The Heavens Rise

by Christopher Rice

  In his view, I am a parasite governed by human will and emotion. Why I can only control one person at a time, he’s not exactly sure. Whether or not the little buggers are still inside me—he’s not sure of that either. Maybe they aren’t. Maybe I pissed them away. But one thing’s for sure: they’re the cause of everything.

  As for the other guy who was exposed?

  Well, to be honest, after what I did to him at the Plimsoll Club, I don’t think he’ll be waking up anytime soon. I might have been able to force a confession from his lips but as my hatred for him swelled, I realized what was about to happen.

  So it’s love and hate, isn’t it? It’s just kind of hitting me now as I write this.

  My love . . . my hate . . . their nightmares.

  Anyway, maybe if I’d let him transform into some kind of beast before everyone in that ballroom, his father would have been too afraid to run toward him and the poor man would be alive today. Meanwhile, I could have watched from the safety of the elevator lobby, concealed in the velvet cape and Mardi Gras mask I’d stolen from a costume shop so I could blend in with the waitstaff. Maybe if I’d let the process unfold, Marshall’s dad would be alive.

  It’s ridiculous, I know. I couldn’t let it happen. But his father . . . I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that at all.

  But I didn’t want any of this, now, did I?

  I lie awake nights remembering the view into his soul my gift afforded me. We were writhing together in the grass, a few yards from the pool at Elysium, and he was holding me by my neck while he drew a short knife with a sharply curved blade up the length of my sternum. And I wasn’t screaming or crying out for help or even gasping for breath. I was accepting this evisceration with serenity and calm. And I could feel his pride, his sense of triumph, at my silence.

  Can you blame me for what I did to him?

  Have you ever looked into the soul of someone who craves your evisceration? Can you see why I changed my mind at the last minute and decided to go for more than a confession? “I put a snake in their car” . . .

  It’s been a year now. I’m sure they medevaced him out of New Orleans before Katrina. But with each passing day, his chances of waking up again diminish. I’ve read up on what happens to patients in a persistent vegetative state. I hope all of it happens to him.

  Yes, I’ve thought about finishing the job on many occasions. My father was so horrified by what I’d done, he made us leave New Orleans before I could try. But how would I do it? I can’t use my ability on a person who isn’t technically conscious. (Trust me. I’ve tried, just to satisfy my curiosity on this front.) And I’m not going to make an innocent person do my dirty work.

  And then there’s the whole not knowing. There’s what I heard him say at the table that night, about knowing the difference between a venomous snake and a nonvenomous one.

  The water moccasin and the diamond-backed water snake are easily confused, you see. Both grow to lengths of six feet, both have smoke-colored scales and bodies as thick as a person’s wrist. Only the diamond-backed water snake isn’t venomous at all. Was it just a prank? And was he just a boy who didn’t know any better? (Am I just a girl???)

  As for the peek I got into his soul? Maybe there are similar visions of violence inside the souls of men who have never lifted a hand to harm anyone in their lives. But he did harm us. And so . . . yes, there is a little regret. Just enough to keep me from driving a knife through his heart with my own two hands.

  I like to believe that with each day, with each hour, death has pulled Marshall Ferriot a little closer to the gates of hell; some souls are just heavier than others.

  But I wonder if as he lies there, some part of his brain is replaying that image of me, gutted like a catfish, over and over again. And when those thoughts become too much for me to bear, I tell myself that a father for a mother is a fair enough trade. For now.

  26

  * * *

  TANGIPAHOA PARISH

  OCTOBER 2013

  Ben Broyard threw himself against the door so hard that the journal he’d just finished reading went spinning off the table and clattered to the floor beside him. There was no response from outside.

  Then he was standing in mud, his shoulder still aching from the blow.

