, Frank?” I asked.

Frank finished off his slice of artery paste, shook out his feathers and eyed me for more.

“I’ll tell you what it’s all about,” I said. “The totality of existence, you, me: It’s all an illusion.”

Frank cooed and fluttered up onto my knee.

I jumped, startled. Normally, Frank barely acknowledged any human’s presence beyond strafing unwary joggers with pigeon crap.

I scratched at an itch that had sprung up on the back of my hand, so taken by Frank’s sudden display of affection that I ignored the burning sensation this action produced.

“Frank, I think this may be the beginning of a beautiful...”

That’s when I noticed the first worm.

It was red, about six inches long. And it was hanging out of Frank’s left eye.

“Jesus,” I hissed.

As gently as I could, I kicked Frank off my lap. He landed on the ground a few feet away, flapped his wings and took off. But I barely noticed.

My legs were covered with red worms.

“Uggghh,” I said, shooting to my feet and brushing at the worms. The nagging itch on the backs of my hands became a burning sensation. A warm flush was slowly creeping up the back of my neck and my tongue abruptly grew two sizes too big for my mouth.

I looked at the backs of my hands and gasped.

Seven worms dangled there, battened onto my flesh like red leeches. I yelped and snatched the worms out of my skin, stomped them into red mush. The smashed worms wriggled and began to creep across the sidewalk toward me.

There came a flutter of wings and a second later, Frank struck again. I heard the sound a large Italian woman sitting in a plate of warm risotto might make and looked down.

My shirt was covered with red worms.

There are times when blind panic is the only sensible choice: I panicked.

Flailing my arms wildly, I ran, tearing at my clothing, trying to scrape off the red worms. All the while I was horribly aware that Frank was fluttering around my head, depositing more of the bastards down the back of my shirt.

Through a blackening cloud of hysteria, I spotted one of the man-made ponds that dot that part of the Park. My skin literally crawling, I ran for it.

The cold water abraded my skin and shocked my senses. I dove down to the floor of the pond and rubbed myself against the muddy bottom, twisting and writhing until I’d scoured my skin raw. Only when my brain was screaming from oxygen deprivation did I allow myself to rise to the surface.

I swam, sputtering, landward, and flopped face-first onto the concrete walkway, half-in and half-out of the water.

A gentle cooing made me look up.

Frank landed on my head.

I snatched a hurried breath and prepared to dive again.   

Before I could submerge, a winged black shape swept over the tree line to the east. Frank’s talons dug into my scalp as the dark shape arrowed toward us.

It was a bird, a big black crow or raven.

The black bird circled the pond once. Then it screamed, folded its wings and plummeted earthward. Frank released my scalp. His wings beat furiously about my head and shoulders for a moment, and then he took off toward the shimmering steel canyons of
Manhattan
.

The raven pulled out of its kamikaze dive. With a sweep of its wings it shot past me and snatched Frank out of the air. A moment later, the raven and Frank struck the grass of the Sheep’s Meadow in a dull explosion of dapper gray feathers. Frank made a sound that was disturbingly similar to a human scream.

Then the raven pecked his eyes out.

I scuttled across the grass toward the avian massacre. 

By the time I’d arrived at the scene, Frank had been reduced to a quivering pile of blood-soaked pinfeathers. The raven was busily snapping up the squirming red spaghetti strands boiling out of Frank’s corpse.

My stomach gave up trying to hold down the pint of Jack Daniels I’d ingested the night before and I leaned over and christened the Sheep’s Meadow with everything I’d swallowed over the last forty-eight hours.

“Thinking things through?”

The voice belonged to a man I hadn’t seen in two decades, a man I’d helped bury a week earlier.

“Looks like we showed up just in time,” the familiar voice rumbled.

I looked up.

Marcus Grudge stood there with the rays of the rising sun pouring through him like water through a sieve. He reached down, extended a big gnarled hand and smiled.

 “Hello, son.”

17

Reunion

My dead father looked like a car crash victim.

Marcus’s body was a mess of torn muscle, ripped tendons and smashed bones. One eye dangled from its socket: As he pointed at me and laughed, it jumped and danced against his cheek like the “bouncing ball” from a karaoke video. The fronts of his shirt and khaki trousers looked like the mop from a Japanese slaughterhouse.

“You look disgusting,” I said.

Marcus looked down at himself. “Sorry,” he said. “Can’t seem to get this shape-molding thing down. Goddamn blood-suckers make it look easy. Watch this.”

