Finally, she stomps down onto flat earth.
The moon occupies the entire sky like an exaggerated matte painting in an old sci-fi movie. It lights the way and bathes the world in a ghost-white glow. Everything’s ethereal.
Rebecca glances back. Curiosity and perhaps one final vestige of reluctance. Jaime does her best to exploit this, begs to go home. The hill Rebecca has just traveled is no longer there. Nothing is. Only the lonely expanse of darkness.
“We’re the veil,” Rebecca says, plucking that from Jaime’s brain.
Jaime only laughs. A cutesy giggle filtered through adult lungs. Rebecca used to find that sound adorable in her little girl.
The ground is softer here, squishier, and the air is squalid. The stench of a locker room at halftime, complete with the stink of two-dozen spent bodies.
Jaime thinks it’s beautiful, forces Rebecca to weep at the sight.
“What happened to you?” Rebecca says.
Nothing. This response is immediate. Adamant. We worship the flesh. Flesh inspires Him. Therefore, flesh brings good fortune.
“You had a loving family,” Rebecca says. “We did our best with you.”
Don’t be a greedy gopher, Mom. Not everything’s about you.
Rebecca can’t take the irony of that thought. It busts her gut and makes her keel over. Real, bona fide laughter, because it’s the only thing you can do when it’s all for shit. There are a million responses she can offer but holds her tongue. Jaime glances at a few of them as they move through Rebecca’s brain and says, Wow, you don’t think too much of me.
To cite these perverse beliefs as some kind of hope fills Rebecca with despair. It’s nothing more than a horrible practice held over from a primitive world. And yet there are people in that motel so eager to belong to it. Who wish to touch a God who’ll touch back.
Jaime begins to fight Rebecca’s legs, making them feel like jelly. Suddenly, she’ll do anything to prevent her mother from reaching those torches.
“What are you afraid of?”
You, she says. You’re crazy and I’m not going to let you kill him. I thought I could control you. But you’re fighting me so . . . damn . . . hard . . .
The ring of fire nears. Circling and dancing flames scratch the onyx sky. Old stone steps scale to a rounded platform floating high over black oblivion.
Each step dips beneath her weight, but Rebecca’s quick. The torchlight is oddly welcoming, licking her face with warmth as she nears. Her footsteps echo like horse clops and deep down inside her, Jamie flails in panic.
You can’t!
“Can’t wh—”
Rebecca sees him. At last. The man she’s thought about for two years straight. The one who ruined it all.
Paul.
He kneels in stasis. Positioned in a way devoid of physics, looking more like a still frame from a movie. His body leans at a harsh angle, arms stretched overhead, reaching for something long passed in the sky. His naked body wears dark-streaked splatter and the way his face is twisted reveals a particular madness about him.
Paul is anything but lucid. His features are sunken, nearly decayed. Impossible to believe this is the healthy twenty-two-year-old man Rebecca once considered her future son-in-law. Skin’s pulled tight over his skeleton, but the sharpest edges of bone are in danger of tearing through. Every bit of muscle has been sapped away. His eyes are open, soft brown orbs floating in piss-yellow pools.
There’s nothing left in this man. He’s given everything away.
It makes Jaime’s heart beam. Mom’s too late. The only thing she can think is, He made it. He actually made it through.
Rebecca, on the other hand, feels nothing. No satisfaction. No anger. Certainly no relief. Paul has taken himself out of this world, denying her the one reason to live this long.
She feels sick and foolish over the things she’s done to get here.
Visiting Paul’s parents.
The memory of a falling hammer as it smashes through a skull, mashing the brain beneath. The way that body goes limp, save for its horrible and twitching face.
Or the gun barrel pressed so hard against a forehead it leaves a ringed depression as watery eyes plead and realize it’s hopeless.
It’s what she came to do.
And you think I’m a monster.
“You are,” Rebecca growls.
