The Heavens Rise

by Christopher Rice

  “It was an accident!” Ben shouted. “We’re reporters. And Stevens—he’s in the water. It looks like he was weighted down, but our propeller caught on him, and I fell overboard. And they must have thought—I mean, they must have thought she was going to hurt me because she couldn’t hear them and she was going to start the boat. I don’t know. She needs help. Now!”

  The deputy shook off his own skepticism; neither of them had time for an interrogation. “There’s a new perimeter just beyond that Mercedes. Go there and wait for the ambulance. You need . . .” He gestured absently at Ben’s neck, then ran back toward the riverbank he’d been steadily guiding Ben away from as they’d yelled at each other.

  Ben was almost as far as the new perimeter the deputy had directed him to when his legs went out from under him, and another set of hands was on him, another deputy, this one a woman. And charging toward them around the bend in the oak-lined street was an ambulance, lights flashing against the falling dark, the first of several.

  • • •

  Marissa was in surgery.

  That was the best information he could get. In separate ambulances they’d both been taken to Lakeview Regional Medical Center, a short drive from Beau Chêne, and when they’d found him wandering the hallways after being treated in the ER for his minor cuts, the plainclothes homicide detectives from the sheriff’s department expressed surprise that Ben had decided to wait around so they could take his statement.

  He didn’t correct their mistaken impression. If you were going to lie to the police, it was important to look cooperative. And he’d fine-tuned his lies by then, even though he wasn’t sure who he was buying time for, himself or the friend who had almost torn him to pieces.

  There’d been such confusion after the corpse of Daniel Stevens had scared them all half to death, well, those poor deputies on the bank (the homicide detectives refused to disclose any details of their respective conditions despite the number of times Ben referred to them as those poor deputies) must have thought Marissa was trying to hurt him when really she was as confused as everyone else.

  The gunshot? Simple. Ben had seen the deputy draw his gun on Marissa, but it must have gone off when the house blew. Maybe the force of the blast had caused him to fire by mistake?

  Maybe. Perhaps. I’m not sure. Every statement he gave them was peppered with these qualifying phrases; he knew he’d have to back out of them eventually if any of the deputies recovered. But for now, the detectives had little to say in return; Ben hoped that was a sign that the Stevens murder was still their focus, that they knew more about the explosion then they were letting on. But he knew better than to ask, and when one of them firmly instructed him not to go anywhere, he nodded gravely and assured them he would camp out in the waiting room.

  It was only then that he realized he’d been wearing wet clothes for almost two hours. They weren’t soaked anymore, but they weren’t exactly dry either. He tried to turn his iPhone on but it was fried. He’d asked a drowsy-looking woman sitting nearby if he could use her cell phone before he’d planned what he was going to say to Anthem if he answered. Only once he heard the ringing on the other end did he realize he couldn’t ask Anthem to drive all the way across the lake. Not tonight. For one, he was on call, and secondly, he didn’t want to tell anymore lies that night.

  This thought speared him in the gut. Maybe it had been the mention of Marshall Ferriot’s trust earlier that night, or maybe it was just fatigue and shock combining into a kind of nervous delirium, but the extent to which he had lied to Anthem over the years overwhelmed him suddenly. Eight years and he’d never said one word to the man about his suspicions of Marshall Ferriot. How many years did it take before a lie of omission that big became an all-out betrayal?

  The waiting room was filling up, mostly with frantic women who stormed in as they talked on cell phones, detailing everything they didn’t know yet about their loved ones to the person on the other end. The wives of the injured deputies from Beau Chêne; they had to be. He walked a safe distance away from the woman whose phone he’d borrowed. Then, before he thought twice about it, he pressed his nose to a plate-glass window that reflected the harshly lit interior of the room behind him.

  “Hello?” Anthem finally answered.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Ben! You’re . . . Why? What happened?”

  “There was an accident, on the North Shore.”

  “Beau Chêne! You were there?”

  “Me and Marissa. Were we on the news?”

  “No.” Good. More time, Ben thought. “But it’s crazy. That goddamn pipeline and now this. My brothers all called me ’cause they think the whole state’s about to blow up.”

  “Listen, if we do show up on the news, call me, okay? Then call my mother in St. Louis and tell her I’m fine. My phone’s fried and she won’t be able to get me.”

  “I’ll call her right now if you want me to.”

  “No. No. I don’t need her freaking out before she absolutely has to.”

  “Is Marissa, okay? . . . Ben?”

  “She’s fine. Just . . . She’s fine.”

  “You need me to come?”

  “You can’t drive all the way to Covington. You’re on call.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’ll get off call if I need to.”

  Anthem 2.0, indeed, Ben thought, when he heard the man’s eagerness to put someone else’s needs ahead of his own for once. But remembering Marissa’s utterance of this flattering term earlier that day only reminded him of her lifeless expression as she lunged at him like a snake and shoved him overboard, of the scored propeller blades biting into his neck.

  Ben’s eyes watered.

  “Ben?”

  “I’m good. A- Team. But I appreciate it.”

  “All right then. Well . . . Hey, when you see Marissa, thank her for me.”

