“So time spent on you is wasted?”
“Stop fucking around with me!”
“There is no shield against what Marshall Ferriot has. There is no antidote. And if he gets you in his sights and he gets close enough, there’s no running. I am going to give you what you need to stop him, Ben. But first it was my responsibility to tell you our story so you would know the risks. So you would know how this works.”
“You’ve told me nothing,” Ben said. “I’ve got one journal entry from eight years ago, and nothing about what came afterwards except for your word. Which I don’t believe, by the way.”
“How could you deny what I can do after every—”
“I’m denying your story. You were the only person she had left in the world. She wouldn’t have left you in Bangkok unless she had a damn good reason.”
Noah lowered his eyes as if he were disappointed, and this time, Ben felt the darkness come like an insect darting through the air behind him before coming in for a landing on the back of his neck.
• • •
He came to on his knees, just outside a weak halo of light thrown by a Coleman lantern sitting on the floorboards a few feet away. There was pitch black all around him, but he could sense that he’d been moved—driven—inside some kind of barn or large storage shed. But it was the photographs spread out in a semicircle before him that captivated him.
At least twenty images in all, but they were of the same three monstrous creatures. One of them had to be the thing Millie Delongpre had been turned into. Just as Nikki had written in her journal, the contrast between the creature’s scaled face and the huge, staring, death-glazed human eyes stopped Ben’s breath in his throat, forced him back onto his haunches.
The others were worse.
All of them had been photographed in death; there was a giant hybrid of a man and what had to be a pit bull that had an almost serene expression, save for its gaping jaws, so huge and so stuffed with giant, almost cartoonish canine teeth, they looked poised to divide the entire creature’s head in half. The most human-looking creature of the three was an enormous woman—the combat rifle leaning against the concrete wall next to her gave her scale; Ben figured she was at least ten feet tall—with a giant ridge dividing her head and her twin flaps of greasy, knotted black curls. The flesh of her crossed legs was sealed together as if by hot wax. If she had been mobile, she would have been forced to drag herself around by her arms. Her dangling, teardrop-shaped breasts were striated by spiderwebs of dark blue veins and a lewd, serpentine tongue dangled from her leering clown’s grin of a mouth, so big that the entire thing could never have fit between her lips no matter how hard she had tried.
Ten feet tall . . . Mother of God.
And what was she? The nightmare version of some test subject’s mother or wife? What crosscurrents of the human mind had literally given flesh to such a horrid thing? Mind monsters, he thought. That’s what these things were. They were living nightmares, plucked from a person’s soul as the material of their soul was drawn from their flesh. No, they weren’t just plucked. That wasn’t the right word. Jostled. Let loose. Set free. A disturbance in the connection between Nikki and the subject that set these nightmares loose upon the world.
Mind monsters. The term came to him effortlessly. He even whispered it to himself. Then he remembered what Noah had said to him about trying to name and label everything. Clearly, the man had been speaking from his own experience because that was Ben’s exact urge. Name, label, categorize. Breathe.
Ben heard movement nearby, then the familiar metallic hum of electricity as several tracks of fluorescent light flickered to life in the rafters above. Noah was standing a few feet behind him at the entrance to what had once been a long boathouse. Walls had been built around the perimeter, and the rails where the boat slips had been rose up out of plywood coverings. On the wall behind Noah, Ben could make out a faded sign in brightly colored print, a series of warnings and notices to the parkgoers who had once lined up for swamp tours and boat rides from this now dark and dank space. The whole place had once been a zoo or an amusement park.
Noah’s stare seemed vacant, then Ben heard a swinging chain behind him, and he realized his captor was focused on something just over Ben’s shoulder.
