The Heavens Rise

by Christopher Rice

  Ben lowered the gun.

  “Jesus Christ,” she whispered. “What did you do to— Whoa.” Her fingers went to the bruises on his face, bruises he hadn’t seen yet so he had no idea how bad they were.

  “He did it—”

  “No. The blood on his face—”

  “I know. He did all of it. He threw me on the bed and then it was like he changed his mind. He smashed his head into the door frame.”

  “Ben . . .”

  “I’m dead serious, Elsa.”

  “How’d you get him off you?”

  “I didn’t. He just . . . stopped. I don’t know.”

  “Because of the gun?”

  “No. Before I got the gun.”

  “Crazy,” Elisa whispered again.

  “Pretty much. Yeah.”

  “You got a permit for that thing?” she asked him.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “ ’Cause I’m calling the cops,” she said, heading back toward their front steps.

  “And what are you going to tell them?”

  “His plate number. I wrote it down.”

  She was almost inside her front door when she said, “And Ben. This might not be the time, but maybe you could try meeting men the old-fashioned way.”

  “What’s the old-fashioned way again?”

  “I don’t know. Dinner?”

  “I wasn’t in the mood for dinner,” he said.

  “Were you in the mood for this?”

  He returned to his bedroom, turned on the lamp, put the gun back inside his nightstand. Then he shook for a few minutes

  What had he been in the mood for? He’d never dated anyone for longer than a few months because that was how long it took him to feel the upsurge of desperate possessiveness within him that he knew would destroy any chance at a healthy relationship. So instead, he’d nuke the thing with the usual platitudes and clichés. He had his career to focus on. He wasn’t all that big on gay bars or leaving the house when he wasn’t working or blah blah blah. Some guys were pros at the Internet sex game and as far as he was concerned, more power to them. But he was different, always had been. For him, these quick, late-night assignations had become a grim compulsion that protected him from the terror of being abandoned again.

  You are beautiful and you deserve better.

  Insane that the guy had chosen those words. They must have been fueled by some kind of schizophrenic self-loathing; maybe the sick bastard saw himself as Ted Bundy one minute, Ted Haggard the next. It was a good thing Elsa has insisted on calling the police. At the very least, they had to give them the guy’s plate number before he hurt somebody else.

  You are beautiful and you deserve better.

  There was a pad and pen in his nightstand. He wrote the words down exactly as he remembered the guy saying them. And as soon as he lifted the sheet of paper in his hands, a flood of adrenaline-fueled warmth coursed through him, causing his extremities to tingle and the hairs on the back of his neck to stand on end in pinprick formations. He could hear the sound of his own breathing.

  Hand of God wrote that note, Benny. A few nights earlier he’d held a piece of paper similar to this one, and the phrase written on it had been just as brief and direct. Of course, his story wasn’t the same as Anthem’s. He hadn’t come out of some blackout to find this note sitting on his desk, in his own handwriting. But the words themselves had come from somewhere else, they’d tumbled from the suddenly slack jaw of his attacker, who had just been seized up and off Ben’s prone body as if by the . . . hand of God.

  Belief. Faith. Maybe those were the only apt words to describe the sensations that were moving through him now, edging out the stark terror of his assault, replacing it with something softer and more malleable. He hadn’t been lying when he told Anthem that he believed in more than one god. But his faith in some kind of higher power was an untested thing, more of a bet on fifty-fifty odds than the result of an actual spiritual experience of the kind Anthem had described to him the other night. And now, here he was, feeling as if events around him had been manipulated in some mysterious and unknowable way, but at a speed that was suddenly visible and obvious. Undeniable.

  You are beautiful and you deserve better. Not the words of that deranged man who had just filled his bedroom with terror. The words that had come through that man.

  A faith experience. Isn’t that what they called this? The kind of bullshit you read about on those vaguely Christian pamphlets left behind in hospital waiting rooms, the kind with crude, brightly colored illustrations. And it had happened to him.

