“Okay,” said the sheriff. “You didn’t see anything, in spite of the fact that we were watching them things from the window when you knocked on the door.”
“The driveway runs up the side of the yard,” Enwright said. “Maybe I just missed them. If you don’t mind, Mr. Creed, can you point that rifle somewhere else?”
“I’ve had enough of this,” said Rachel, returning to the table, sitting down heavily across from Enwright, who was sitting in the Elijah seat. “I don’t believe a thing you’ve said so far. But I’m going to give you the chance to tell the truth about something at least. Why the hell have you come back here?”
Enwright ceased smiling and looked straight at Lev. “To tell you to get rid of the Jew,” Enwright said. “He knows a great deal more than he’s telling. In fact, he’s a major part of what’s happening.”
“And you come to know this how?” said the sheriff. Enwright sneered.
“He’s a Jew.”
“That’s it?” said Rachel. “No suspicious acts? No actual evidence, even circumstantial evidence?”
“You have to understand how the Jew works. He’s subtle, his influence at first almost invisible, but he sews discord at every opportunity. Destroying a small town by fear is only a warm-up for taking over Washington or international banking. To use financing at no interest from his brethren to buy up Zebulon properties and form coalitions to take over the media, education, industries.”
“Get out of my house,” Rachel said. “And stay away.”
“Enwright,” Dave said. “I think you’re the one who knows a lot more about this than he’s telling.”
“Funny those things disappeared when you showed up,” said Creed.
“Tell us how you opened that door,” Beatricia demanded.
Enwright said nothing. The sheriff rose slowly, putting a hand on Rachel’s shoulder. He took a step toward the Elijah seat. “Enwright, I won’t order you to leave this house because I know it’s dangerous. But I can arrest and put you in restraints for breaking and entering.”
“I’ll go,” said Enwright. “My own free will.”
“What if the things outside only let him pass before because they wanted to trap him in here with us?” said Beatricia. “There’s no guarantee they’ll let him leave now.”
“They’ll let him go all right,” Creed laughed. “The little creep is tight with those buggers.
Maybe they sent him in to stop the Seder.”
“Zack,” said Beatricia. “Go into the living room and fetch my Tarot.”
To Rachel, the room now felt unbearably hot. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of one hand. The fire in the stove was blazing. She wanted Enwright to go. She prayed the bastard would leave, she willed him to. But she wanted any information he had. If only she could read his mind.
He fidgeted and wrung his hands. Then pushed back from the table and stood, his limbs shaking, his eyes blinking fiercely. “I’m going,” he said. “Be careful of your pet Jew.”
The sheriff seemed on the point of ordering him to stop, but then let him go. Dave switched the porch light on.
Enwright opened the door, left, and shut it behind him.
The explosion that followed was so powerful the house shook. Wise lost his balance and fell. Creed dropped his rifle. Rachel got up and looked out.
There was little left of Enwright, as if a bomb planted in his body had blown him up.
What looked like fine ground beef was spread over the floor of the porch.
“He’s dead,” she muttered, horrified, but, otherwise, feeling nothing.
When the makeshift Seder ended, Rachel returned to the living room, her children like puppies flanking her, the feet of the others stuttering on the oak floors between the kitchen and the dining room. The swirling wind stepped up its fury, beating the boxwood branches against all four sides of the Sheltons’ house.
“Hope those horses head back to the stable.” Wise strode into the living room, put his eye to the camera atop the tripod, and scanned the dark pasture beyond the north window. “But maybe they ain’t.” Rain spat at the shaking glass. A screech from outside rocked him back on his heels.
Rachel’s mind turned to the great bat of her unholy dreams—the splayed wings that had dropped their shadow on her innocence. She sank deeply into the soft leather chair by the woodstove.
Wolfie leapt from the Oriental carpet, one shade more orange than he, into her lap, a sprawling ten pounds holding her down, wet cold nose prodding her palm.
“Well, the spooks with torches for hands have come back.” Dave was gazing in the direction of the north pasture, over the sheriff’s burly shoulder. “There’s a ghost on each side of the house again,” the sheriff said. Dave nodded.
