Sonant

by A. Sparrow

  “Privacy. Sure, I get it. Not a problem.”

  “Her number’s not listed. But if you ask around … music circles in particular.”

  “I’ll do that,” said John. “Thanks.” As he turned to leave, the woman touched his shoulder. He wheeled around to be pinned by her penetrating gaze.

  “Hey,” she said. “Good luck.”

  ***

  He drove home, not even listening to what seemed on the surface to be an intense political discussion on NPR. He barely noticed that he had made the turn into the cul-de-sac until he had pulled into the driveway and the act was complete.

  The sound of his Hoover upright carried out through the open windows. He entered the foyer to find Jerry vacuuming in his cammie-patterned bib overalls, a feather duster jammed into his back pocket. Rand sat on the floor of the kitchen playing blocks with Nigel, while Jason bounced in his bouncer.

  “Did some chores while you were out,” said Jerry. “Washed the dishes. Did a load of colors.”

  “Well, gee. Thanks Jer.”

  “This way, you can come out with me to them woods. Rand’ll watch the kids.”

  “Um, I’d rather not, thanks. There’s a lot more to do and—”

  “Listen.” Jerry took him by the elbow and led him out of the room. “Rand’s a good kid and all,” he whispered. “But he’s got no woods sense whatsoever. Tripping on every twig. Chattering non-stop. I’d appreciate it if you could come out with me.”

  “Uh, I don’t know, Jer.” He sucked in his breath through clenched teeth.

  Jerry twisted the corner of his mouth and hoisted up a pack dangling with ropes and gear.

  “C’mon. You’re coming along.”

  John sighed and grabbed his jacket off a coat stand.

  ***

  They stood on the mossy ledge overlooking the hell house. Fallen leaves obscured some of the tracks. There were no fresh traces. Jerry had strapped a pair of camouflaged plastic boxes to trees on each side of the moss patch.

  “What the heck are those?”

  “Bushnell scouting cameras with motion sensors and a flash. If anything goes by, we get a picture, automatic, day or night.

  John struggled over how or if to tell Jerry about what he had witnessed at the Arts Coop. All Jerry knew about the incident was what he had read in the newspaper. As far as Cindy knew, he had been at Madeline’s having dinner with Dale. But it didn’t seem fair to leave him in the cold.

  “I was in Ithaca today, Jer, talking to some people, and at that band show the other night. Where the supposed bomb went off? There was one of these things there, and it etched a groove in the pavement—like acid, just like we see here through the moss.”

  “Don’t surprise me one bit. That was a fucking fra diavol.”

  “You know of these things?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “You’ve seen them? Up close?”

  “Not quite. But I aim to. We ran into one in the Ozarks, once. A little town, deep in the hills. The thing came out whenever it wanted, sun or no sun. Spooked the whole damn community, carving up lawns, ruining paint jobs on cars.”

  “Donnie sent a team out, but they couldn’t do crap. So then he sent me, and I had no better luck. The thing just went on its way when it was good and ready. Of course, Donnie gave me credit for a deliverance.”

  “Fra diavol, what does that mean?”

  “Mean’s devil’s little brother. Problem is, any spin of wind can kick up dust. Makes for a lot of background noise to sift through and find these fuckers. Every place on earth’s got stories of whirlwinds, dust devils and shit. Most of the time, they’re just some little spin of the wind that peters. But some keep on spinning and spinning like they got turbines up their ass.”

  “Those ones, are they dangerous?”

  “Don’t know. That’s what Donnie and me are trying to figure out. Still.” He taped a clear plastic sheet around a tree and sprayed it with some aerosol. “This is Tanglefoot. It’s a kind of stickum orchardists to trap peach borers. I use it to pick up traces of fur and stuff when things rub against it. Gives us more clues about what we might dealing with.”

  “Fur?”

  “Whatever.” Jerry shrugged. “They gotta be made of something. Maybe we can get ‘em to leave a piece of themselves behind.” He wrapped and sprayed a second tree. “There. Now let’s go hunting.”

  He strode off into the forest. John took one longing glimpse of the subdivision below, before trotting after him.