  When Elsa stepped inside his front door to tell him what the police had said, she froze in her tracks and gave him a funny look, and that’s when Ben realized he was smiling.

  V

  * * *

  MARSHALL

  16

  * * *

  MANDEVILLE

  OCTOBER 2013

  Danny Stevens made it to the front porch just in time to see the taillights of his wife’s Mercedes disappear around the wall of stately oak trees at the end of their driveway. He tried her cell, but there was no answer. Satellite radio, Kelly Clarkson, his wife’s impatience: Danny blamed all three in equal measure.

  “Metamucil,” he said after the beep. “Orange-flavored. None of that pink lemonade crap . . . And sorry. You know, about . . .” What was he apologizing for? His irregularity or his forgetfulness? He wasn’t sure, so he hung up.

  Just a few minutes earlier, Sally had cornered him in the kitchen, armed with pad, pencil and her plainest pair of eyeglasses, the ones she only wore to Albertsons on the weekends. Danny had insisted up and down that they weren’t out of anything, only to realize his omission once he was alone with his bloat. But that’s not what was really bothering him. Lately, he’d been consumed by a burning need to issue some kind of apology to his wife whenever she entered the room. And he often did, usually a mumbled, halfhearted thing, as reflexive and irritating as a dry cough. Sometimes she would hear it and stop in the doorway to ask if something was the matter, and he’d do his best not to give her a guilty look. Because in the end, what did he have to feel guilty about?

  Unlike most of the men he worked with at Cypress Bank & Trust, he’d never cheated. (Not on his wife, anyway.) And he was a damn good provider—that was for sure. The house was proof of that: two stories of French Regency perfection with immaculate limestone walls and second-floor windows adorned by slender, intricate iron railings. Just another year of bleeding the Ferriot trust and the damn thing would be paid off too. Because that’s what good providers did; they made deals that had to be kept in the shadows.

  It was a crisp autumn afternoon. The house wasn’t right on the Tchefuncte River, but it was pretty close. Just a few yards of smooth, rolling lawns separated them from the glassy green waters and the boat dock they shared with their neighbor Lloyd Duchamp. Technically the oaks between the house and the water belonged entirely to Lloyd, but he’d allowed Sally to dress them up with string lights last Christmas, probably as penance for that awful hog of a motorcycle he’d bought after his wife left him.

  Danny loved Beau Chêne. And no matter how bad things got at the bank, he’d fight like hell to stay within its grassy, wooded borders. The place had given his son a damn near perfect childhood, a childhood where Douglas and his friends could water ski in their own backyard and spend afternoons on the rope swing without fearing stray bullets. Nothing like his childhood, trapped in the Irish Channel with a mother who refused to let go of the old house on Constance Street even after the blacks moved in on all sides.

  But things at the bank were bad, had been bad for a long time in fact. Like most of the other managers and officers at Cypress, Danny wore the fact that he was employed by the last locally owned bank in New Orleans as a badge of honor. But lately the whispers about a sale to one of the nationals had grown into a dull clamor, and even senior staff were starting to jump ship to JPMorgan Chase. Layoffs were imminent, he was sure of it. And if his situation wer
e any different, Danny probably would have left by now.

  But his situation wasn’t different. There was one trust he just couldn’t afford to leave.

  His son had arrived for a visit the night before, but he’d only been home an hour or two before zipping across the causeway to meet up with some friends. They’d probably done a circuit of all the old Uptown bars they used to frequent in high school with their fake IDs, and now Douglas was probably sleeping it off at a buddy’s house. Midway through his junior year at Chapel Hill, his son’s connection to his hometown was still as strong as ever. Good, Danny thought as he made his way to the kitchen. Too many of us leave. Too many of the good ones anyway. As for the fact that Douglas had left his bags at the foot of the stairs? Everyone has room for improvement.