  String lights sparkled in the low, shadowy branches overhead. The trailer was several yards behind him. Once again, time had been excised from his consciousness with a surgeon’s precision. And as he turned in place, he realized there were two trailers parked in the mud a few yards away, not just the one in which he’d been confined. The other was a bright silver Airstream that had the same stage-set newness and shine as the tiny prison in which he’d been forced to read a chronicle of monsters and magic.

  He was standing amid a re-creation of Elysium as it appeared more than two decades ago, in that photo of her newly engaged parents Nikki had described in her journal. (It had to be a re-creation. The land on which the original Elysium had stood was now a wash of untamed swamp.) Everything seemed perfectly arranged except for the small tangles of shredded plastic lying close to the trailers. The closer Ben got, the more he could see that they were pieces of the original lounger Noah and Millie Delongpre had been reclining on as she’d extended her ring hand toward the camera. But just pieces. Something had torn both lounge chairs to pieces.

  A snake’s scales. Claws. The eyes of a lost woman.

  Just then, approaching footsteps squished in the mud and when he turned, Ben saw a stopped figure hobbling toward him with the support of a cane. There was some vitality underneath the man’s strained movements, and Ben sensed that his contorted walk was not the result of age, but of some recent and serious injury.

  Once they were a few feet apart, the pale glow from the string lights above illuminated the man’s face. Ben felt his vision narrow and a weight on his chest that made him gasp.

  The last time Ben had laid eyes on Noah Delongpre had been eight years ago; the man had been home early after doing his rounds at the hospital and rifling through mail in the kitchen as he pretended not to eavesdrop on the conversation Nikki and Ben were having in the other room; another whispered, frantic how-can-I-ever-forgive-Anthem session Ben felt overwhelmed by and powerless to bring to a satisfying close. Noah’s eyes had briefly met Ben’s through the doorway, and for the first time he’d seen real concern for Nikki in them. The sight of it had so startled him in that moment, he’d stammered through his next few sentences to his best friend.

  Noah Delongpre had always struck Ben as a wildly self-centered man, and his only real joy in the world seemed to be his love for his wife, a love he saw his only daughter as a distraction from. Perhaps if Nikki had been less self-possessed, more in need of his constant guidance, he could have treated her like a patient. Or a case. Maybe that’s exactly what he’d done following the madness recorded in the journal he’d just read.

  But now, here he was, looking as if he had aged two decades instead of one. Gone was his military-grade buzz cut; it had been replaced by a thick salt-and-pepper mane he’d tied into a ponytail and threaded through the back of his gnawed baseball cap. He had the same angular features, with small, deeply set eyes, dwarfed by his boat’s prow of a nose. But Ben couldn’t tell if the tightness in his expression was the result of controlled fury or a great, interior strain.

  “If you’re going to waste our time with protests, do it now, by all means,” Noah Delongpre said. “But allow me to remind you that there was a time when the mere notion of there being a chemical inside of plants that essentially metabolized sunlight itself would have seemed like an insanity to most men. Maybe it still does . . .”

  “You exposed yourself to it too?” Insane, Ben thought, even as he spoke. All of this is insane. But it felt as if some long-buried set of instincts inside him had taken over and was answering for him, some primitive yet essential ability to believe in the impossible. He didn’t dare call it faith. Not yet, anyway. To do so would imply that the hell of which he’d just read
had something of the divine within it.

  “So you believe what you read?” Noah asked.

  “Whatever you can do, whatever she can do, you’ve done it to me twice. So I’m not sure I really have a choice.”

  “You were hoping it was her, no doubt. When you opened the door.”

  “No. I knew it wasn’t her.”

  “How?”

  “Because she would never treat me like this.”

  “It’s been almost a decade, Ben. You have no idea what she’s capable of doing to you or anyone—” His anger caused him to straighten a bit, and just this small movement stoked the fires of whatever injury he was struggling against. “That’s the only reason I drove you again—”

  “Drove me?”