  ***

  They zigged and zagged across knobs and ridges, through forest and clear cuts leveled by game managers seeking to maintain some artificial meadows diversify the habitat. Much of it, John recognized from their prior excursion. Some of it was a whole new world, like the stands of spiky, needle-fallen tamarack standing sentinel over the banks of bogs ringed with crimson-leafed blueberry bushes.

  A ravine with a wall of collapsed ledges forming caves drew an inordinate amount of attention from Jerry. When he got down on his belly and started to crawl into one, John had had enough.

  “Don’t expect me to follow you in there.”

  “Oh, I ain’t going in,” said Jerry, shining the beam of his little metallic blue flashlight into the lair. “Too cramped. Dusty.”

  “Watch out. It might be a den for some kind of animal.”

  “Might be? It is a den.”

  “For what?”

  “Not exactly sure,” said Jerry. “Ain’t a vegetarian, I’ll tell you that.” He crawled out, got up and moseyed along the line of tumbled stone. “Now I kinda wish we’d a waited and set one of those scout cameras here. This is a place that gets some action.”

  John tried to find the sun, lost behind ridge and cloud. “You know where we are?”

  “I know exactly where we are.” He patted his GPS, but did a double-take and frowned. “Or I will, soon as we get out of this wrinkle and catch another satellite.”

  Above the ravine, they hit a plateau. Jerry clipped a supplementary GPS antenna to his slouch cap. His face relaxed. “This way.” He strode off confidently down a corridor of oaks, their boles thick and straight.

  Jerry checked it frequently to guide them down the staggered transects they cut across hill and hollow. As far as John could tell, he wasn’t finding much of interest. The tracks he stopped to study were all made by ordinary hoof and paw, nothing remotely demonic.

  They paused at the traces of an old abandoned dirt road, evident only from the strip of younger trees that filled its curves. John glanced up towards the sun again, still concealed behind a thick screen of cloud. He made a quick sign of the cross.

  Normally, John saw nature as a place for one to get closer to God. But these woods were different. From the first time Cindy showed him the house she wanted, when it was just an open frame of timbers, the chaotic rumple of this landscape, the claustrophobia of its canopy had made him uneasy. Now that he had seen one of its entities up close, his unease had only grown.

  Without even thinking, he started reciting the Lord’s Prayer out loud. It wouldn’t hurt to let the Lord know he was thinking of Him. John hoped that the feeling was mutual.

  Jerry looked askance at him and smirked—such an odd reaction from a fellow Christian. Most folks in Cindy and John’s circle would have joined in the praying, or at least provide a hearty Amen. It struck John that when Mac or Donnie started up a prayer at the house, Jerry always seemed to be absorbed in some other activity.

  “How come I never see you pray, Jerry?”

  Jerry kept his eyes to the ground, scuffing at the newly fallen leaves, checking every fractured twig and scrape in the dirt. “Is it that obvious?”

  “I’m not the most observant person, but … yeah.”

  Jerry sighed. “I try to be a good sport about it. I try to duck my head and mumble and all when I see folks praying. Don’t mean to embarrass Donnie in front of the clientele.”

  “You’re a … an atheist?”

  “Hell no, I’m not no athei
st. I just don’t claim to know what’s what and who’s who in the universe and all. I mean, it wasn’t always that way. I see things in this job that make me question things. Donnie seems to find some way to connect it all up and fit it next to Jesus, but I can’t do that. I just can’t.”

  “How is it you work for a Christian deliverance ministry?”

  Jerry shrugged. “Donnie’s a pragmatist. He appreciates my skills. He figures, at least I don’t work for the other side.”

  “Is he sure?”

  Jerry’s initial glare evolved into a guffaw. “Stop with the Jesus crap already. You think I don’t get enough already from Donnie? He’s tried to convert me a hundred times. Think I finally wore him out. I hope.”

  “Have to admit,” said John. “I was a lapsed Catholic before I met Cindy. Only went to church on Christmas and Easter.”

  “So, do you believe, or is it just pretend?”

  “I believe. Sure I do.”

  Jerry picked his way over a trickle of a stream, lined with flakes of black shale, all perfect skipping stones, if only they had a lake for skipping.