“The murders have never been committed the same way twice,” said Wise.
Rachel had heard him repeat this so many times it seemed like a mantra. At first she’d believed he was trying to convince himself any new murder would be different, but now the phrase seemed more a modus operandi, a clue of such great significance, the sheriff had to be looking for deeper meanings.
“Maybe that was just chance or maybe it means there’ll be no more evaporations, explosions, or wrecked cars, or murder by tractor,” Wise stated this blandly, as if not lingering to parse the meaning of his words. Rachel knew different. She knew the sheriff wasn’t in a literal frame of mind.
“There are plenty of other ways to die.” Dave moved the video camera into a corner under his painting of a cattle feedlot, then stood beside the sheriff.
Zack rolled his eyes, an annoying habit. “Mom. Those things out there.” He drew a circle in the air with a pointing finger. “They’re not ghosts.”
Rachel’s eyes rose upward. A doily formally placed beneath a Murano glass vase on the mantle had plastered itself on the ceiling, defying gravity. No, no broken law of physics could shock her now. Her eyes narrowed. “Okay, ghouls then.”
“No, Mom.” Zack grabbed a chenille throw, dropping himself down on the Ottoman, and stared at the smoldering coals of the woodstove. “Ghouls don’t appear at night with their bodies on fire. Besides, there’s no such thing as flesh eaters from the grave.”
“Are too,” said Leo.
“That’s just in the movies,” said Zack, pulling the blanket up over his shoulders.
“They’re dust reanimated by Nuno Sievers,” said Beatricia. On the sofa, she seemed perched on a throne, arms thrust out straight before her, canes tapping the floor.
“That’s right, Grandma,” said Zack. “That’s exactly what they are.”
The room was growing warmer. Waves of heat from the wood stove engulfed the end tables, sofa, salon chairs. Votive candles on the sills flickered, wicks drowning in waxy pools.
Sheriff Wise sat next to Beatricia. Dave turned away from the darkness and jammed a log into the stove over flaming embers, half smothering them. Rain drove in perpendicular streaks as if some merciful force, perhaps the earth herself, was trying to put out the flaming hands of the specters. But the dark, shadowy figures remained.
Rachel saw them as knots on a noose being tightened around the Shelton house. “They’re coming closer,” she said.
None of the men got up to look. They sat silent, pale and shivering in spite of the heat.
Rachel rocked and stroked Wolfie to the rhythm of the wind. Shutting her eyes for a moment, she pictured the blistering figure perched in the Harper’s maple tree, across the street from Daisyland, flapping its black wings, as if preparing to fly. Iron manacles of panic clutched at her heart and constricted her throat. She knew that maple tree, the one with the tire swing that her own children had played on. But worse was that she had seen the figure years before. The great bat from childhood that had invaded her dreams and brought night terrors. It seemed to her now she should have always known it because she had never actually parted from it, but had only ignored it, denied it. Irresponsibly, egotistically, as if she’d had the power to send it out of exi
stence.
“No, not a ghost. Not exactly,” she said, contrite in her enlightenment.
Beatricia dropped a cane. Rachel stopped rocking, set Wolfie on the carpet, and picked the cane up.
“Mother,” Rachel whispered, hoping no one else could hear. “You were right. I’ve seen it too. Not just today. For years. In my dreams. The ghost of Nuno Sievers. Well—not a ghost. But something close to it.”
“Real ghosts aren’t evil,” Zack said. “They’re good.”
“How do you know?” said Rachel. “You’ve only known one—Isabel.”
“Isabel says they aren’t.”
“And what else does she say, Zack? That she loves you?” She knew better but couldn’t hold back the words. “Have you made love to a dead girl?”
A sudden gasp from everyone, then silence, as if the room had inhaled. Rachel felt all eyes upon her. Zack’s face flushed. He didn’t have a sarcastic comeback, which was unlike him. That confirmed it.
“Let’s get on with it,” said Creed.