  “For what?”

  “My piece. It’s up. Sixty comments already. Some of them think I’m a shithead, but the rest of ’em . . . they’re callin’ me a hero, Benny.”

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  The words he’d meant to say next were You are a hero, but a great, silent wave of darkness seemed to course through his entire body before it robbed him of his vision, and then his hearing a few seconds later. Ben expected to feel the floor rising up to meet him. Instead he felt nothing at all.

  • • •

  “Ben?”

  A few more tries, and then Anthem Landry was answered by a dial tone, and once again he was alone with his glowing computer screen, filled with the big headline they’d given his article, “The River’s Response,” and the smart-looking photo he’d emailed them earlier that day. Ben had probably been called away or the call itself had dropped and he’d ring again in a second. Whatever the case, there was no sense in standing there like an idiot listening to a mocking dial tone.

  Of course, that wasn’t really what he was doing, now that he thought about it. It was the computer he couldn’t tear himself away from. Every few minutes or so, more comments were posted. Hell, if the whole state could stop catching fire for an hour or two, his first piece of journalism just might make the evening news. But the suddenly dropped call had made it feel too quiet all of a sudden, and that’s when Anthem realized that something else was missing, a comforting and familiar sound he usually took for granted.

  His apartment was on the second floor of an old corner grocery store on Tchoupitoulas, directly across the street from the concrete Mississippi River floodwall and the wharves just behind it. The constant hum of idling container ships drove most of his neighbors insane, but he loved it. It made him feel connected to his lifeblood, especially on nights like this, when he was giddy with anticipation about going out on a ship. That’s why he’d left open the door to the exterior staircase’s second-floor landing. So he could hear the pulse and the throb of the river’s constant call as he went about finding various ways to kill time until the phone rang.

  Beignet. His dog. That was
it. The little slobberbox had been snoring up a storm on the porch just outside. And now he was gone.

  The building had a side yard shared by both the upstairs and downstairs apartment, but it was Anthem who had turned it into a veritable jungle. And he’d done most of the work on those first early nights of trying to stay sober while he was on call, when he had no choice but to avoid friends who hadn’t taken his pledge seriously, and women who liked to knock back a beer after a hookup, and his brothers, who were the absolute worst. Those guys spun through the nearest drive-through daiquiri shop on their way home from just about anywhere.

  First he’d planted the banana trees, then he’d started work on the birdhouses and then he’d gone about laying the flagstones for a circuitous path from the tall wooden back gate, through the dense leaves and to the foot of the exterior wooden staircase that climbed the side of the building. His neighbor, an overworked paralegal, had once remarked to him when he’d caught him working on the pathway, “You realize we don’t own any of this, right?” As if Anthem hadn’t known, as if he’d been doing it for any other reason than to keep his hands busy and his head filled with something other than the terrible fear that he wasn’t going to make it through another night sober.

  Now he stood on the second-floor landing, staring down at a million places where his pet might be hiding. But Beignet was an English bulldog, which meant he wheezed like a runner in the Crescent City Classic wherever he went; if the little guy was down there somewhere, Anthem would be able to hear him. But he couldn’t hear him. Just the rustle of the banana leaves in the humid breezes off the river.

  When he noticed the shadow in the garden below, Anthem’s mouth opened, but nothing came out and then it appeared to him as if the shadow itself had turned into a column of darkness, shot upward and swallowed him whole.

  21

  * * *

  The darkness cleared and Ben found himself lying facedown on a twin bed, lips parted against a chemical, institutional taste he couldn’t quite identify. He braced himself for the agonizing throb of some head injury, or the stomach-twisting aftermath of Goldschläger shots. But all he could feel was a clean and quick release from a previously impenetrable darkness, and the same sense of lost time he’d experienced during hernia surgery as a child, after they placed the mask over his face.

  He had to have passed out in the waiting room. Some kind of delayed reaction probably; shock or, God forbid, some injury he’d sustained during the blast.

  He opened his eyes and saw the retro starburst comforter his face had been pressed to; the distant familiarity of the design made him recoil off the bed so quickly his back knocked into a wall of cabinetry just a few feet away.

  The trailer he found himself inside of was all 1970s but everything about it had a new sparkle. The place was homey, but fake, no personal items anywhere he could see. He’d visited a few movie sets since New Orleans had turned into Hollywood South, and he felt like he was on one now. Nobody lived here. This trailer was some kind of re-creation. As soon as this word strobed through his mind, as soon as he found himself staring down at the comforter that had frightened him so badly, he realized where he’d seen it all before.

  Elysium. Before Noah Delongpre had tried to turn it into a compound, when it was just two trailers parked together like lovers on an acreage of mud beside a serpentine bayou.

  The door was barred from the outside, and he was on the verge of crying out when he saw the leather-bound journal sitting by itself on the immaculate kitchen table. READ ME, read the notecard sitting atop the scored leather cover.

  Ben flipped the cover back. The sight of Nikki Delongpre’s handwriting, still familiar to him after all these years from the labels of the mix CDs she used to make for him at least once every few months, forced a sound from him that was something between a gasp and a yelp. And soon Ben was sinking into the tiny booth that served as the trailer’s pathetic dining area.