  “The way I see it, this universe is too big for any bunch of humans to claim they got it all figured out. I seen too many weird things to believe we’re even close to knowing what’s going on.”

  “But you have to believe in something, don’t you?” said John. “How else do you make sense of who you are, why you’re here?”

  “Who cares? It’s sheer arrogance to think there’s some Supreme Being who gives a fuck about what we all do. I’m not denying that there’s a Supreme Thingamabob of some sort up there, but do you think it makes a difference whether some bacteria knows whose colon its infesting?”

  “Gosh Jerry, that’s … just wrong.” John winced at the analogy. “We’re all created … in His own image.”

  “Yeah, right. Like God’s a fucking space monkey. That makes a whole lot of sense.”

  “Space … monkey?”

  “Think about that, next time you look in a mirror. Might just be my knack for seeing through facades, but I sure don’t see a whole lot of difference between us and a bonobo. I mean, ninety-nine percent of our DNA is exactly the same. Do bonobos believe in a God that looks like them?”

  “What the heck’s a bonobo?”

  “They’re chimps, John. Fucking chimpanzees.”

  “Oh. But that extra one percent, it’s pretty special, isn’t it?”

  “Special? So we got bigger noses. We walk upright. Got a bigger brain. Big deal. It’s not like we do much with ‘em.” Jerry grabbed onto a sapling and sighed. “Now you got me going. Listen, don’t mention any of this to Donnie. I’m not supposed to have existential discussions with the clientele.” His fingers traced a set of healed-over scratches in the thin bark. “Though, you’re not like most of the folks who hire us. You don’t have that glaze some get. You’ve actually got something going on behind those eyes.”

  “Well, thanks. I guess.” A red-tailed hawk glided past, high above the treetops. “What I don’t get about you being in the deliverance business is … if you don’t believe in God … how can you believe in the devil?”

  “Good. Evil. Now you’re just talking about labels,” said Jerry. “It’s all arbitrary. No denying, there are dangerous things out and about in this world. Folks have no clue what’s scrambling around out there in their back yards while they’re sleeping. Are they bad? Is a fox evil for being hungry and chomping on somebody’s pet? Whether things are evil or not, who they belong to, that’s irrelevant. Someone needs to keep an eye on all those other entities most folks don’t know about. And that’s my job. All that deliverance stuff that Donnie does, that’s just fluff … to make people feel better.”

  “So you think these deliverance rites … are just for show?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  “Don’t tell Cindy that.”

  Jerry stopped at the base of a huge beech with a fluted trunk and poked at a spoor with a stick. John came over and peered down at a dark, greasy turd studded with bits of bone and fur. “Whatcha got there?”

  “Looks like bobcat poo,” said Jerry. “It’s got crunched-up squirrel bones, or maybe it’s rabbit.”

  “I never realized we had wildcats in our backyard.”

  Jerry straightened up and gazed up at the knob overlooking their position. “That ain’t the half of it. You got fishers, weasels, foxes, maybe even lynx, from time to time. But I expect the coyotes are your biggest threat.”

  “Threat? Those scrawny things? They wouldn’t dare go near a man, would they?”

  “No, but they’ll take a child,” said Jerry. “Don’t you ever leave your boys in the yard alone. One clamp of those jaws can crush a little skull.”

  John cringed. “Oh come on. No need to talk like that.”

  “I’m just sayin.’ These northern coyote’s are hybrids. Ten, fifteen percent wolf blood. Bigger and meaner than the ones we got down south.”

  “Well, I’ve been here a year and haven’t seen or heard a single coyote.”

  “No, but I bet they been looking at you. If it was me, living out here with those little boys, I’d get myself a big dog. Get some early warning at least. Some deterrence.”

  “Yeah, just what I need. A dog to take care of, along with everyone else.”

  “I’m just sayin.’”

  John looked up, struggling to locate the sun, behind the thick wall of cloud. “We should probably start heading back, don’t you think?”

  “We are back,” said Jerry. “The house is just over this hill.”

