The Calling

by Robert Swartwood

  “It’s Lily. She was rushed to the hospital.”

  “What? When?”

  “Almost an hour ago.” She paused, her hand to her chest, taking slow breaths. “I was walking my poodle Sky, and I heard her cry out inside her trailer. She said a name—it sounded like Kevin. I knocked on her door asking what was wrong but she never answered me. When I went inside to check on her she was right there on the floor. She looked just like my dear husband Stanley did when he had his stroke, God rest his soul.”

  “She had a stroke?”

  Carol shook her head. “Them ambulance people wouldn’t say, but I’m sure it was a stroke. Lord, first Nancy, now Lily. I’ve been trying to call Dean since it happened but I can’t get a hold of him.”

  She told me about my note and how she’d been keeping an eye out for me. I asked her which hospital they’d taken her to, but I already knew.

  “St. Joseph’s,” she said matter-of-factly. “Do you need directions?”

  “No, I know the way.” I started down the drive, toward my car.

  “Oh, one more thing.”

  I turned back.

  “Do make sure she didn’t get any burns. I checked her trailer after they left to see if the oven was on, or maybe her curler, but I couldn’t find what it was. I even mentioned it to the ambulance people, though they claimed they didn’t smell anything. But I swear I did smell it when I first went inside. I know I did.”

  I was in a rush, but something made me pause, made me ask her what it was she’d smelled.

  “Well, when I stepped inside the trailer, the first thing I smelled was something burning. It was an awful stink. An awful, nasty stink.”

  Chapter 33

  They had her in a private room on the fourth floor. I sat in a chair beside her bed. The machines around it beeped steadily, the green thin lines on the monitor sloping up and down. The room had no noticeable smells, which bothered me. For some reason I felt I should at least smell disinfectant, or my grandmother’s dying body on the bed.

  I thought of my final words to her last night, of telling her goodnight before I went to my trailer. Did I tell her I loved her?

  She wore a blue paper gown. Her chest rose and fell. Her calm and long face was pale. Behind her eyelids, the movement was slight.

  Before I knew it then that chill shot through my soul and I saw her just as she came out of the bathroom in her trailer. I was there with her, standing by the Magnavox in the corner. I could hear her radio, playing light jazz; I could smell the tuna sandwich she’d made herself for lunch, the potato chips and ranch dip. I watched helpless as she walked out and saw the figure standing there before her. Its clothes were charred, as was its skin, and though I only saw the back of its head, I knew it was staring at her with the darkest eyes she’d ever seen. Memories of her youth swarmed her and she cried out a name before her heart failed her. She fell to the floor, her soft head knocking against the edge of the counter.

  Blinking, I was back in the hospital room, not standing but sitting, staring at my grandmother’s near-lifeless body. For a moment my mind was a complete blank. Then thoughts and shards of the past began seeping in and I understood.

  “You didn’t say Kevin,” I whispered. “You said Devin.”

  I remembered the man whom I’d thought was Lewis Shepherd tell me a fragmented history of the Beckett House, and that he said Supposedly Reverend Beckett was involved with one of the local girls ... supposedly she was a minor.

  I remembered my first day in Bridgton, sitting beside my grandmother on her swing as she told me how she’d only been in love with two men her entire life, and about the first she said It was really nothing more than a hopeless crush on a man twice my age.

  And while it may have seemed like some very thin evidence, I connected the dots, I saw the link. Once again that feeling passed through me and I saw them there, back in 1953, a young Lily Thorsen going to meet with an older Devin Beckett, a man with whom she had a crush on but a man who respected God and himself, who even respected Lily. They talked about simple things, like school and the weather, and more complex things, like God and the Bible. Lily quickly understood that while she thought she was in love, it was only a crush, and while Beckett agreed to speak with her in private about whatever she wished to talk about, he made it a rule that it would be their secret. He knew how townspeople liked to gossip and didn’t want to think what would happen if word got around he’d become friends with an underage girl.

  Except, of course, that secret was finally revealed, which somehow sparked a massacre that kept killing unto this day.

  “Everything,” I whispered. “It all comes back to you.”

  Whether her unconscious mind heard her me or not, she made no response. The only sounds I was left with in the cold sterilized room were the steady beeps of the machines. The steady beeps, and the slow rise and fall of her chest.

  • • •

  I MUST HAVE dozed off. The last thing I remembered before closing my eyes was that it was a little after seven o’clock. When I awoke, my arms were crossed and I was slouched in the chair. Through the slim space between the plain curtains I saw it was nighttime. Dean stood at the foot of Grandma’s bed.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  He glanced at his watch, told me a quarter after nine.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  He never even looked at me, instead stared down at the woman in the bed. Her face was still long and calm, there was still movement behind her eyelids, but nothing else.

  “Have you talked to the nurses?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I did. Heart attack.” He shook his head. “They said the only things keeping her alive right now are those machines.”

