Strays

by Remy Wilkins

  Rodney walked down the aisle, letting his hand trail along the tops of the pews. He approached the thick rope that came down from the ceiling. He looked up into the bell tower to see the mouth of the bell and the wheel where the rope connected. He wondered how loud the bell was, and he put his hands to the rope.

  “I wouldn’t pull that, son.”

  The voice so startled Rodney that he stumbled back and fell behind the pulpit. He peeked over the table to see a broad-shouldered policeman standing in the doorway.

  “I wasn’t. I’m sorry, I just wanted to see.” He rose to his feet as the man took a few more steps into the light. The man had short blond hair and a bulbous nose over a bushy mustache. He looked like the blond version of an Italian pizza mascot.

  “Didn’t mean to frighten ya. I was just driving by, saw you enter here. I tell Aaron to keep it locked, but he’s careless. What’s your name?”

  “Rodney.”

  “Who’s your papa?”

  “I haven’t, well, I’m not from here. I’m visiting my uncle.” He paused before adding, “Ray Lauter.”

  The man’s eyes seemed to bulge, he blinked three times rapidly, and then smiled. “Oh. Well. Guess that explains my next question. I was going to ask what you were doing in a church on a Monday morning.”

  “Yeah, I just wanted to see it.”

  “I’m Al Walden, sheriff ’round here.” He walked down the aisle to join him. “Did your uncle tell you about the bees?”

  Rodney shook his head no.

  “What? No bees? Hah, I can understand.” He moved to the wall and put his hand against it. “Hear that?”

  Listening carefully, Rodney began to hear the dull hum of bees.

  “They’re in the wall. Your uncle closed up the front of this church here, wanted the congregation facing the east, he said. Bees filled it up. I think it was them azaleas out there.”

  “What happens if you ring the bell? Does it make them angry?”

  Walden gave Rodney a slanty-eyed look. “I can’t believe your uncle didn’t tell you the story.”

  Rodney again shook his head no.

  “Unbelievable,” he said brushing his hair back, setting his hat on top, then removing it again. “It’s funny to me now. Your uncle was a hell-breather, always naming sins. We have differences in what we consider preaching. I do the service now. I preach on justice, being good citizens.” He tapped the star on his chest. “’Swhat I know.” He flashed a wide grin that made Rodney step back.

  “But back then, ole Ray was doing the preaching, and he went to swinging on this rope.” He paused to run his hand up the fat bell rope. Walden pointed at the wall behind them and continued, “Now bees aren’t a bother unless you give ’em a big noise, something that rattles their little stingers. So a soft tug or two might rile ’em, but it won’t stir ’em up too badly. However,” he held up both index fingers to emphasize this, “if you give a mighty yank, you’re gonna upset these critters.” He tossed his head in the direction of the bees.

  “But I heard from—from the mailman, that bees got inside. How’d that happen?”

  Walden paused with a twinkle in his eye. “Ah, Otis got to ya, did he? Yes, that’s right, bees did get inside. Look here.” He pointed to the center of the wall. Rodney noticed a long crack, like a bolt of lightning, filled in and painted over but still visible.

  “That scar is where the old door was. This was where you used to enter and face that way, to the west. But Ray flipped it. Then, that time he lost it, pardon, the time he . . . ” He lifted his eyes to find the words. “The time he prompted his resignation,” he seemed pleased with this phrase and added a laugh to it. “He was just cranking on this rope. He split the wall behind him and the bees poured out. Like it was the end of days, people screaming, running.”

  Rodney recalled his own flight from bees yesterday. “Did anyone get stung?”

  “Sure did. Scores of us, ’cept Ray. We’re all waiting outside in the bright sun wondering if Ray had locked himself in the bathrooms. Then finally Ray comes strutting out like nothing happened. And not one sting.” He paused to let that sink in. “That ain’t right. All them bees and not a single sting? Mm-mm, that’s what we call, in the law and order business, fishy.”

  Rodney tried to draw out an explanation. “Sooo?”

