by Rex Hurst
Next to him, as usual, was Maria, beauty glowing off her, watching the yelling. Then she turned and stared at Jon. Not just looked, but openly stared. And when their eyes met, she smiled—a sweet, welcoming smile that stirred every molecule in his body. It was the greatest feeling ever. A moment indelibly stamped on his soul. Romeo and Juliet’s first dance.
Gabbaducci caught her looking and snatched her away, but that didn’t erase the moment. The breath caught in his throat. Was this going to happen? Would she be his?
Reveling in the sweet anticipation, he rode over to Louis’s house. In the daylight, the place seemed even more cluttered with weird garden knickknacks and a partially disassembled motorcycle in the driveway. Louis’s father and two younger brothers were on the lawn trying to fix a gas mower that had conked out halfway through the lawn. Each had their own opinion.
“Told you the durn spark plugs been disconnected.”
“No, it ain’t.”
“Well, it’s dirty then.”
“I tol’ you the grass is too high.” And it was high. “You can’t have the gauge so low or else it’s gonna keep clogging up the system.”
“Hit the carburetor. Make sure the gas is flowing in.”
“Hey there, Jon,” Mr. Norton, Louis’s father, greeted him in a friendly manner. “Been a while. You looking for Lou?”
“Yes.”
“Go bang on the door, his Mother’ll get him.”
They went back to spinning theories about the mower. Jon stepped onto the sagging porch. It was so rickety that every time he had done so in the past, he was afraid one of his feet was going to break through the old wood and get torn up on rusty nails or ripped off by a snarling animal underneath, but the structure held and he negotiated through a collection of discordant wind chimes. None of them blended musically with the others. Louis’s mother had collected them from dollar stores in the five different states that the family had drifted through.
His mother cheerfully said hello and called up the stairs for Louis to come down.
“I’ll let you boys talk,” she said.
What came down was not Louis Norton, or not the same teenager that Jon knew. Streaks of white shot through his once bountiful head of blonde hair. His movements had a listlessness to them. And there was something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on.
“Hello, Jon,” Louis said flatly.
“Hi,” Jon paused. How should he broach the subject of what happened at Goodleburg. “Some kind of time the other night, huh?”
“You could say that, but in a way it hasn’t ended for me. We called up a soldier of Hell with our satanic game and paid the price for it.” He eyed Jon up and down, really looking at him for the first time. “Or I did, at least.”
“I know it was weird, but—”
“It wasn’t just the spook. Off in the woods where I went for safety there were things. Things old and awakened. Things waiting for the end of the world and becoming impatient. They got senioritis, because it’s soon to happen.”
Jon remembered. He remembered the sensations of doom emanating from the cemetery visions. There was no arguing it away.
“What kind of things?” he asked.
“Things with ragged shapes, like half-torn shadows puffed up with poisonous gas and sickly yellow spots of light puncturing through. That’s all I could see. There was more to them, I could feel it, but my eyes couldn’t take it in.”
His head shook compulsively as he spoke. As if he were fighting some primeval instinct to suppress the evil events.
“I fell there,” he said, “into their world. One step and one half of my brain. Like melting between molecules. They circle in an endless loop, the lights and shadows, looking to strike out, to grab life’s form. They are all minds and spinning energy embedded in rock. They whispered weird secrets that I am only beginnin’ to understand. And they are anxious to come here.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. They want to come now, because later they won’t be able to. Judgement Day is near.”
“Ah. With the Antichrist and Armageddon . . . ”
Louis nodded gravely. He was a believer.
“That’s why I dropped out from that school. It’s full of sinners. I left part of my soul behind in that half space, Jon. I have to atone and get it back before the Rapture, when all good Christians are called to Heaven before the final battle between Jesus and the Devil. My parents agree.”
“I’ve never heard that before.”
“It’s there in Revelations. Look it up if you think I’m a liar.”
‘I didn’t say that.”