Ben screamed when he saw it. Not a short, sharp cry, but a guttural scream triggered by a true belief that he was in immediate physical danger. But after a few minutes of stumbling backward, almost losing his balance a few times, and watching the creature swinging from chains above the floorboards, Ben realized that, even though it was twice his size, the creature swinging from chains strung from the ceiling was dead. A chain had been attached to each large, translucent wing, keeping them spread out behind the slender, malformed body at its center. The wings were patterned like those of a butterfly, but the colors themselves were the greens and browns of the deep swamp. And the body that appeared to be pinned to the very center of both wings was almost humanoid. Infantile, even. Bald, with foreshortened, dangling legs. Covered from head to tiny knotted toes in what looked to be charcoal-colored fur.
And Ben wondered if the reason he hadn’t lost his mind entirely was because there was always a part of him that believed the swamp could give birth to such vicious and massive creatures. And to behold one now, to smell the sour-milk stench it gave off, returned him to a state of childlike wonder. But childlike wonder is always accompanied by a child’s overpowering sense of helplessness, and so, for the first time in his life, he was fighting not to lose control of his bladder and his hands rested against the nape of his neck as if there was a strand of pearls there for him to clutch for dear life.
“You wanted the whole story,” Noah said. “Here’s the whole story.”
Ben heard Noah’s footsteps approaching from behind as he studied the dangling creature before him. And then he realized what was familiar about the creature’s blackened face; the deeply recessed brow, and the jutting lips, contorted into a cruel parody of a baby’s pout, even in death. They were cartoonish distortions of a face he’d seen just earlier that day—impossible to believe it had been the same day, but it had been—the email a woman named Allison Cross had sent him as he’d pulled away from his apartment building with Marissa and a tiny motorboat in tow.
Millie Delongpre. Yes. You see, she and my husband, they were together before she met Noah, and well, Jeffrey always carried a torch for her. He even talked to her in his sleep.
Her husband, missing. Her husband, one of the only other men to love Millie as much as Noah had. Her husband, here now before him, a shadow in the facial features of this terrible creature.
“Jeffrey Cross,” Ben said.
Noah went rigid beside him.
“Jeffrey Cross has been missing for weeks. His wife, she called me today and . . .” Ben pointed at the creature but he couldn’t find the right words. “This is . . . Is this . . . ?”
“It doesn’t sound like you need my help. You’re smarter now. When you were a kid, you were all emotion and temper and—”
“You were trying to reverse it,” Ben said. “Jeffrey’s wife told me he always carried a torch for Millie. He was there the night you proposed to her. So you re-created Elysium just as it had looked on that night. And you brought Jeffrey Cross here and . . . what?”
In response, Noah lifted his chin and stared directly at the creature.
“Jesus Christ,” Ben said. “Is this what Nikki found out? That you were actually going to make a monster out of—”
“I was not trying to make a monster. I was trying to make her.”
“Millie. Your wife . . .”
“They’re memories. They look like nightmares. But they are memories. Living memories. They are fusions of human form and memory and I thought if the process could be refined, we could . . .” His breath left him and he licked his lips desperately, which seemed to bring no moisture to them at all. “Our test subjects were abducted and confined and interrogated; of course they gave birth to monst
ers. And Millie had suffered the worst trauma of her entire life that night, of course she gave birth to a monster. But what if, what if it could be done another way? What if what appeared to be the great and terrible limitation of Nikki’s power could be used to unleash true magic on the world, instead of living hell?”
“You were trying to bring back the dead.”
“I was trying to give life and form to a memory,” Noah said. He pointed to the photographs at their feet. “That woman, she’s the mother who molested one of our subjects when he was five years old. That dog, that’s the pit bull that attacked our other subject when he was fourteen, the one he could never get out of his head. And my wife . . . my wife ended up merged with the snake Marshall Ferriot put in our car. Memories, all of them. Every experiment, every last one. So I picked the man whose memories of my wife were as full of love and longing as mine, and I brought him to a place where she would rise to the surface of his consciousness. And then I reached into his soul. If that qualifies me as bringing back the dead, then so be it. Then that’s what I was trying to do.”