A look of concentration tightened Marcus’s features.   

Then his head fell off and rolled across the grass.

“God!” I hollered.  

“Ain’t that a poke in the shitter?!?” the head chuckled.

“What the Hell are you doing?” I sputtered.

“Oh, get over yourself,” the head grumbled.

A moment later, Marcus reappeared. This time he looked almost normal, save for a massive gash across his throat and the blood spatter on his shirtfront.

“Sorry ‘bout the neck wound. That’s the one that took me out. Harder to manipulate.”

It had stopped raining by now, but the sun peeked warily from behind a skein of fast-moving clouds.

Marcus sat down next to me. He looked older, but that only made sense. The black had faded from his hair and he’d grown a slight paunch. Like me, Marcus was a big man, nearly six-feet-three inches tall. He’d played football in college. The exercise had rewarded him with an athlete’s broad shoulders and the easy gate of a man who was comfortable with physical exertion.

In one of my earliest stories I wrote about the adventures shared by a nine year old boy and the superhero who visited him when times were toughest. I’d named my superhero Captain Prometheus. I’d modeled him after Marcus.

We sat there, two strangers. My father was dead, or at least among the living dead. But I was alive.

And I was pissed.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’ve come back because you want me take up the family tradition, expose what the government knows about UFO’s or whatever it is that people like you do.”

Marcus shook his head.

“I’m here to see how you’re doin,’ Obadiah.”

“What?” I said.

Marcus shrugged. Through the gash in his neck a flash of bone winked at me.

“I didn’t get the chance to make an appearance at my funeral; tell you how sorry I am about the way things turned out between you and me.”

“You were at your own funeral?” I said.

“Yep. But I hadn’t yet learned to entify.” 

“Entify?”

“To make manifest,” he said. “To convert mental energies into physical ones. Ironic, isn’t it? That’s what this whole mess is about, son.”

I cringed. The paternal tone he adopted so casually made the hackles on my neck stand at attention.

“What do you want?” I said.

Marcus sighed. He shook his head and lifted his hands in a “what do you want from me” gesture that was disturbingly familiar. After a moment I realized why: It was
my
gesture. I’d seen myself shrug in exactly the same way on television.

Pull it together, asshole
, I snarled inwardly, furious at myself for allowing mere familial similarity to divert me from my target. I had a lifetime of solo science projects, missed Father-Son Weekends, and unanswered sex questions to get through. Marcus, the reality of his presence, was distracting me.

“Listen son,” Marcus said. “If it’s an apology you’re after…you’re right. I left. It was a shitty thing to do, abandoning you and your mother. If I had it to do all over again… I guess I might have gone another way.”

“You guess you might have gone another way?” my voice rising to a shriek. “
Might have gone another… fucking… way
?”

Marcus did my shrug again. Then he did something even worse: He smiled at me.

“Hey!” I snapped. “Don’t think just because you’re dead that you can ingratiate yourself with some lame-ass apology and a few cheap parlor tricks. I’m the one who spent my life wondering why the hell you left. I’m the one with flaming bitch bites permanently scorched across my ass from her temper tantrums. I’m the one who sat up nights listening to her cry.”

Marcus grunted. It was the same noise he’d made the time he came home, the day after my ninth birthday, the one in my dream, and learned that I’d burned our garage to the ground when I’d decided to end a dysfunctional relationship in the time-tested manner: with fire. The break-up had spiraled out of control, however, resulting in a harried call to the Bronxville Fire Department and a hysterical verbal assault from Lenore. 

“If you came back hoping for some half-assed reunion where you get to say— ‘Ooops! I was a bad father! Sorry, chum!’ —then I forgive you and we become best buddies, you wasted a lot of ectoplasm learning to
entify
because I’m not interested.”

Marcus nodded. “Fair enough.”

“Fair enough?” I said. “
Fair enough?
That’s all you have to say? You left us, man.
You
left and
missed it all: My high school graduation; that stupid prom picture I took with Lois McCaffrey.”

My head was spinning, the words tumbling out of my face like turds out of an elephant’s backside. If Marcus had been alive at that moment I might have strangled him. As it was I needed some distance. He’d gotten too close too fast.

“You missed the first time I ever got drunk,” I continued. “I threw up all over the bathroom, passed out behind the toilet and got stuck. Lenore had to call the fire department to come and cut me out with the Jaws of Life. Where were you? I’ll tell you where:
Gone
.”