  Home alone, for a half hour at least. Too fast for a quick wank to some of the new porn he’d downloaded the night before: naughty nurse stuff, a little spanking thrown in, predictable but efficient. (And the truth was, at fifty-five, a quick wank wasn’t as easy to pull off as it had been a few years before.) The news was out too. More depressing footage off that awful pipeline explosion over in Ascension Parish; trailers turned to molten heaps, mothers weeping for the incinerated children. The whole place looked like Pompeii, and though Sally couldn’t seem to pull her eyes away from the coverage, he’d had enough after twenty minutes.

  So John Coltrane and a quick scotch would have to do, but as soon as Danny closed his hand around the bottle of Balvenie, he was swallowed by a wave of silent darkness.

  • • •

  His first thought when he came to was, I’m having a stroke. He was in the front parlor. It was still light out, the Audubon bird prints were still safely in their frames.

  The last thing he could remember was holding the bottle of scotch. Had he downed the whole thing? Was this the end of some alcoholic blackout?

  But there was no headache, no sour stomach even. No pain of any kind. And for some reason, that scared him more than anything else—the fact that this feeling of complete disorientation, this sense of having lost time completely, wasn’t accompanied by any physical sensations at all.

  It was like he’d literally been plucked out of time and moved to a different . . . second? Minute? Hour?

  Some kind of weight was tugging against his right arm. When he looked down, he saw he was holding one of the massive candleholders his wife kept on the mantel. The thing was solid glass, the base a fat pillar, the platform still matted with the waffle-print residue of those high-end beeswax candles Sally loved.

  A brain tumor? Wasn’t this how it started with Jake Bensen? No, that wasn’t it. The guy had tripped. One day he was walking across his bedroom and it was like his right foot wasn’t quite attached to his ankle. MRI. Inoperable. Four months. Just four months from diagnosis to—

  A car engine distracted him from this quickening panic. Then he heard another sound: someone breathing, someone standing a few feet away.

  Before Danny could turn or scream—and he started to do both at the same exact second—the darkness returned. And this time it felt like great pincers rising up from under his feet, closing high above his head, sealing him inside an obsidian tomb.

  • • •

  His office. He was standing in the middle of his office and the flat-screen computer monitor was turned around so he could see it. He blinked and tried to focus.

  The candleholder was in his right hand still. He dropped it and it hit the hardwood floor with a deep, fatal-sounding thud. His entire body was sore, the same kind of bone-deep ache he used to feel after the gym.

  The glowing computer screen looked grainy. He took a step toward the screen, fearing for a second or two that his legs wouldn’t respond to his commands. But they did. He was back inside his body, and whatever was on his screen wasn’t part of the plain blue wallpaper he’d opted for in a quick, distracted moment.

  It was blood splatter.

  His desk chair had been turned to face the window so he couldn’t see who was sitting in it, just the coil after coil of bloody nylon rope that had been used to tie them down.

  Against his will, Danny Stevens reached for the back of his desk chair so he could turn it around and see who it was, because whoever it was, they weren’t moving. He’d heard a car engine outside in those last few seconds before the darkness returned, so whoever was in his chair, they had to be—

  “Don’t do that yet,” someone said.

  Danny bellowed and landed ass-first on the floor.

  Marshall Ferriot stepped forward from the band of shadow beside the double doors to the hallway. The last time Danny had laid eyes on the guy had been six months earlier, on the same computer screen that was now smeared with blood. The kid called the house one afternoon, right after they’d sent Allen Shire after him and his sister, and a dumbfounded Danny had refused to stay on the phone for more than a few seconds without some kind of proof the caller was who he claimed to be. Skype: that had been the kid’s suggestion, the same thing he and Sally often used to talk to Douglas when he was up at school. And so, stunned and slack-jawed and wishing he could hide the emotions passing over his face, Danny had listened intently that day as Marshall Ferriot made his pitch.

  He hadn’t just listened. He had given in, completely.

  And it had all gone perfectly since then. But now, Marshall was in his office and there was blood everywhere, so maybe it hadn’t gone so well after all. The kid seemed to have no trouble moving around but he looked gaunt and ghostly. How long had it been since he’d come to? Six months. What had he said at that time? I need time to get my bearings. And a fresh start. After what I’ve been through, I think I deserve a fresh start, don’t you, Mr. Stevens?