She could hear his words but barely absorbed them. She dragged herself to the bathroom and squatted down to rifle through her medical supply box. She found a 10 cc syringe and a 22- gauge needle, then hunted for a bigger syringe and a smaller needle. She grabbed a few alcohol wipes, and then hurried to the kitchen to get a dog food bowl, four cups and a tea towel. She returned with her arms full to the living room and dropped the supplies on the rectory table. Seated in a straight chair at one end, Creed rolled up his sleeve and offered his arm, laying it on the dented African hardwood of the table.
Rachel put her hand on his wrist. “Thank you, George,” she whispered as she tore open an alcohol swab.
“No!” said Lev. “No.” He shook his head so hard his curls bounced. “Absolutely not. Use something soap and water. No alcohol.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Creed. “Just tear open my scab if you want. Give me the needle.”
“I’ll take those,” said Lev, who took the swabs and threw them in the wood stove. “Shit.
The fire’s almost out.”
Dave hurried over and helped him wrestle with the large wet log that had almost extinguished the fire only minutes ago. After cracking cured kindling, they restarted the fire, and burned what was left of the chametz.
“I’m sorry,” said Rachel. “I forgot about the alcohol.”
Dave turned around. “Is there more?”
“No,” she said, tying a satin gift ribbon around Creed’s arm. It would have to do for a tourniquet. She tapped a few times on the ventral aspect of his small, muscular forearm and popped the needle into a vein that looked like a tree trunk with spreading roots. There was a sanguineous flash in the syringe. She untied the purple satin, extracting a full ten milliliter tube, unscrewed the syringe, and squirted the blood into the first cup. She repeated the procedure three times.
Creed watched, unfazed, inflated in his bravery. He seemed to have grown four inches. “Okay, baby,” said Creed. “Let’s get the job done.”
Rachel smoothed a yellow Band-Aid over the oozing hole in Creed’s skin. He looked depleted. “Spongebob?”
“Sorry. I don’t have any plain Band-Aids.” She handed a cup of blood to Dave, one to the sheriff, one to Lev.
“Let’s man the doors.” Lev doled out white handkerchiefs to each of the men and to Rachel. He kept one for himself. “Remember,” he said. “Smear it on the outside lintels and door jambs. We’ll open the doors all at the same time. Creed will turn out the last of the lights so those creatures can’t see us. Take less than ten seconds to smear the blood. Then close the doors and lock them behind you.”
Zack and Leo made a quick round, blowing out candles of the rooms downstairs. The sheriff glided toward the back door of the house carefully balancing his cup of blood. Dave walked softly toward the porch.
Returning from smearing blood on the upstairs windowsills, Creed stationed himself at the light switch in the foyer. Rachel stationed herself at the front door within reach of Creed, whose fingers were on the switch. Lev, carrying his cup of blood reverently as an offering, put his hand on the doorknob at the west side of the house, and said a short prayer, with words spoken too quietly for the others to hear.
“Okay,” said Rachel. “Everyone ready?”
Creed threw the light switch, submerging the house in darkness. “They’ll come now,” said Beatricia. “Very soon.”
“He’s on the way,” mumbled Rachel.
Nuno Sievers did not know his name. Nor did he care.
His body, plumped up and sizzling, was bursting with heat, its skin charred black and flapping in shriveled strips. His eyes were melting, oozing light. His brows were singed; his ears and nose reduced to ash, their cavities, tunnels to nowhere. He had three fingers, no toes. He wanted to scream, but even in death his tongue was a torment, a blackened stump capable of orchestrating only incoherent utterances. His chest could propel only an occasional bellow.
He beat his heavy black wings, balancing on a thick limb high in a maple tree. From him blazed the energy that he’d gathered in the cellar when the boys had burned him, and then in the hospital when he’d slipped into death and the doctors had pulled him out again and again and again and left him to live too many days after that. He remembered the burn unit, when his skin had hardened and the doctors had debrided him, cutting away shrinking crusts of skin. He recalled cold grease dressings and the grafts from the dead pig that never took, and the mummy’s wraps.
Then he died. His remains were buried in a lawn cemetery on the outskirts of Zebulon. But his beaten soul lay as a ghost in the basement in the woods, through twenty years of death and suffering, waiting for release, his rage growing, enveloping him, at last exploding.