  Walden shrugged and brushed his mustache. “I figure he’s the kinda guy that doused himself with bee repellent just in case, not that he premeditated the event. But not everyone saw it that way. Lot of folk had an even more . . . ” he paused while he selected his word, “extravagant explanation of his healthy exit.” He winked, “But don’t let people convince you of any of that. I figure Ray’s a good type. As much time as he spends around those rockers of his, I expect it ain’t too surprising that he’s a little off his rocker.” He chortled at his turn of phrase.

  Rodney excused himself soon after and made his way to the library. He found it without trouble and slid his bike into the rack out front. It was the town’s single modern building; blond brick with a flat roof, columns of small rectangular windows across the front. Inside were weirdly angled walls, slanted wood slats dividing the different areas.

  His encounter with Walden had given him another striking view of Ray. Walden didn’t seem to have the dull anger that Otis held, but the picture of Ray was quite different from his own view. Otis thought he was crazy and maybe even evil, but Walden seemed to think he was more disturbed than evil.

  For himself, he had always liked Ray, but had never trusted him. Ray was playful and fun, but there was something secretive about him. His motivations weren’t to be trusted, and, as friendly as he was, there was a meanness to him, too. The baseball incident was only one of a string of Ray-instigated injuries. There was the time when he was seven that Ray built a giant slingshot and terrified him with water balloons the size of his head. Rodney had spent ten minutes running across the front yard of the Corleonis screaming before his mother came out to put an end to it. Another time Rodney climbed a tree behind the workshop and couldn’t get down. Ray wouldn’t get out the ladder to help him, but only poked and prodded him with a long stick until Rodney had fallen, branch by branch, to the ground.

  He replayed these events while he wandered the rows of books in the cool air of the library. He finally found someone shelving books and asked her where the foreign language dictionaries were. She pointed him to a shelf near the wall, and soon he had claimed an empty study room bearing a couple of fat Italian dictionaries. He made sure he shut the door before he pulled out the strange plans stolen from Ray’s workshop. He removed the blueprint from the tube and studied the words surrounding the bulb-like structure.

  At the top were the words “Alvarium Maleficorum” so he looked those up first. There was no alvarium, all he could find was alveare, which meant hive, and alveo, which was the word for bed.

  Maleficorum presented problems also. He found mala (underworld), malaccorta (unwise), malafede (bad faith), and malaffare (shady characters) before he realized that his word was spelled male-.

  He found maleficio (witchcraft) and malefico (evil), but didn’t find the exact word maleficorum. Still, the words were close enough to make him uneasy about this evil/witchcraft bed/hive.

  He skimmed the document for another word. Cruentationis appeared numerous times so he looked up that word next. He read:

  cruccio: nm, torment

  cruciale: a, crucial

  cruciverba: nm inv, crossword

  crudele: a, cruel

  crudelmente: adv, cruelly

  crudelta: nf, cruelty

  crudo: a, crude

  cruento: a, bloody

  crumiro: nm, scab

  Cruento was the closest, but regardless of meaning, the neighborhood was imposing enough for him to get the general idea. He decided to focus on some of the sentences scrawled along the edges. He chos
e “Le api sono sangue del cuore” first.

  Thirty minutes of flipping through the dictionary yielded a rough draft of: “The api sono blood of heart”. Looking up sono got him sonoglio (bell), sonar (sonar), sonno (sleep) before stumbling onto a strange little note: “sono : vedi essere”. He didn’t know what that meant, but looking up essere resulted in the meaning “be”. The api be blood of heart. Seemed close.

  The final puzzle was api. The closest words he could find were: apiario (apiary), apice (apex) and apicoltore (beekeeper). But there was no api. He stared at the bare brick wall. Through the windows in front of him he could see the librarian pass with her book cart. He frowned at the table in front of him, lost in his thoughts. It felt familiar to be isolated in a room. Rodney’s life was full of solitary moments in rooms. They were his retreat, his safe-place.