Louis stared at the screen door for a long time before blankly saying, “You get out of here, Jon. You done bad things, but you’re not a bad guy. Try to save your soul if you can, but you need to go and don’t come back.”
Louis went back upstairs and that was the last Jon ever saw of him. The entire family up and moved two months later.
“I’m sorry Jon. It’s for the best,” Louis’ mother called after him as he left the house.
Half a block away, it suddenly dawned on Jon what was bothering him the most about Louis. It wasn’t what he had said, but how he looked. His eyes! Somehow his friend’s eyes had changed color and shifted from steely blue to dark brown.
The next day at school, a balled-up note was tossed at him in a crowded hallway. Inside, scrawled in a woman’s hand, was Maria’s name and phone number. Was this real? Was this a sick game? He looked around, all breath sucked from his body. Neither she, nor anyone from her group were about.
Did he dare? Did he dare disturb the universe? Make the call? Are you kidding? Hell yeah, he dared! This is what he’d been waiting for. The rest of the day, he found it difficult to walk, he was so stiff with anticipation.
He biked with difficulty to a payphone after school, still afraid of bugs at his own house, and gave her a ring. After an agonizing eight seconds, her mother answered and called Maria to the phone.
“Hello?”
It was indisputably her voice. Breathy and brash mixed in a seductive tonic that he couldn’t resist.
“Hi, it’s Jon.”
Dead air.
Oh shit! He was an idiot! Had he fallen for a prank? Was someone fucking with him? Who? Who? Must be Gabbaducci, that asshole. Blood burned inside his cheeks. The world could crumble to a mote of dust and all life swept away into a black hole, and Jon would welcome it to hide his shame.
“Hi,” Maria said at last, very happy. “I’m glad you called.”
All that negativity fell away like a snake shedding his skin. The world bloomed into bursts of bright color and light. You could get drunk on the air and Jon felt as if he had.
“I’m glad I did too.”
“Yes.”
Now it was Jon’s time to fill the line with dead air. His mind hit a blank. Everything drained away. Christ, he was going to come off as a spaz, a loser, a dope with a tied-up tongue. Say something! Say something!
“Sh—should we go out sometime?”
“I’d love that.”
“Great. How about—?”
“Tomorrow. I want to see you.”
Very nice. “Tomorrow.”
“And you got to take me to some place nice. I’m not some cheap whore, you know.”
“I never thought you were.”
“Good, because I don’t like cheap guys. There was one prick who took me out to that hot dog stand on Sheridan, you know? Thought he could get into my pants with a foot long and some greasy curly fries.”
“Heh, really?”
“Yeah, then he tries to make a move on me and I’m like get your fucking hands off me, creep, or I’ll bite your dick off.”
“I’m not cheap.”
“Good. I want to go to Lombardos.”
The woman had expensive tastes. While not the most ostentatious of restaurants, Lombardos had the reputation of subtle elegance and such atmosphere did not come cheap in the world of fine dining. Howe
ver, was he going to say no with the prize in sight?
“That’s doable.”
“Great. Pick me up around seven.”
Now all he needed was a lot of money and a car.
***
Michael wasn’t all that excited about his friend’s success. In fact, Michael seemed damned angry that his friend’s wish came true and his own seemed stuck in limbo. Maybe it was the fact there was much more strife in his household. Apparently, several letters from colleges had arrived for Michael and his mother had thoughtlessly thrown them out, thinking nothing of them, uninterested in whether her son had been accepted by his choice of colleges. They were screaming at each other when Jon approached their screen door.
“I didn’t know,” his mother yelled.
“They were addressed to me! That’s all you needed to fucking know.”
“Watch what you say to your mother,” Michael’s father butted in. “It was a mistake.”
“One that could ruin my life!”
“Ah, please, gettin’ into college, big fucking deal. You’re not going to get anywhere with it, so stop wasting everyone’s time.”
“You don’t know.”