  “That’s the term we came up with for it. Her power. He’s got his own name for it too, I bet. Marshall Ferriot, that is. But I warn you, don’t become lost in the language of the thing. Terms, labels—they’ll do nothing to blunt its reality.” When he noticed the expression on Ben’s face, his eyebrows lifted and he recoiled, both hands balanced atop the head of his cane. “Oh my. You are upset with me, aren’t you?”

  “If Marshall Ferriot is out there . . . if he can do what you can do, why did you bring me here?”

  “You would rather I leave you unguarded?”

  “Anthem is out there!”

  “If it’s Marshall’s intention to hurt Anthem Landry, then Anthem is either already dead by his own hand or he’s been changed into something you will never want to lay eyes on!” This eruption sent Noah into a coughing fit, and when he lifted one fist to his mouth, Ben saw that that the space from his index finger to his thumb was a mass of red welts and fresh scar tissue.

  “How would you know?” Ben asked.

  “What do you mean, how—”

  “If he’s . . . if he’s been changed. The thing you described . . . Miss Millie . . . You killed it right away. How can you know what it really was, or if it was—”

  “If it was still her, you mean?”

  Ben nodded.

  “There were others,” Noah said. “Many others. And we made it a point to keep them alive for as long as we could just so we could answer that very question. And if you think I harbor one scrap of guilt for shooting that thing my wife turned into exactly when I did, then you are a worse listener than I thought.”

  “Others . . .”

  “You don’t think I’ve been here for eight years, do you? What? You think we just vanished into the swamp to live like rats? No, that part came later. First, we had to learn. First I had to play mad scientist, and she had to play test subject. You see, when I was in med school I did an exchange program in Thailand, so I knew the country fairly well. I also knew what we could get away with once we arrived. That’s where we conducted our experiments.”

  “Experiments? On . . . people? You experimented on people?”

  “On men who became sexually aroused by burning children with cigarettes and penetrating them with the legs of furniture. Trust me. We put them to a far, far better use. And no one will miss them. Least of all the children they traveled halfway across the world to abuse.”

  “And what did your experiments prove?”

  “Most of our initial conclusions we’re confirmed, just as she wrote them in her journal. The parasite resides in the brain and it allows the host to consume and metabolize frequencies of light which are not visible in this dimension of existence. On any equipment I could get my hands on anyway. But the pupils of both Nikki and her subjects dilated to twice their normal size during a drive, as we called it. Leading us to the conclusion that the eyes truly are the windows to the soul.”

  “You consume . . . a person’s soul?”

  “Close. You absorb part of it. It flows through you on a kind of conduit which we can’t see. The person completely loses all consciousness as a result. So forget what you’ve seen in the movies. This is not possession. You can’t see the world through their eyes. The mind-control aspect . . . well, it’s just a by-product, you see. A by-product of the fact that you can draw the person’s fundamental quantum material into your body by metabolizing part of it.”

  “And the monsters?”

  “Ah, see, that was the interesting part. Sometimes I would tell her what a subject was guilty of. This one, for instance, enjoys tying up young girls and applying abrasive chemicals to their bare flesh. Nikki would be able to drive that unsavory subject for as long as she wanted, and no monster. Unfortunately. But if, on the other hand, I spritzed the man with a little bit of Anthem Landry’s favorite cologne—Ralph Lauren Polo, is it? Well, then . . . showtime.”

  “And what were they? The monsters?”

  “They were from the mouth of hell is what they were. They were malformed hybrids of that person and one of their worst nightmares or some element of a past trauma. Just as it happened with Millie. Don’t worry. We did our due diligence. We confirmed what their worst nightmares were beforehand just to be sure we weren’t off the mark. The interviews were not my favorite part. She mostly handled those, well-spoken girl that she is. I can show you some photographs, if you’d like.”

