“It’s all right,” Matthew repeated.
“Ain’t you hearin’ what I’m sayin’ to you, son? What was it that happened? I gotta get ya to a doctor.”
Waving him off, Matthew stood on his own and moved to the staircase. “I got mugged.”
Eugene Carmichael looked at Gusto as the dog crawled over to his mat by the kitchen door and lay with a whine and a huff of air. “Jesus God! And the sons a bitches mugged my dog, too? Ain’t there any shame left in this world? Did you see who done it?”
“No. Couple or three wild kids, I think. Came up behind me. Couldn’t see anything in the rain, in the night. Gus helped me out.”
“It’s ’cause of that damn Bosco Bob’s party, I bet! This whole town goes shitstorm crazy when that rich man decides to throw a shindig. He’s a regular goddamn Caligula, if anyone’s got mind enough left to ask me. And you should still go to the hospital. And the police.”
“Nothing to report.”
“Well, you don’t worry about that. Hodges will probably already have them kids in custody anyways, if they’re out there harmin’ decent folk. I’m gonna go find out if I can get some damn lazy doctor to get over here and come see you, son. Your head’s lookin’ a little dented, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I’m okay, just a little shaken up,” Matthew said.
“Well, then, what the hell is that stink, you cross tracks with a skunk? What’d them rotten kids do to my dog?”
They got to Matthew’s room and he pulled away from Carmichael, his ribs protesting when he bent to open the satchel, grabbing other clothes, the chills chopping at him deeply. His frozen arms were still blue. “Gusto’s beat up, but he’ll be all right. You should get him to a vet.” Go, anywhere, leave me.
“Anything I can do for you, though? A drink maybe? A shot of whiskey or two? Got the good stuff under the sink. Some of Emma’s liniment? She’s got all kinds of that grease around the house, and it won’t make you smell too much worse.”
“No, thank you, I just need a shower.”
“Yeah, well, I ain’t arguing on that.” Carmichael grimaced and stood back, his concern apparent but with little reaction, the man just staring and not moving, until finally he let his hands drop to his sides. “I sure don’t like the look of that cut on Gusto’s back, either. I’ll getting him to the vet, then, he’s gonna be needin’ stitches. Of course, that’s only supposing that the doctor hasn’t gone off to the party by now. Mebbe I just better go into Gallows, at least there people are still in their right heads.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be back soon. You remember to take it easy on yourself. It ain’t in my nature to mother, but I wish you’d let me do something for you. But if not, all right, then. Jodi’ll be back any minute, I suspect. Okay?”
“Thank you,” Matthew said, able to grin for an instant.
“All right, then, but I got some Man-O’-War cologne on my dresser that you’re more than welcome to use.”
Matthew shut the door and began pulling off his tattered clothes, blisters on his chest flattening and draining, healing now, even as he watched. His kidneys were bruised badly, back covered with scratches, welts, and bites. He quaked, a rush of nausea and dizziness dropping him forward over the bed. He snaked out of his pants and underwear. The cold sweats came and his bad ankle beat like castanets. After a moment the vertigo passed and he brushed his wet hair out of his eyes, got up, and made his way to the window, knowing that he was just being corralled. He deserved what he got, so stupid, but at least so human.
A few overlooked dead luna moths lay crushed in his tracks. His reversal charm should have vanished these as well, but he’d been missing the finer details. Lightning blazed from ground to sky in the distance, impossibly igniting in the cold night. He drew back the curtains and watched Carmichael lead Disgusto into the passenger seat of his car and back out of the driveway. Gus looked up at the window and wagged his tail once. Matthew couldn’t help himself and actually waved as Carmichael sped off toward Gallows.
The dog had saved his life.