  “Really?” A wave of relief loosened some of the anxiety that had been constricting him. He pushed ahead of Jerry and climbed. When he passed over the crown, there below them, just as Jerry said, sprawled the clearing of the would-be second subdivision. A slash through the treetops marked the lay of Connecticut Hill Road.

  A movement in the laurels caught his eye. Whatever was there, he couldn’t focus on it, as if it had no mass to reflect light.

  “S-something’s down there!”

  Jerry un-slung his shotgun and pushed past John. He stopped dead a few strides down the slope. One of the cameras flashed. Something crunched. A blurry mass slid through the moss and over a ledge.

  Jerry charged down the slope like an assault commando, shotgun at his hip. A swirly thing much larger than the one that had come out of the bell jar burst out of a patch of mountain laurel and into the trees, careening around to the back side of the hill. He stopped on the mossy shelf and wriggled out of his pack.

  John hung back until a rustling behind him raised a chill and got him moving. He scurried off down to Jerry’s side. Jerry was kneeling next to his pack, removing a zip-lock bag and a pair of forceps from a kit. He picked through bits of shredded moss.

  “Fuckers didn’t waste any time, did it?” Jerry nodded towards one of the scout cameras. Its plastic housing lay crumbled and blackened in the moss.

  “My God. Is it burnt?”

  “It’s not melted,” said Jerry, holding up a black shard with his forceps. “It just looks … converted.”

  “Into what?”

  “It’s all flaky and greasy. It’s that graphite stuff again. The damned thing shits pure carbon. If it can do this to plastic, imagine what it can do to flesh.”

  John thought back to the girl in Aerie’s band and the scaly, red patches on her singed arms. He wanted to tell Jerry about it, but he couldn’t. It would blow his cover with Cindy.

  “I don’t think your silver birdshot is gonna do any good with this thing.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Jerry. “Might have to reconsider my ordnance.” He went over to the other camera and opened the case, popping out an SD card, replacing it with another from the breast pocket of his vest.

  John went over one the trees that had been wrapped with plastic and sprayed with stickum. Large hunks were eaten away down to bark. The bits that remained were curled up at the edges and flaky, like ash. Where the plastic
remained, much of the stickum seemed to have been scraped off. The traces that remained were studded with bits of dust and grit.

  Jerry came up behind him with his tweezers and pulled off some of the remnants. “Well, this sure will keep me and Rand busy a while.”

  “Jerry, I have to tell you something. That other night, when all that stuff went down in Ithaca, I saw one of these things close up. I was there. I went—”

  Music began to throb from the hell house. It seemed different, more mellifluous and melodic than anything John had heard before. Electric sounds blended with the fiddle strains.

  “Oh Lord,” said Jerry. “Satan’s spawn are at it again.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “Believe what? That those punks are the spawn of the devil?” He snickered and winked. “Come on. I need a beer.”

  He turned down the hill, keeping time with the skittery beat.

  Chapter 31: Samantha

  Aerie rushed through the glass doors of the terminal to the first arrivals screen she could find. Piedmont Flight 462 had already landed. Passengers streamed into the baggage claim area. She caught her breath, smoothed her hair, and picked the lint off her sweater.

  She had just survived a twenty-four hour cleaning jag, fueled by French Roast and raisin bread. Band-aids and bacitracin swaddled her feet. Every joint and muscle ached. Every step felt like walking on a bed of nails.

  It wouldn’t have been such an ordeal had she owned a single mop or vacuum cleaner. She had made do with an old broom worn to nubs and a pizza box for a dust pan, dusting every surface with a rag of an old Vegas T-shirt, corralling by hand whatever dust bunnies had escaped her broom.

  Whatever she couldn’t sweep away, she scrubbed, getting down on her knees with sheet after sheet of paper toweling, attacking every inch of tile, linoleum, hardwood and porcelain until the soiled and crumpled wads filled an entire trash bag. For the carpet she used strips of duct tape pressed against the pile until they came up completely coated in hair and crumbs and not a square millimeter left tacky.

  As usual, her mom was one of the last people off the plane. That was Samantha Walker for you, never wanting to get in other folks’ way, or to be impeded by them. She despised the tussle of mobs, ever waiting for a clear path so she could pull her things together in her ‘own sweet time,’ as she put it.