  And so, as far as anyone at Cypress Bank & Trust knew, Marshall Ferriot was still a vegetable, still being cared for in seclusion by his dutiful sister. Danny had taken care of everything: submitting fake medical reports to the trust committee, setting up a new account to receive the disbursements, which he and Marshall could both access—Marshall under a new identity Danny had provided for him, Henry Lee. He’d been handling Allen Shire himself, so there weren’t a lot of questions to answer on that front.

  The split was a little more than fifty-fifty, weighted more generously in Danny’s favor. That had been the kid’s proposal, not Danny’s. And he’d never taken out a penny more than he was supposed to. So why? Why was this happening? Why was there blood everywhere? Why was the kid here in his house?

  When Danny tried to ask this question, he tasted blood on his lips. He rubbed at his mouth and the back of his hand came away dark red. Suddenly all he could do was wheeze and groan for a minute or two while Marshall studied him patiently.

  “I did . . . I did everything you asked . . . Everything we ag-agreed to . . .”

  “I know.” But he didn’t sound grateful.

  Marshall crouched down next to him and Danny looked into his eyes for the first time in his life. He’d only seen them in photographs. At first, their large size made them oddly welcoming, but then he saw they were utterly expressionless; staring into them felt like being invited to dive headfirst into an empty swimming pool.

  “Please,” Danny wheezed. “Please . . . tell me . . .” He gestured toward the chair.

  “Oh, I get it. You want to know who it is?” Marshall asked evenly. “Your wife, or your son?”

  A sob exploded from Danny’s chest.

  “I know, I know. It’s a real mind fuck, isn’t it? No pun intended. But the whole thing—it kinda makes sense, don’t you think? My gift, I mean. After the way my sister dragged me around like a rag doll just so she could keep getting her checks. It’s gotta be some kind of poetic justice. . . . Hey, you know what’s also interesting, Mr. Stevens? How you never asked about her.”

  “Wh-who?”

  “My sister. I guess you assumed she just walked away? No trust, no checks. Nothing in it for her. Was that it?”

  Danny nodded. It was total bullshit, but Danny nodde
d.

  “Uh huh . . . okay. And the private detective that you sent to find us? Allen Shire?”

  “Well, I never heard from him again. I figured he’d—”

  “No one ever heard from him again.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Yes, you do, Mr. Stevens. You know exactly what I’m saying.”

  “I figured you paid . . . paid him off, I guess . . . Both of them . . . I th-thought—”

  “Did you really? Or did you think I killed them?”

  “Now I do.”

  Marshall cackled and clapped his hands together.

  “Very good, Mr. Stevens,” he said once he caught his breath. “Excellent. In all seriousness, though, Allen Shire was a big help. Huge. Thanks for sending him. Eight years without moving your legs, well, it takes you a long time to learn to walk again. And I needed someone with me every step of the way. So thank you. Thank you for not sending the cavalry after him and causing a big mess for everyone. ’Cause there were other things I needed to learn too, you see? And he was very, very helpful.”

  Marshall tapped the side of his head with one finger and smiled broadly, and that’s when Danny realized there was something in the kid’s head, something that defied everything Danny had believed to be true about the world, something that had covered his office in blood while it thrust Danny into some corner of darkness inside himself.

  “But you can’t . . . I mean, that doesn’t . . .”

  “Doesn’t what?”

  “Just ’cause . . . My family . . . Just ’cause of what you did to them, that doesn’t make it right for you to hurt my family.”

  “Silly rabbit! I didn’t hurt your family, Mr. Stevens. You did.”

  Marshall stepped behind the desk. A few keystrokes later, a surveillance image from the hidden camera Danny had installed in the office filled the screen. He’d put the camera in after he and Marshall came to terms, and for one purpose only: to make sure no one was accessing his computer without his knowledge. But Marshall had clearly put it to another use.