Outside this window, the trellis had pickets along the edge, and Matthew gathered his clothes and hung these rags from the points. Tired and weak, he still focused himself enough to speak the Enochian spells: Images of the Seraphim flooded his mind, Debbi moving behind him but just out of peripheral vision, making him turn to look, to turn and look again. His tongue twisted to fit the melody of the language of angels, in and out of time with his pulse. He placed the hand that Mauels had bitten through on top of the cursed clothing. Words worked against the buffeting wind. Soon flames licked at the lifeless brown vines and his clothes were on fire, burning perfectly until there was nothing but cinders left to blow in the strange storm.
Something would happen soon—maybe A.G. knew what, but he wasn’t telling. This reaping of the whirlwind.
Naked, he moved down the hallway to the bathroom and checked himself in the mirror, assessing damage. The fourth scarred point of the inverted pentagram—the Goat’s other ear—had already scabbed over. Flecks of dried blood flaked off the burns. He touched the scores of bruises and gashes on his face, neck, and torso. He was lucky that he hadn’t drowned when the backlash slammed him down to the bottom of the lake. In two days, the gray streaks in his hair had grown into rivers twining through his curls. He snatched a towel off the shower rod and stepped into the tub, his knees cracking. He scrawled the seal of Solomon in the soap scum on the tiles.
Aiming the shower nozzle to spray into his face, he turned on the water. Steam started rising, but it still didn’t seem to be hot enough for him. There was a chunk of malformed soap already in the dish, and he briskly lathered up, over and over again, letting the scalding water flush away the daemonic perfume and lake sediment, his blood so thick swirling in the drain. Vapor floated into his face like the ghosts of friends and family.
He dropped the soap.
“No,” he whispered. “Oh no.”
He bent and retrieved it, looking deeper into the yellow wax of the soap, peering closer as if words might be written in it. He shut off the water, hearing the souls now whispering across time, so distantly he almost thought he imagined them.
Almost.
“You maniacs!” he shouted.
He flung the soap from him, disgusted, but after what had transpired tonight, he realized it didn’t matter much anymore. Soon he’d simply be one of them, another of the desecrated dead. He got out of the shower and dressed.
Ready to party.
A sound, or the lost ripple of a sound, drew him to the dimly lit den. The silence of the empty boardinghouse made the groaning and rumble of the invading storm all the more desultory and definite.
A.G.? he asked, but felt no return psychic reverb, none of the crossing of life force he could note. He stepped farther into the room, glancing to the left and right while leaves blasted up against the windows. He went to the table, at last realizing that the chess set wasn’t composed of normal Civil War pieces, as he’d originally thought.
There was much to be said about bones.
Matthew knew them well: how they looked up close, straight from the earth, old and broken, treated and polished like ivory, used according to ritual, as locks and keys. He knew skin. He knew human fat.
Chess pieces of the body and spirit, taken from corpses. He understood that immediately as he touched them, the soldiers stern and vicious and callous, young, belligerent and posed to strike. Some of them grinning and handsome, but all of them cruel; the victims’ agony engraved into every crevice of their starving, hollow faces, wearing nothing but rags and agony; each body poised in some ultimate torture, shrinking from boots and bayonets.
The years it must have taken.
The hatred honed to perfection, perhaps as fine as Matthew’s own, perhaps far better—this rage needed to keep the dead past alive long enough to faultlessly remember each face of never-ending torment and ceaseless, sadistic pleasure. It could happen like this, the bon
es on the table, the human fat in the shower.
The front door opened and Kessner and Hoffman trudged through the foyer. One of them was crying.
Kessner entered, coughing hard into his fist, and proceeded to hang his overcoat on the rack in the corner. He spotted Matthew, nodding slowly and walking over to his seat: the Jew’s side. “So, you have noticed.”
Each movement of his fragile body appeared as if it might be his last. “That is a start.” He picked a pawn off the board and turned it in his fingers, carefully, as though the bones were his own. “This is me,” he said. “I am only fourteen.” He replaced the piece and took another, one that might have been the Queen. “This is my mother. Her name was Tzipora. It was her grandmother’s name. It is also the name of Elie Wiesel’s younger sister, who did not survive the camps except in the dedication to his fine book Night. You know Wiesel?”
Matthew nodded.