Jaime grows defensive. Hers was not a sacrifice made lightly. Paul hadn’t wanted it at all. But Jaime had to be the one to cross, don’t you understand? She couldn’t let another woman go on ahead in her place. No way, given what Paul was planning.
“Why did you let me think he killed you?”
Jaime laughs. It’s a wicked sound Rebecca’s never heard.
You had to get me here, Mom. Nobody else could’ve done that.
Rebecca is a transporter. That was her role. She looks down on the rotted face frozen before them. Paul seems to grin.
Rebecca lifts the axe, thinks, Fuck all of you, and drops it. Paul’s head shatters like a frozen pumpkin.
Jamie screams so hard the noise comes out of Rebecca’s mouth. Rebecca puts the blade to her own throat next, ready to yank the hilt.
It’s the only thing left.
But, oh, Jaime’s been expecting this. She flings her arm outward and, with a bend of her elbow, casts the weapon into the night. It never lands, never rattles across the ground below. It’s just gone.
Paul remains frozen in place, a thick sheet of red pus pumps like a geyser from that headless spigot.
Rebecca thinks, finally Bret was right, but it’s too late. Rebecca is almost gone, sapped of the will to continue. Revenge is the battery that had kept her juiced. But it’s dying, bringing Jaime into control. Her thoughts dominate this brain as the body learns to dance more steadily to her daughter’s music.
“It’ll take some getting used to,” Jaime says. “But you’re in pretty good shape.” She settles behind Rebecca’s eyes like the driver’s seat of a used car. The body’s odd—older, achier, groaning knees, imperfect vision, and a twitch at the base of the spine. Wear and tear that comes with age, Jaime thinks and smiles. Yeah, I can make this work.
Rebecca is stunned by just how little she can fight it. It’s a gift in some ways, because she thinks she’s been dead since that night two years ago, and all of this was some vision of hell glimpsed between the single blink of an eye.
When you’re called into the morgue to identify the body of your baby girl, the pall is so dark it can never really lift. And that worsens in the days leading up to the funeral, as you begin making arrangements. Choosing the dress the body will wear, the photo for the casket, the eulogy you’ve got to somehow write . . .
How can you talk about nineteen years of life? That’s the snap of a finger.
Then there’s the burial, the last goodbyes. Ain’t a parent on earth who wouldn’t swap places with their child to give them another chance. To avoid the despair you feel while standing on that cemetery grass, shivering in that always-autumn chill, no matter the time of year.
And yet, Rebecca feels nothing but hatred for her daughter.
“I wish it was different,” Jaime says. She turns away from Paul’s splattered remains. The field has returned. Maybe for Jaime it was always there.
Paul’s body is long gone, too. Even the bloodstains are missing atop the stone tile, the last remnants of a waking dream.
Jaime’s awake now.
“Time to see Him,” she says. “I’ve waited long enough.”
Rebecca’s last thought before she slips away is, Yeah . . . let’s see Him.
After everything, she’s at least curious.
She’s never met a god before.
28
WHY PAUL?
I’ll tell you why Paul.
I mean . . . he was never much of a worker. We know that. But . . . what a dreamer. I loved his promises.
He never got bit by that stupid 9-to-5 bug, knew there were other ways to make a living. Only education
he wanted was the one life teaches.
He wasn’t dumb or lazy . . . just different. Always thinking about the way life really works. Remember when he and I both got accepted to UMass? I don’t think I ever told you just how quickly he dropped out. It was after one walk through the bookstore, tallying the amount he was going to have to pony up for a single semester’s worth of books.
“That system,” he said. “That system’s gonna squeeze every dime out of you, honey. Books you won’t read, classes you don’t need. Parking fees, meal plans, an adviser who thinks you’re a number, who will push you to take four classes a semester knowing full well you can’t graduate in four years that way. It’s to their benefit they keep you here longer. And the really stupid ones will get pushed into other majors and then be left stranded on the job market without sellable skills. Higher learning’s a meat market.”