They both just laughed at their son, who burst out of the house and ran into Jon, sobbing. They went around back, past a pile of half-filled paint cans that Michael’s brother had been sniffing, to a trio of trees, their adventure spot from younger days. It took a while for him to calm down, which he did by throwing pinecones at an old shed. Then Jon’s pronouncement riled him back up.
“When’s mine gonna kick in?”
“I don’t know. I thought you’d be happy.”
Michael only grumbled and smashed a pinecone against a tree. Jon offered up how pale Gabbaducci looked the other day as a peace offering.
“So what?” Michael fumed. “You got a hot girl lusting after you, what did I get? Oh, he feels a little queasy. His fake tan needs touching up. He has the sniffles. Big fucking deal.”
“Give it time. That’s all I’m saying.”
Michael sullenly nodded.
“I need your help to get a car to pick her up for the date.”
“What do you want me to do? I don’t have one.”
“You got one before. The van from that Brian Elder guy.”
“Ah. I don’t know how to get hold of him, except at Snakeland. I don’t know where he lives or even that much about him. He had his own reasons for helping me.”
“I guess I’ll ask around there then.”
“He seemed kind of dangerous. I don’t know how exactly, but he had that aura of being capable of great evil. Didn’t he?”
Jon thought about it, but every argument was overridden by daydreams of Maria’s curly hair, scented with female attraction. Phantom sensations tantalized him: Of his hands running over her perfect skin, her shapely breasts, moist mouth. All other ideas were driven out.
“Don’t care. I’m doing it.”
CHAPTER 10
Blessed are the Victorious
Lombardos was not a small place, but it was carefully designed so that every table felt intimate. It was close, warm but not hot, with tasteful, but not distracting, art about the room. Taken as a whole, each room in itself could be considered a work of art, so elegantly did every table, chair, color, and painting swirl together.
Jon did not notice any of this. All he had eyes for was the young lady across the table slurping down lobster ravioli. He picked at his salad, filled with odd vegetables he’d never heard of and sipped a diet Coke, served to him in a wine glass to help make him seem grown up. As he did so, Jon mused on what it had taken to bring them both to this spot.
After Jon had told him of the success the previous day, Michael had stormed off up to his room, predictably reciting one of his foul limericks.
“There died a young girl named Maria,
Well known for slutty behavior,
When the priest thought her shriven,
And fitted her for heaven
He cried, ‘Go on and fuck the Savior!’”
Sour grapes. Michael would just have to get used to the taste of them. Jon had bigger things to worry about. Maria. Eventually he would get back to figuring out what his parents were up to, he told himself. Right now, he needed to take care of this. In fact, it was all he could think about, no matter what else happened. Jon took stock on what the date required. Even if the girl was charmed, that didn’t mean he shouldn’t put his best foot forward. First was money.
Well, that was easy. He waited until the old man was busy elsewhere, then snuck into the “hidden” safe. So much money was piled up that his parents wouldn’t miss five hundred. Or he hoped they wouldn’t. Father seemed very busy this week, disappearing for fourteen hour stretches and Mother had come and gone. She was now dragging little Catherine around to another set of beauty pageants. Oh, screw it, this was his chance. Even if he had to pay off Hell afterwards, it would be worth it to fulfil his wet dream fantasy.
Several new documents placed on top of the money had caught his eye. It was a deed, an old land registry on top of a modern reiteration of the same information, and a transfer of title and bill of sale to a company called Bright Dawn Cleaning Supplies, Inc. The title was for Goodleburg Cemetery. Could you buy a cemetery? Jon had never heard of such of thing. He guessed it might be possible if the graves were on private land. Goodleburg was one of the oldest cemeteries. It had certainly been around before any current laws on the books. Maybe its private status had been grandfathered in.
Was it Father who had been spying on them that night? Either him or some flunky, like that man Absolom, who had disappeared after that day. What had he and Father been talking about? Memories of their three-way with his mother had driven away the rest of the details of that afternoon.