  Home, after a ballgame, after the jeers of his teammates and the barked corrections from his father in the stands, he’d go into his closet to hide. From there he’d imagine cheers and high-fives and his father clapping him on the back after the game. Or he’d imagine his mother coming in to tell him that baseball was stupid, that his teammates were stupid, that it didn’t matter, that nothing mattered if he didn’t like it.

  The door opened and Rodney was startled out of his thoughts. It was the librarian.

  “Doing some research?” she asked.

  “Yeah, just a . . . uh . . . summer project.”

  “Oh, how nice. Need anything?”

  “No. Oh, wait, there is something.” He picked up his notes and asked, “Do you know what ‘apiary’ means?”

  “Sure, that’s a place for bees.”

  “Bees? Hm. How about ‘apex’?”

  “That’s the highest point of something.”

  Rodney stared at his translation again. “Thanks.”

  “No problem. In fact, I’ll go get you a dictionary so you can look up the words you don’t know. I’m Lucasta, by the way.”

  “Thanks. I’m Rodney. I’m visiting my uncle.”

  “You’re Ray’s nephew?”

  He looked up at her in surprise. “That’s right, how’d you-”

  “We’re neighbors. I live on the same side of the road, just farther down it.”

  “Past Otis?”

  “Past Otis.” She smiled brightly. Her face was smooth and her hair was white, but she didn’t look old. She looked to be about his mom’s age. She turned to leave. “Be right back with that dictionary.”

  Rodney tried the new words into his sentence to see if they fit. “The apiary/apex be blood of heart.” Both apiario and apicoltore had to do with bees, perhaps that’s what api meant. He looked back at the Italian dictionary and his eye fell on the opposite page where he found ape, which meant bee. “The bees be blood of heart”? That didn’t make much sense either.

  Lucasta reentered the room and put down another fat book. She saw the blueprints and said, “Doing something on the human heart?”

  Rodney looked at the bulbous shape on the plans again. “Why do you say that?” he asked.

  She pointed at the structure. “That’s a four-chambered heart.” She pointed at the two circular rooms at the back. “Those are the atria, and these longer rooms here are the right and left ventricles.”

  “Ah, yeah,” was all he could manage.

  “Let me know if you need anything else,” she said cheerfully as she backed out of the room. She shut the door and pushed her cart down the hall.

  The last line he translated was easy. “La porta dei demoni” was “the door of the demoni.” And while he didn’t find demoni exactly, he did see:

  demone: nm, demon

  demoniaro: a, demonic

  demonio: nm, demon

  demonizzare: vt, demonize

  demonizzazione: nf, demonization

  It was pretty clear. It was a plan for building a doorway for demons. Rodney felt the hair on his neck bristle. He heard a low buzzing coming from the light above him and shivered. He remembered the conversation he’d heard in the night between Ray and an unknown guest. Guess it wasn’t a dream. Guess Otis was right.

  The final definition at the bottom of the column of words was:

  demoralizzante: nf, demoralizing

  Rodney slumped in his chair. What should he do now?

  He started to roll up the blueprints when he noticed a note written on the back. It said, “Raimondo, Efesini 4:27. —Filippo.” He was pretty sure the Raimondo was his uncle Ray. A quick flip of the dictionary told him that Efesini meant Ephesians, a book from the New Testament. He went back into the stacks to search for a Bible. Once he found one he returned to his study room and looked up the reference. All it said was: “Neither give place to the devil.” Why would Filippo send Ray plans for a demonic doorway, but tell him not to give place to the devil?

  As he considered this, the room went dark. The power had died. He could hear the ripple of surprise from outside the study room. He waited for his eyes to adjust, but nothing changed, and he remained in darkness.

  He stood and reached his hand to the wall. He could follow it to the door and then down the hall out into the main area where the windows let in light. He froze as he heard the door open and shut. He felt a presence before him in the black.

  A voice spoke, harsh and a bit like water sizzling in a pan. He couldn’t make out the first words, but he recoiled in fear to the wall behind him. The voice spoke again, “Where is Birthless, little adam?”