Some might disagree, but hey, he sold me.
I remember going home that day thinking maybe it isn’t for me either and Dad jumped down my throat, saying I wasn’t going to ring groceries the rest of my life.
I went to class while Paul took a job at the Fairview Country Club. The pay was under the table, north of nothing special. He trimmed flowerbeds, whacked down the weed crops that grew in knots around hole ten, and learned how to set the John Deere’s mower low enough to the ground to keep the fairway clean.
It wasn’t glamorous work, and Paul knew that. It was an act for the money people. A way to prove to them he knew the value of an honest day in the field.
I wasn’t surprised to hear Paul had ingratiated himself to others. Even you’ll agree, Mom, that his confident smile can turn your heart to butterflies. Make you think there’s no one better.
Because there isn’t.
The country club loved when he worked charity events, caddying for VIPs who were amused by his gift of gab. They helped him to build connections with local businessmen and state-level politicians—all part of his plan to claw his way to the next strata.
Paul took weekend work, too, pool cleaning and landscaping. Whatever those VIPs needed. He came home one day and told me how he got lured into a million-dollar kitchen when the bored housewife of some international CEO caught herself a doozy of a computer virus.
The wife, all bronzed wrinkles, peeled three one hundred-dollar bills from her wallet and slapped them on the counter—his, if he could fix it right now, no questions.
He could. And did. That would’ve been that, if not for one accidental glance at her browsing history just before clearing it away. One URL out of the ordinary, the only thing that wasn’t social media and gilded specialty shops. Something he’d never heard of before and couldn’t access—FindingTheVeil
It was something we weren’t supposed to see.
The site was behind a firewall, accessible only by password. A password he wanted. So Paul sent Old Miss Bronzer a phishing email that injected custom JavaScript into her browser, grabbing all the usernames and passwords off it.
Dick picks, compromising videos of hubby and underage mistresses—incriminating stuff, but not the Veil.
What was the Veil?
Well, we didn’t know. And it turns out nobody really did. Hence this website. FindingTheVeil. A digital secret society. A community of one-percenters from every corner of the world, each dedicated to solving the mystery by pooling evidence found in their personal collections.
What mystery?
Well, it’s all sourced from one single page. A page that’s older than time, they say. An illustration of a girl in coitus, her face crudely ecstatic and thrown back, upside down, so she’s at the bottom of the page. Her legs shooting up in a V. Between them a dangling curtain.
A veil.
From that website, Paul gets the names of other members.
Names whose laptops he eventually breaks into with the same JavaScript key.
He finds more digital whispers there inside the bodies of encrypted emails, digs them out from behind password-protected folders, and swipes the most careless sketches and document scans off unsecured clouds.
Paul abandons his goal of ladder climbing, quits his jobs and goes off the grid. Because this veil is the only thing that matters.
What’s behind it?
We get drips of information that wouldn’t fill a bucket.
It becomes an obsession.
The document that pointed the way for us was Arabian. Paul found it sitting on the hard drive of an actual Saudi prince. The scan of a page that’s locked up tight somewhere inside the Kingdom. It was sent encrypted to London for translation and the discovery yields a name never shared with the rest of the Veil Community.
It’s not exact, but the words were close enough to resemble Tanner Red. Maybe it’s like a game of telephone where the meaning changes the further it gets passed around, and maybe He doesn’t care what we actually call Him so long as He’s worshipped.
The deeper we get into this world, the older the documents become. Scans of yellowed pages, scrawls in a written a language no one’s ever seen. Yeah, you’ve seen it, Mom, but let me tell you . . . very few people on this earth have.
The language is alive. It slides the worlds around like . . . I dunno, some kind of Rubik’s cube, opening doors and then closing them just as harshly. Why do you think the book can hide in plain sight? Why nobody else recognizes it for what it really is?
Anyway, we begin putting these pages together. What few translations exist. It takes every hour of every day. Soon, we know what we’ve got.