In his mind, he saw the Shelton house a half-mile away while his nose smelled of two first-born sons with the Light behind them. His heart cried out, Let my people go!
A few words of Holy Scripture came to him from an old woman’s lips and stirred his heart.
“I’m going to stop reciting now,” Beatricia said, suddenly, horror in her voice. “I’m giving him more power.”
The old woman and her daughter—how he hated them for touching him with their minds, causing him pain beyond endurance. He threw his gathered strength through lanes of darkness to his acolytes positioned around the house—power bursting out through their hands. He would trap the Sheltons’ first-born boys, drain them dry, then burn them to ash.
The whole house shook. The windows, bricks, floors and ceilings. Dust fell like flurries of snow. Dishes clattered; knives and forks leapt from their drawers. Lights winked on and off all over the house as switches rattled up and down. Windows flared with lightning, and then went dark, one by one.
The old woman had been thrown from the sofa and lay gasping on the floor, a sea of dark below her sinking, dropping away. She called out for the younger woman who cowered, trembling in the foyer near an antique wardrobe that loomed above her, tipping in shadow. The apostate Jew, who’d slammed the porch door shut, was surrounded by dining room chairs walking toward him, colliding with one another like drunken buffalo. The table had flipped over and lay in the darkness like a turtle on its back. The tall man who had fathered one of the firstborns jammed the handle of the stove door with a poker to incarcerate the firelight, his face filled with rage—and fear. The piano rolled across the foyer, and was threatening to run him down like the tractor that had squashed the Haitian man by the barn. In the kitchen, the maple butcher-block marched after the fat man in uniform and backed him up against the counter.
The two firstborns were caught in the living room huddled against a wall, books and pictures raining on their ducked heads and crouched shoulders. There would have to be more pictures, more books, a houseful of them, until their lungs compressed and they couldn’t breathe.
He shrieked with the fire that burned up through him. The boys were still moving.
He fisted the remaining fingers of his hands because he
couldn’t rush in to slay them—because of the blood.
He leapt from the branch, wings spread, and hung in rain and darkness. He could wait.
The rain pounded the windows, but the house drew its brick shell tightly around its shoulders and shut out the night’s weather. Poking its cables into the belly of the dark, it thrust itself upward, sentinel and fortress, momentarily blessed by the Lord, sealed tight by blood and the Seder. No crack to exploit, no whoosh of wind or rustling of leaves. No branches breaking under thunder, only the tiniest whispers inside—the light fingering of Dave at the piano, the dripping of faucets and creaking of boards.
Leo whimpered and the house groaned in sympathy.
Creed felt his way to a switch in the living room and flipped it up, illuminating all the lamps.
Pinned against the kitchen counter, Wise pried his bruised hands free and then heaved his stomach against the heavy maple butcher block, grunting. Its stocky legs slid away across the hard pine of the kitchen floor.
The men dragged furniture back in place; the sofa was soon in its spot before the windows, plaster dust salting the chenille upholstery. End tables flanked the couch squarely once again. Bookcases were realigned. The glass of two windowpanes lay shattered on carpets in the living room. But blood ran on the sills and the rain failed to penetrate the house. It could not be heard.
Lev and Creed dragged the Chinese armoire housing the stereo system and TV back into the corner of the living room, beside the camera mounted on its tripod, still recording.
Rachel pushed the dining room table back into place under the hole in the ceiling, then settled the chairs around the table. She startled when a chunk of plaster dropped onto the boiled beets that sat in the middle of the Seder plate.
“The blood is keeping the evil out,” said Beatricia, hobbling into the foyer.
Dave rolled the piano back to its corner across the oak floor. He struck its keys, sending a chord through the house that summoned its inhabitants into the living room, into which they paraded, flushed and armed. Rachel was clutching a knife from the kitchen, Lev, a hammer he picked up from a windowsill, and the rest, their rifles and pistols. Beatricia leaned on one cane and shook the other as if it were a cudgel. Even Leo had his drumsticks and Zack an old electric guitar he was willing to use as a club.
Passover Page 26