  “What I would like is to make sure Anthem Landry is okay so I can—”

  “Anthem Fucking Landry,” Noah bellowed. “It all gets back to Anthem Landry. You’ve both tried so hard to save him—”

  “What do you mean we both—”

  “Oh, don’t you see it? Don’t you? She suffered a crisis of conscience in Bangkok, you see. She couldn’t go on with the experiments and she abandoned me. She left me there. But I knew exactly where she was going. Exactly. It’s the only reason I exposed myself, as you so eloquently put it. You see, I had taken samples from the pool before I capped the well. When she left me, I had no choice but to expose myself. But the problem? Well, the samples weren’t enough. It’s a funny creature, you see, our Elysium parasite. A drip and drab of it here and there has no real effect. In the wild, on its own, floating free through the swamp, it’s as inconsequential as a drop of water. But in concentration, it’s another thing entirely. If you capture it the way we did in that pool, if you get it to flock, then immerse someone in it, the change takes effect. So I came home as well to get—”

  “As well?” Ben cried. “What do you mean as well?”

  “Oh, come on, Ben. You’re smarter than this. You’ve always been smarter than this. A big brute you meet on the Internet walks into your apartment late at night, gets violent with you and suddenly just walks away.”

  It took Ben a few minutes of gape-mouthed silence to remember what Noah was talking about. “I . . . I pulled a gun on the guy . . . I—”

  “Is that why he smashed his head into your door frame three times in a row, the exact same number of times he smashed your head into the headboard?”

  “How do you know all—”

  “Or better yet, Anthem Landry, in an alleged blackout, smashes every bottle of liquor in his apartment and writes himself a note that says he’s done drinking forever. She was here for years, Ben, working on your lives from the shadows. But then she got scared. You see, she ignored my warnings all together, and she flat-out ignored what we had discovered in Bangkok. Which is that it isn’t contempt or anger that makes the monsters rise. It’s connection. It’s true love and true hate. Not the kind of petty, childish hate that gets bandied about on the Internet as some petty device against strangers. I’m taking about true hatred, the kind where you’re convinced the other person has been taking from you year after year after year and you’re powerless to stop them. That kind of hatred, Ben. The kind of hatred you feel for Marshall Ferriot.”

  “How?” Ben said. “How could she . . . Did she not feel a connection to us? How could she have been using her power on us and not turned us into—”

  “She wasn’t using it on you! She was using it on the people around you. The people who threatened you on the way home from the bar, the people who were standing in your way at work. She was your guardian angel, Ben. And i
t was going so well, she started to get careless. I had found her by then and I warned her. She went too far with Anthem that night. The bottles, the note. She knew I was right. So she went back to your apartment to remove all the surveillance software she’d installed on your computer so she could track your movements and whatever stories you were working on. That’s when your angry visitor showed up and she was forced to take action to keep you from becoming a hate crime. After that . . . Well, I haven’t seen her since.”

  “That was six months ago. She has to know,” Ben whispered. “Just like you, she has to know after everything that’s happened today that Marshall’s awake. That he’s here. She has to know.”

  “Maybe she does. I don’t know how far away she is. And you’re so desperate to leave. Do you really have the time to wait for her?”

  “What does that— What do you mean?”

  “I have more of it, Ben. I went to the source and I took as much as I could ever need.”

  “It looks like you took too much,” Ben whispered.

  Noah lifted his scarred hand from the top of the cane. “Nice try,” he muttered. “But this is from something else altogether.”

  Noah’s smile was wobbly. “You always hid behind your sarcasm, Ben. Always. When you weren’t hiding behind Anthem and Nikki. You’re still hiding behind him, by the way. Standing here, at the threshold of one of the greatest miracles ever to be visited upon mankind, wondering how that vulgar, self-obsessed drunk will fare by the time the night is over.”

  “I haven’t heard anything that sounds like a miracle,” Ben whispered.

  “Then you haven’t been listening!” Noah roared.

  “Why didn’t you stop him yourself?” Ben fired back. “Why go to all this trouble and waste all this time?”