I glared at Marcus with what I hoped was the righteous nobility of a wounded saint. I’d rehearsed this scene in my mind a million times. At the climax of my fantasy monologue, Marcus always hung his head and begged my forgiveness. At that point I would either punch him in the stomach or tell him to go fuck himself.

In real life, Ghost Marcus shrugged and said: “Fair enough.”

“I swear to God if you say ‘Fair Enough’ one more time I’ll...”

“You’ll do what, son?” Ghost Marcus said. “Kill me?”

I stared at him until my head throbbed.

“Now, if you’re done venting, I’ve got business to discuss,” Marcus said. “I want you to take up the family crest.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you were here to check up on me.”

“You’ll be alright,” Marcus said. “Trust me, a little anger can be a good thing in our line of work.”

“Hey,” I snapped. “There’s no ‘our line of work.’ I’m a writer, in case you hadn’t heard.”

Ghost Marcus shrugged.

“You’re a writer because you have no other way to channel the energies of the Bent. It’s sitting there in your blood waiting for you to get jiggy with it.”

“Get ‘jiggy’ with it?” I said. “What is that? Did you take a ‘How to Speak in Stupid Anachronisms’ class in the Afterlife?”

“Don’t be a smartass,” Marcus said. “While we’re sitting here circling our wagons people are dying. I just hope we’re not too late.”

“What do you mean ‘too late?’” I said.

Marcus pointed at the remains of Frank the pigeon where the raven was snapping up the last of the red worms. It flapped across the grass and landed on Marcus’s right arm.

“Friend of yours?” I said.

“In a way,” Marcus said. “Othello led me here. He even managed to foil their little assassination attempt.”

“Assassination?” I said. “Why would anyone want to kill me?”

“Because you’re next,” Marcus said.

Kowalski’s words came back to me then.

Better to have you hate him than lose you to the Wraithing.

“It’s an old story, son,” Marcus said. “The things that live in the shadows hate us just as much as we hate them. I’m beyond their reach now. But you’re not. I’d hoped to keep the Wraithing Pale out of your life. Oh, your mother and I had our share of problems like any other couple, I suppose. But I loved her from the moment I first laid eyes on her. That’s why I left. I wanted to protect the two of you.”

Marcus sighed heavily. His image wavered, flickering as the wind picked up strength. Then it steadied.

“But now I see that I was wrong,” he said. “You were born to walk the Road.”

“The Road?” I said.

“The
Revenant Road
, son,” Marcus said. “The road every monster hunter must walk. I’m just a little farther along than you.”

Overhead, the sun tumbled down the gaping maw of a massive black storm cloud. Thunder rumbled in the west.

“The things Kowalski told you are true, Obadiah. The woman you saw back at the house?”

“The dead Amazon?” I said.

Marcus shook his head. “The Dreamer isn’t dead. She’s a gatekeeper of sorts. Her mind is... well it’s a kind of portal, one that opens onto the Wraithing dimension. There are others like Stella
,
hundreds of Dreamers, all over the world.”

“Stella?”

“That’s what Kowalski called her. We never learned her real name.”

“Who are they, these Dreamers?” I said.

Marcus shrugged. “No one knows where they came from, or how long they’ve been here. They generate the energies that separate the dimensions: the planes we access when we dream, from this one. They call themselves the Nolane.”

The raven uttered a dry chuckle and ruffled its wings.

“I don’t understand,” I said.  

“Neither do we, really,” Marcus grunted. “But the Nolane are incredibly powerful. I don’t know what would happen if the Dreamers ever woke up. Hell on Earth I suppose.”

“Then they’re the cause of all the problems,” I said.

Marcus shook his head.

“The Nolane are the reason we don’t live on the ninth circle of Hell, son. They act as buffers between the myriad realities. Think of them as, well, you might call them cosmic wardens.  Without the Dreamers, the realities would have merged ages ago. But occasionally something from the Wraithing makes it past their defenses.”

I shuddered as a cold dread skittered down my spine.

“But why?” I said. “What do they want?”

“To possess a human mind,” Marcus said. “Someone scarred by deep suffering: loss or grief or hate. Some of them can re-shape the human body. They walk our world, stealing form and substance from mankind’s primordial fears, to prey on us.”

“Vampires and werewolves,” I said.

“Suckers and Wolves are the tip of the iceberg,” Marcus said. “Believe me, there are worse things. If one of them stays over here too long it creates a breach in the space between realities. The longer the breach stays open, the stronger the squatter becomes, sucking energy from
both
dimensions, until the rupture becomes permanent.”