“And you failed,” Ben whispered.
Noah’s face wrinkled, and after a few seconds, what Ben thought was a sneer turned into the threat of a sob. He pulled his shirt up over his chest and the wounds Ben saw there were as fearsome-looking as the carcass swinging by chains a few feet away. He’d seen photos of great white shark attacks that looked similar, but the worst parts were the bands of blue and dark green on the perimeter of the giant bite mark that covered half of his chest, his entire side and the lower part of his back. They weren’t bruising; they were signs of infection which would explain the weakness and the shivering Noah was suffering from on top of everything else.
“There’s no way that thing could—”
“Oh, no. This, this lovely creature was my third attempt. The first was decidedly more reptilian in nature, as you can see from my wounds.”
“Your third attempt at . . . what? Millie?”
“No. I’d given up by then. I was trying to turn him back. But he didn’t make it.”
“You’re dying, aren’t you?”
Noah let his shirt slide back down over his injuries, and when he turned to face Ben, his eyes were glassy with barely contained tears. “I’m done. There’s a difference.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re all dying. Every last one of us. Me? I’m actually ready to be dead. And that’s fitting, isn’t it? I’ve been legally dead for years.” Noah closed the distance between, and in the bright glare of the fluorescent lights, Ben could see for the first time how sallow the man’s features were. His lips were so dry they looked ready to slough from his face. “I don’t expect you not to judge me. Or not to hate me, even. But whatever choice you make, know this, little Ben Broyard. I am your prologue. And so is Nikki. She used to think we’d hand over everything to you once the time came, or if we were ever discovered or found out. All she wanted you to do was tell our story. But I’ve been watching you, Ben, and I can see now you have the power to continue it. And I’m going to let you. On one condition.”
Noah paused, and despite his stern and aggressive tone of voice, one of the tears he’d tried to contain slipped down his cheek. “You must do what she failed to do, what she lacked the courage to do. You must stop Marshall Ferriot.”
• • •
A choice, this last thought was still filtering through his consciousness when Ben opened his eyes and found himself staring down at cloudy, mustard-colored water. After a few seconds, like the pixels of an old Magic Eye, the tumbles of flesh-colored particles, many of them flocking together in pulsating clumps, seemed to resolve, and he realized he was standing on the service walkway above a large aquarium tank, another exhibit in the ruined zoo Noah Delongpre had taken as refuge.
There was a service walkway that made a U along the tank’s sides and back. Off to his left was a floor that sloped abruptly, probably the ceiling over the walkway tourists had once filed through to get a look through the tank’s glass.
Noah had driven Ben to the walkway’s far end, and was standing between him and the service door on the opposite side of the tank.
“Why give me the choice?” Ben called out to him.
“Because you won’t put it to good use if I force it on you.”
And then the door opened on the other side of the tank, and she was there. She was taller, her hair thicker and darker than it had ever been in her youth, no longer the honey shade it had been when he’d used to run a brush through it late at night as she dozed off in his lap. And her face was longer and more angular and there was a hardness to her slanted cat-eyes that hadn’t been there before. And when she saw him standing just steps from the tank and the surging, tumbling infestation laced through its cloudy water, her lips parted but no sound came out that he could hear. Indeed, what he heard instead was a shuffling sound, and when he looked to Noah, he saw that the man had taken out a small gun and placed the barrel against his right temple, while balancing his other hand on his cane.
“That’s the other thing, Ben,” Noah called out. “The other limitation. You can only drive one person at a time. So sometimes, you have to make choices. Hard choices.”
Nikki shook her head back and forth, but her expression was one of mild, mature disapproval.
“Enough,” she said quietly.
“Of what, dear?” Noah asked his daughter. Then, to Ben, he said, “She can’t decide, you see. Which one of us to stop, that is. And the risks of driving either one of us are already so great to begin with—”
“Enough, Dad. Please.”