The oldest secret.
A world of rituals and trespasses. Efforts to resurrect these practices inside temples hidden from both Christian and Islamic faiths.
We’re no historians, you know? But how is it possible for civilizations on two separate continents to worship the same ancient deity? Then I remember some random nugget from school, real diamond in the rough bit of info. How at some point long ago the world was once a single continent. I start to wonder how old this Tanner Red really is.
What’s funny is that the members of FindingTheVeil could’ve found all of this themselves, except they couldn’t even trust their own secret society in full, keeping things hidden from the rest because everyone among them wanted to be the one to finally figure out how to cross over and bring Him back.
You snooze you lose, right? It’s Paul who becomes the first to understand this history in full. Tanner Red in the New World and the women who killed a god. There’s mention of a book taken from one corner of the world to another. Pages that describe these events in full, and many things far older, brought to the New World and hidden inside the Village of Gar.
Unlike all the empty faith and mysticism in this world, here’s a god who’ll show His followers the secrets of the universe. All they need to do is be faithful . . . and ask.
We start to resent the powerful people and their efforts to conceal this secret. Like everything else, they want it for themselves.
But now, Paul’s got it. A roadmap.
And most importantly, nobody knows it.
Nobody except me, and I’m sorry to tell you this, Mom, but it’s so much more interesting and fulfilling than any part of the world you tried to prepare me for.
What nobody knows is there’s a way back for the vanquished god. He’ll come through a ritual, after a willing sacrifice has surrendered her body and can still prove loyal. This is meant to signal the complete and utter rejection of lesser faiths. Denial in the concept of an afterlife, not because there isn’t one, but because we have no interest in going there. His religion is flesh. Flesh is so much more interesting.
Do you know what it’s like to discover that? Like, parents are always making the mistake of telling their kids they can be anything they want to be. We can’t, and that’s a bitter fucking pill to swallow, you know? But for me? Well, when you find out that you can become the bride of a god and all you’ve got to do is find the balls to check out of here . . . well, that shakes you up.
And at first,
it’s a bad feeling. Like coming to the end of a treasure hunt and realizing that not only did you forget your shovel, but you can never get one.
That’s how Paul reacts. Sulks around the apartment feeling like it’s over because self-sacrifice is a bridge too far—or is it?
I wondered that while going to class, pretending to think about anything other than that possibility. There’s nothing like taking a few political philosophy electives to push you over the edge. You listen to college kids drone on and on with regurgitated talking points like they’re the first fucking idiots to ever have these thoughts. And this while the professor pretends to be dealing with free thinkers and grown ups? It’s so depressing.
My mind’s made up. And now it’s my turn to get Paul to come all the way around.
You wouldn’t believe it, Mom, just how little he wanted to kill me.
What scares him worse is what he needs to do after I’m gone.
It’s monstrous. Because he needs to actually reach into that void and give himself over to Tanner Red. Be the one who’s going to carry Him back. If he’s gonna send me on ahead, then he’s gonna be right behind me . . .
I don’t think either of us really wanted to walk anything back. We were scared, yeah, who wouldn’t be? I watched you come home every day, Mom, dreading the next morning, tired of talking about your day. We both saw the boredom in your eyes. It sucks. There’s just nothing in this world. It’s slavery. And if my life is my own, then I’m going to use it any way I want.
Paul didn’t think he could do it.
Not at first. I stripped, got him going with the hardest fuck he ever got. Have to fuck for Tanner Red because that’s what gets His . . . blood flowing, I guess. Ha ha. Power comes from bodies, you see, and we’ve got to imprint so our spirits can follow each other to the next life where our bodies will be different. Because they’re going to be.
We drove to the woods, never exchanging so much as a word the entire way out there. I guess our minds had diverged as reality set in. Too late for either of us. Curiosity is about to make Paul into the world’s most reluctant murderer. There’s no turning back now.
Rites of Extinction Page 11