As to why it was bought, that was easy. They needed it for its soft properties to better contact the beyond. Guess the basement wasn’t big enough, or malleable enough, for whatever Father had planned. It must be something big. Jon knew Father wasn’t an idle boaster. The old man was up to something.
That was all the thought Jon had given the mystery. He was a man with a mission. After closing the safe, he had snuck back into the secret room to rewind the tape just a bit. Inside he saw that the old bottle of whiskey had been replaced with a new unopened one.
Then came the vehicle. He had his license, but there was no way to borrow Father’s BMW. The St. Fond patriarch kept the keys in his pocket at all times, and Mother was still gone on her trip.
He was forced to go with his first inclination and get Brian Elder’s van. This had been daunting. It meant dragging himself off to Snakeland and listening to dull people pretend they’re clever, until he could drop the fateful question on where the old man might be found.
Most of the poseurs turned pale at the question and refused to talk. They started like they’d been slapped and changed the subject. One fellow with a forgettable face and a pink mohawk just shook his head back and forth until he vomited. There was only one person, a rotund woman, who liked wearing operatic Viking gear, who whispered, “I heard he rents a room over on Windspear in the University Heights area.”
That was a jog. The area was in Buffalo proper, near the massive state college, where all the Ivy League rejects ended up. Once a proud Irish working class neighborhood where everyone knew each other, the whole of it had been renovated into transient apartments for the college crowd. As the occupants tended to move after a year, the absentee landlords let the houses fall apart, doing just enough to keep the lazy building inspectors off their backs.
Without knowing exactly where Elder was on the long street, Jon rode up and down it endlessly. Whenever he tired, the vision of a naked Maria spurred him on to keep pedaling until he spotted the same van Michael had gotten.
He strode confidently on to the house porch, the building was a duplex, and banged on the front door. Thick curtains flickered on the ground floor and the old man appeared at the door, dressed in a sauce-stained T-s
hirt that bore the legend “whip inflation now.” He walked outside in flip flops worn down to its last layer of foam rubber.
“Why, it’s the melancholy douche. How fares Demark?”
Jon brushed off whatever the hell that meant. “I want to hire—”
“Oh, that’s different!” Elder squealed and hustled him inside.
The first thing Jon noticed was that the curtains weren’t actually curtains at all. Both the walls and windows were covered with thick sheets of linoleum, while the hardwood floor was bare, except for pizza boxes.
Everything in the place was hand-me-down and makeshift. Instead of a table, there was a giant spool that used to coil industrial strength cables. Milk cartons substituted for chairs. A bunch of old gym mats and flat pillows were his bed and sofa. A little black-and-white portable TV rested on the floor. Jon noticed it was the same type he had in his room.
“Uh, nice place.”
“Don’t pay any attention to it. I got taken in by a linoleum salesman once and didn’t want the stuff to go to waste.” He plopped down on the mats. “So, who’s the mark?”
Jon remembered Elder gave his profession as psychic assassin. “Oh, no, no. I just want to hire your van for the evening.”
Elder was disappointed and mumbled into his chest for a while until Jon threw a c-note at him. That perked the old man up and he ran into a back room to root about for the keys.
“You have to fill it up with gas,” he called.
“Fine.”
Jon peaked at the backroom. It was filled with antique oddities tossed about on cheap fold-out card tables. Weird devices of smoked glass and metal and ancient bronze astrolabes, used in older days to navigate the seas, lay cluttered together like the discarded science that spawned them. Yellowed papers, pieces of parchment, vellum documents, and what looked like papyrus codices were heaped around a state-of-the-art Commodore 64 computer and at least fifty square floppy disks. The monitor was propped up by a large book made of several thousand pages, with a thick leather cover and sealed by a brass clasp. Anatomical charts covered the walls. Little notes were taped all over them. What they were specifically about was a mystery. The alphabet used was unknown to Jon, assuming it wasn’t just gibberish.