“I am glad that there is at least one such book dedicated to my mother’s name. It is befitting, I like to think.” Kessner leaned forward and chose a Nazi pawn from the front line. “This is the soldier who killed her. He was little older than me, this boy of seventeen, straight from the Hitler Youth He lived most of his young life in the city of Munich, the birthplace of Herr Himmler.” He held the two pieces together, the woman lying on the ground, arm raised to avert a blow, frightened eyes pleading while the soldier kicked out, his foot coming down on her throat at the precise angle. Placed together, the bones were each consummated. “This other boy … his name is Hoffman.”
“God.” Matthew nodded again, having no idea what else to do, the extent of evil so concrete in the town, in their lives, this room, that its influence was staggering. So much power in those shards of splintered bodies. His own flesh was now covered with the flesh of others.
Kessner replaced the chess pieces and said, “I no longer believe in God, which is not such a bad thing, despite the fact that my forefathers were all rabbis. I go to temple, but that is out of respect for my parents, and because I worship the past. It lends my existence a little more credence, and puts fate a bit more firmly into my own two hands.” He gestured to the doorway, and beyond to the living room, where the weeping persisted, though now lower. “We have just returned from temple, he and I, and now he goes and sits in front of the television and is forced to watch the rallies where the gay men and women hold their lovers without shame. He watches the homeless, who are something like the gypsies, shouting obscenities at their own president of the United States, decrying your very own government officials. These freedoms.”
Kessner laughed under his breath, and there really was humor in it. “He sees the Berlin Wall come down and sobs all night long. He was not a soldier who whined that he only followed orders. He believed. He truly believed.” Kessner smiled and ran a palm over the board, tapping at the black and white squares as though listening to the blackshirts marching in step. “Oh, he wants to kill me, this is true, but he does not dare. For he, too, worships only his memories, of which I am now the greatest part. This is his torment, to see how badly his precious Thousand-Year Reich has failed him and the Fatherland. I can think of no better vengeance.”
The scars on Matthew’s chest twitched, speaking, having tasted the murdered again, and wanting more, so much more.
“Yes, your skin sparkles,” Kessner said. “He still has many bars of soap. He bathes with them on occasion, washing his sins with all of the families. I see no reason to stop him. I enjoy the idea that the dead are here with me, forever upon him as much as on myself.”
Kessner brushed his shaggy beard down, and said, “She’s in the basement, you know.”
“Who?”
He waved Matthew on. “There. Go. See for yourself. It is not my place to bring sadness to another innocent old man’s dream.”
Matthew left, with the Goat rippling beneath his sweater. In the living room, Hoffman sat on the couch, sobbing, watching the news, his mouth moving but no sound emerging.
“Come!” Kessner shouted from the den. “Come! Kill my mother again tonight.”
Hoffman shut off the TV and went.
Matthew unlatched and opened the basement door, feeling for the light switch but not finding it. He descended the rest of the stairs in the dark, and at the bottom, reached up to pull the chain he hoped would be there. It was. The single lightbulb glowed effusively through the unfinished basement. Boxes, cabinets, toolboxes, and other assorted junk of decades piled high all around.
He listened to the hum and drew closer.
He opened the meat freezer and stared into the face of Emma Carmichael’s corpse.
At least she was smiling.
Chapter Eighteen
Debbi laughed and flashed her braces, stuck her tongue out, threw her hands out, and poo-pooed him again in her mother’s fashion. “Smile!” she ordered, fist held to his chin. “Don’t be so grim and creepy all the time, this is an adventure! Like you’ve got something much better to do? Today’s the day we’ve been waiting for!”
No, it wasn’t, he hadn’t been waiting for it at all, but trying to dissuade her from this—he’d been reading, he’d already learned so much. She didn’t care about anything he said and just laughed. Debbi whirled around, like the way his mother danced with his father. “In a couple of hours we’re going to be stumbling on pirate treasure, listen to me, I’m telling you.” She told him, she was always telling him. “It’s down there in the ground. Pearls and diamond tiaras. Jewels and silver chalices.” No, witches abhorred silver. “Rubies, emeralds, gold doubloons and jade stolen from Chinese emperors. Anything you can name, everything you could ever want!”