  A stench filled the room. Rodney put his hand before his face. “What?”

  There was a loud thump and crash. He heard the books hit the wall and the papers on the table scatter. “Birthless, you bald dirt!”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, cringing further into the corner. His stomach churned. He was going to be sick. As far as he could tell the figure remained on the other side of the table.

  There was a horrible chuckle in the darkness. “No matter. The diaboloi will find Birthless. The new age is ending and the world will be made old again. You will see. The terms are over. The diaboloi break the boundaries. Soon the army will be amassed.”

  There was a clamoring on the table, and Rodney cried out as he realized the creature was moving near him. A hairy fist grabbed his neck and stood him upright against the wall. His head banged against the brick and sent him into a daze.

  The creature leaned near and said, “We do not fear the Name any longer.”

  The hand released him and Rodney fell to the floor. The door opened and slammed shut again. Rodney sucked in air, shivering with fright. The emergency lighting snapped alive, casting a thin beam down the hallway. A minute later the lights rewoke, and he was able to see the disarray of his room.

  In a panic he gathered up his paper and the blueprints, stuffing them in his backpack. He stacked the books on the table and left as quickly as he could. What were these things that kept appearing to him? Were they really demons? Was that what he had heard this morning? Or was he going as crazy as Uncle Ray?

  The bright sun did nothing to calm him. He rode stiffly down the streets. He didn’t stop shivering until he hit the final curve that would take him back to his uncle’s house.

  The only thing he could think of was why had his mom left him here?

  Chapter Six

  MORTAL ILLS

  Ray knocked on the door. “I’m going back to the shop. There’s some sandwiches in the kitchen when you get hungry.” Rodney heard him take a couple of steps toward the stairs and then stop. “Oh, and if you could check on the rabbits, that’d be great. See that they have plenty of hay.”

  Rodney sat up in the bed. “Sure, I can do that.” He heard Ray descend the stairs.

  Once he’d returned from town, he’d hidden in his room to formulate a plan. He wasn’t sure whom to trust, and he couldn’t go to his mom with crazy stories of demons and mons
ters. Ray seemed involved in something, but why would Ray bring him into this? Perhaps his mom had forced Ray’s hand by insisting that Rodney stay with him. Perhaps his mom was in on it, too.

  He covered his face with his arms as though he were deflecting a blow. He growled, stretched, and rolled off the bed to check on the rabbits. On his way out, he grabbed a couple of carrots as a special treat for them and exited into the backyard. It was just after two, and the air was as thick as a quilt. He walked over to the tree line where the rabbit pen was kept, batting bugs with his hand. Home run, home run, home run, he muttered as he whacked them.

  The rabbit pen was a three-foot-high fence big enough for the rabbits to spring around. Like most things at Ray’s house, it was made of wood. Several of the slats were carved with the names of bunnies who had passed on: Saltus, Shem, Dada, Cassidy, Houndstooth, and Rococo.

  Rodney had plenty of memories with these rabbits. When he was younger, his mom would put him into the pen and the rabbits would bump and nuzzle him. He’d chase them and giggle. As he became older the rabbits lost their charm. He remembered the names of the three current rabbits: Jerome, Ebenezer, and Thundertrump.

  He didn’t understand the point of having pet rabbits. Ray would throw a beach ball into the pen and watch the rabbits bump it around with their noses, but aside from that and petting them, there didn’t seem much use to having rabbits. Ray certainly didn’t eat them.

  He waved a carrot. “Here boys, come here.”

  Thundertrump, the great big cinnamon-colored female, made a tremendous leap and shook the fence when she landed. Rodney stumbled back. “Whoa there, girl.” The bottom of one of the slats came loose and he toed it back in place. He stuck his hand over the fence again and let Thundertrump munch. She nibbled briefly, but when Ebenezer, a much smaller, gray-furred rabbit, hopped over, Thundertrump leapt away. A cloud of dust exploded when she landed. Rodney tossed the remaining carrot in front of Ebenezer.