Still pressing the gun to his own head, Noah looked into Ben’s eyes. What he was searching for in them, Ben couldn’t be exactly sure.
Was it some roiling evidence of Ben’s constant desire, there since the first day he could remember, to be a bigger and more physically powerful man than he would ever be? Was it some evidence of the lifelong terror he’d felt most of his life, always fearing some form of attack on his very being, fearing that his only real defense—his sharp tongue—would offer no protection against pipes and bottles and guns? Or was it Ben’s ceaseless desire to change the very flow of the world around him, to alter the course of rivers so that they flowed toward the sunlight of truth? Was it the memories of those ruined and shamed women, clinging to the rafters of their flooded homes in the Lower Ninth Ward or cowering in their attics, terrified to let the floodwaters touch them again, even as Ben and Marissa had goaded them on—Come on, girl. Come to the boat. It’s okay. Were Ben’s lips moving as he remembered those awful scenes, as he thought to himself how the water beneath him now was as clouded and menacing and dark as the water that had blanketed his city that week?
What was her name? he thought. The one who was too afraid, the one who never swam for the boat. The one who stayed behind because she thought the water would go down soon and she could just walk out of her house as if the levees had never failed. The one who died of dehydration. If only I could have made her swim . . .
. . . I could make them swim.
He realized he’d said these words aloud only when he felt the breath of them move across his lips. Then Noah Delongpre smiled, and nodded slightly.
“And now it begins,” Noah said.
The gunshot knocked him backward, the blood spray painting the wall behind him a split second later, and then Nikki was screaming and racing down the walkway. And Ben felt as if he were floating up and out of his skin and bone. But there was no darkness, no sense of missing time, no sense of having his soul pulled from him by a force he could barely comprehend. All he saw was Noah Delongpre’s final, barely perceptible nod. Then the water rushed up to meet him as he dropped himself feet-first into the tank.
27
* * *
TANGIPAHOA PARISH
OCTOBER 2013
Ben could feel them.
There was nothing quick or predatory about their movements, nothing to suggest they were penetrating hi
s flesh or following some primordial instinct to enter his bloodstream and make their way to his brain. First they drifted toward him, then they formed tendrils down his limbs, up his neck and over his face, and within a few minutes it felt as if a veritable blanket of them had embraced him from head to toe. But there were no pinprick stings, no tiny bites. On their own, they were too small for that, and it was the clumping of them—the flocking, as Noah had called it—that rendered them visible at all.
According to her journal, Nikki and Marshall had been in the water together only a few minutes, so that was all it took, right? Just a few minutes was all he needed. But Ben held himself below the surface, just as he used to do when he and Nikki were kids and they would compete to find out who could hold their breath the longest. It was fear that kept him from surfacing, but not fear over what he’d done. Too much of the world had been cracked open during the past few hours for him to be seized by such a childish and reflexive instinct. No, he was simply afraid that if he surfaced too quickly, the little bastards wouldn’t have enough time to work their magic.
But then he heard the sound of Nikki sobbing, as familiar to him as if they’d never been separated; the same raw, chesty sobs she’d let loose when choir practice was interrupted and she was told that her grandmother had died. When he broke the surface, gasping for air, feeling wet clumps of the little fuckers sliding down his cheeks and up his nostrils—not sliding, crawling—she was cradling her father’s corpse in her arms. It looked like she was preparing to flip Noah’s body into the tank. But that wasn’t it; she was just desperate to hold him, but she didn’t want to cradle his gunshot-blasted head on her lap, so she’d slid her arms underneath his lower back, despite the awkwardness of the pose.
Then she saw Ben, floating several feet away, with only his head above the surface. He braced himself for judgment of some kind, but instead, he saw a flash of recognition in her eyes that stalled her violent tears. She was scanning the rippling surface of the tank. The tendrils of Elysium parasite had formed a starburst pattern around his head.
The Heavens Rise Page 21