He wanted her to forget about it.
Her eyes grew moon-wide and bright with anticipation. She bopped him gently on the jaw, bent and grasped the metal handle on the floor of the lighthouse, exerting herself until the blue veins stood out on her skinny forearms. “And even if there’s not we’ve still got nothing better going on in this dumpy town.” She grunted and heaved at the antiquary trapdoor cut out in the slates, but couldn’t budge it alone. Nobody could move it all the way, all the way open into there, wherever it led to, because of the locks and wards upon it. He could sense that now, and worse, whatever was in there could sense him.
She scowled at the rest of them and smooshed her smile into a frown. A.G. and Ruth bent to grab the handle with her, the three of them pulling but still not getting anywhere. Even if they opened it they wouldn’t be going anywhere except down the stone stairs.
Only he could slip through the wards. The counterspell wasn’t difficult, but not especially easy either. She said, “Well, are you going to help us or just stand there?”
He didn’t know what to do. He stood by them, so curious to see if he could open the door all the way, his breathing becoming ragged now in the heat, so close to Debbi. She smoothed the backs of her knuckles over his cheek the way his mother used to do, and a sob welled in his chest but thankfully didn’t come out.
Debbi said, “Come on, help us out with all them muscles.”
He bent and strained at the handle, the words reciting themselves in his head, sweat breaking on his top lip, and he knew in his heart that they were going to open this, and whispered so low under his tongue that she asked, “What did you say?” The rusted hinges finally squealed like an animal, rolled back, and the door flapped open.
“It wasn’t that tough the last time,” she said, puzzled, and Ruth added, “This is stupid.”
A.G. moved closer to him and got him into a headlock. “Yeah, well, that’s because Mr. Muscles here has been spending all his time in the library and bookshops for you, Deb. He’s pale and weak.”
“No, he’s beautiful,” Debbi said.
His face burned.
The flowing of the craft came so easily, as if he had been made for it.
Sunlight filtering in through the rotted planks covering the windows seemed absurdly distant. The highlighted dust looked like falling snow. Waves boomed on
the beach and seagulls continued to cawwww nearby, but he still felt as if the lighthouse itself stood much farther from the ocean than it should. He pushed A.G. away, wishing he could explain it to them, wanting to warn them but too excited that he was pleasing her and had the ability within him, happy to perform anything she bid.
“Holy digs,” Ruth said, looking through the trapdoor and seeing the first few stone steps. The stairs receded into the darkness below, and she bent and wiggled her fingers at it, as though testing the waters. “Freaky. How’d you ever find out about this, Deb?”
Debbi oohed and aahed in some exaggerated Alice in Wonderland astonishment. “I found it the only way you can find rabbit holes like this,” she said. “Pure luck. Those chains fastening the front door are so salt-eaten they’ve broken through, or maybe older kids cut a few links, I’m not sure. See, the door still looks chained shut, but it’s not locked. Anyway, I was hunting around the Point looking for seashells for Mr. Smiley here a few weeks back, and I just, y’know, stumbled into here. The trapdoor just looks like a storage basement.” Others had spent time here, beer bottles and condom wrappers scattered about the room. “But you’ll see that there are cracks in the rock down there, and the caves open up beyond it. It’s great! So now here we are. Soon to be millionaires.”
Ruth whirled. “You sneak! You mean you’ve known about this for weeks and you only told us about it last night?”
“Yeah, well…” Debbi looked sidelong at him. “He wanted to do some research. Kid spontaneity. There’s some marks on the walls he got really interested in. Anything to keep his nose in the books.”
“Do you really think there’s treasure down there, like all the gossip says?”
A.G. softly hip-checked Ruth, knocking her off balance. “Oh, please, don’t be ridiculous. Like if there was, they wouldn’t have discovered it by now?”
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