  But even as he read, he told himself not to surrender to hope, told himself that this could be some kind of fake. Most of all, everything he was reading could have been written before that terrible night—the day Anthem had transferred to their school, some disjointed thoughts about Elysium and the well her father had dug, none of which Ben could quite put together in his race to find proof that this journal had been written after her disappearance

  Then he saw the word Katrina, and he was forced to blink madly to keep the tears from spilling down his face. But then the swell of emotion hardened as he kept reading, like a charging ocean wave suddenly saddled with an iceberg.

  My name is Niquette Delongpre and on the night before her 47th birthday I killed my mother . . .

  VI

  * * *

  THE HEAVENS RISE

  22

  * * *

  Patience, Marshall told himself.

  He’d lost his cool in Beau Chêne and the resulting conflagration had made clear the one, unavoidable limit to his power—he could control only one person at a time. And while it was doubtful the police would find his lost ring after what he’d done to the crime scene, Marshall couldn’t afford two mistakes in one night. He had to remind himself that Ben Broyard had never been target numero uno; that title belonged to the giant shadow now standing frozen and ramrod straight, one story above Marshall’s head. Still, when the little fucker had literally floated into the middle of the crime scene, the opportunity had seemed too good for Marshall to pass up. But by giving into temptation, he’d come close to scorching himself to death and losing his shot at Anthem altogether.

  Now he was here, and the connection had been made, but the visions coursing through him—the raw, unedited flashes of Anthem’s very soul—were far more vivid than anything thrown off by the other souls he’d violated over the past few weeks. Compared to Stevens, his secretary and Allen Shire, this stuff felt like a fire hose blast that might knock him into the banana leaves. The burst, as he’d nicknamed it, was usually one or two brief pulses of hallucination that gave way to silvery, distorted vision (and the power to do whatever he wanted with the person in question). But this was movie quality.

  Nikki Delongpre was embracing him (embracing Anthem), and he could feel the fleece of her pullover, could smell the chemical odor coming off the Mardi Gras pearls around her neck. All around them, a press of bodies, the familiar raucousness of an Uptown parade, a dance of flambeau fire and shadow beneath a ceiling of interlocking oak branches. Bloodred plastic beads smashed to the asphalt; Marshall recognized the spear-shaped logo of the Krewe of Ares parade. And pulsing beneath every sight and smell was the endowed knowledge that he was being flooded by the happiest moment of Anthem Landry’s life. And even though Nikki was smiling at him—not just smiling, beaming—he could hear her voice in his head (in Anthem’s head): My hero, my God, my angel. A soft, intimate whisper that didn’t match the jubilant expression on her face, an expression that seemed to hold and hold and hold until it took on the appearance of a mask.

  Jesus Christ, Marshall thought, is that how they really spoke to each other? In those kinds of stupid clichés? Or were these supposed words of Nikki’s more dream than memory? Then he saw that the giant figure atop the Mardi Gras float rattling past them wasn’t the typical shuddering papier-mâché rendering of some third-tier pagan god. It was a statue of Anthem Landry as Michelangelo might have realized him, impossibly flawless muscles, skin some shade between marble and flesh, and when the beautiful giant’s eyes opened and stared right at Marshall, as if sensing the presence of a spiritual interloper in the midst of this hallucinated crowd of shadows, Marshall cried out, and the great, sickening burst was over. Now it was just him and Anthem, separated by the long exterior staircase. Everything in Marshall’s vision fluoresced in the way it normally did once a hook had been established, but the pulse of it was stronger. Everything about this was different.

  Stop, and it was his voice he heard now, not Nikki’s. Stop. He’s different.

  But how could that be? How could Anthem Land
ry be the only anomaly after weeks of exercising his power on others without incident? The injustice of it was almost too much for him to bear. And the connection had been forged, hadn’t it? He could force the guy to leap from the porch right now and break his neck. But he couldn’t settle for that. A fall? That wouldn’t do at all. Not after all the work Marshall had done to get to this point. That would be a downright cheat.

  Besides, this wasn’t the last game he planned to play; if there was something different about Anthem Landry, he had to find out what it was, even if it meant being forced to dispatch Anthem in some less than impressive way.

  “Patience,” Anthem Landry said quietly, giving voice to Marshall’s thoughts, and the steadiness of his voice reflected the new steadiness in Marshall’s mind.

  “Indeed,” Marshall answered himself.

  • • •

  And just like that, the leaping shadow was gone and Anthem Landry found himself still standing at the railing, the garden below him still rustling in the breeze. His heart was racing but that was probably just the result of whatever strange trick of light had convinced him a ghost was rocketing toward him from the foliage below. A train’s locomotive blared, which wasn’t a shock, given the tracks were just on the other side of the floodwall. But usually he heard the trains approaching before they got this close. Not this time, apparently. And there was someone down there in the garden, and Beignet was at the guy’s feet.

  “Hello?” Anthem barked.

  And when the guy stepped forward into the security light’s halo across the bottom few steps, Anthem gripped the railing in front of him to make sure he was still standing upright.