  His face reminded me of the first five days he’d been in Lanton. Hard and cautious, his eyes cold. Only now his face was red too, and wet from tears. Because the room had no distinguishable scents, I had no problem smelling the lingering cigarette smoke coming from his direction. I imagined him smoking ever since he heard the news—on the drive over from Bridgton, flicking the ash out the window as he sped down 14, then in the parking lot, sitting in the Explorer and chain-smoking his Winston’s until he was finally able to come inside. Now here he stood, in the same clothes as this afternoon, his arms at his sides, his hands flexing in and out of fists.

  “I saw what you did today.”

  I didn’t think he was going to answer me. He continued staring down at his mother. Finally he nodded. “I know you did, Chris. Everybody there did. They saw me screw up.”

  “Screw up? No, you were a hero. You saved lives.”

  Thirty-four lives, I thought but didn’t say.

  His eyes shifted away for the first time, stared back into my own. He looked so helpless there, so alone. Nothing like the man who’d confronted me earlier today just outside the gymnasium, the man who’d nearly called Moses Cunningham a nigger.

  “When you become a cop they tell you to learn the law. To memorize it, to live it, and that’s what you do. They tell you to keep the law, to enforce it, and you do that as best you can. But you know something? The only thing the law does is protects the bad guys. No matter what somebody does, there’s always a technicality to get him off.”

  He shook his head.

  “Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it in the end. That all the time and energy I spend trying to catch the bad guys and keeping the peace is even worth my time. Driving home every night I ask myself what I’m sure every cop asks himself—am I making a difference? Am I doing something that will somehow make the world a better place?”

  He shrugged, wiped at his face.

  “But it’s not like I can complain. Hell, I’m just a deputy assigned to some sticks town, not a cop walking the beat in New York City. But today when I saw those two, instinct took over and I reacted. I shouted at them, I told them to stop, to drop their weapons, and when it became apparent that they wouldn’t, when the one in front even start
ed to raise his rifle, I knew I had no choice. I fired at them both. The one’s dead. The other ... he’s actually in this hospital somewhere. I think they have him on the third floor.”

  “Dean,” I said, leaning forward in my chair. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  He stared down at the bed. He actually grinned, though it was an empty grin, the grin of a defeated man.

  “As it turns out I didn’t warn them that I would shoot. I shouted stop and I shouted drop your weapons, but I never gave them that warning. You probably think it’s no big deal, and in reality it’s not. But some lawyer came forward about an hour ago—he was actually at the graduation, some school parent—and he said he’ll represent the Grant kid, and the Luhr family. Says that I could have handled the situation differently. Says both parties might still be alive. That had I done my job properly none of this would have happened.”

  “But that’s bullshit. Those kids were planning on shooting up the place. They wanted to kill people.”

  “I know that, Chris. You know that. Hell, everyone there knows that. But the thing is, with our fucked up judicial system that doesn’t matter. Because there’s always some technicality a lawyer will try to play. It’s a game to them. He might get it past a judge and jury, he might not, but in the end it doesn’t matter. He’s going to drag this thing out for as long as he can to get his name in the papers, because he thinks he’s doing what’s right. And that’s really what pisses me off. That he’s the one who thinks he’s making a difference.”

  I asked what this meant for him.

  “This lawyer, his name’s Gray, he’s already talked the families into suing me, the county, even the school district. My supervisors say I don’t have anything to worry about, but I can tell they aren’t one hundred percent sure themselves. They know how the system works. They know how fucked up everything is. Even if I do end up coming out of this clean, it’ll be months, years, before that happens. And by then I’ll probably have spent all my savings and be in debt thousands of dollars.”

  He paused, shook his head again, and muttered, “Just because I was doing my fucking job.”

  My uncle went back to staring down at his mother. In the silence, the only sound was the machines beeping. I glanced up at the screen, watched the green lines sloping up and down. I thought of today, of this past week, of my entire life. How it had all come to this point—my parents dead, Joey gone, two teenagers shot, and me sitting in this chair beside a woman I barely even knew.

  “Dean, can I ask you something?”

  He didn’t even look at me when he said sure.

  “Who owns Shepherd’s Books?”

  I knew this wasn’t the right time or place for such a random question, but it was something I needed to know. Something that’d been gnawing at me ever since I read Mrs. Porter’s obituary. I still couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid. And though I knew it really was Gerald Alcott, I had to hear it from someone else, someone who lived here and possibly even knew the man.

  The question didn’t seem to faze Dean at all. Still staring ahead, he took a breath and said, “Shepherd’s Books? That’d be Gerald Alcott.” He paused. “Why do you ask that?”

  I shook my head. “Just curious.”

  As I went to rise from my seat, Dean cleared his throat.

  “About before, what I said about you being bad luck.” He spoke without looking at me. “I wish I could say I didn’t mean it, that I’d just been caught up in the moment. But then I’d be lying. Because after everything that’s happened since you arrived—with Mr. Cunningham and his son, with the mess today at the high school, and now Mom—I have to ask myself if any of this would have happened had you not been here. And the more I think about it, the more certain I am that somehow it all comes back to you.”

  “What are you saying?”

  He turned his head to meet my stare. “That I want you back in Lanton as soon as possible. That despite you being my nephew, I never want to see you again. And it’s not because I dislike you—because I don’t—but because every time I see you I feel like something bad is going to happen. And today just proves it.”

  I didn’t know what to say. As much as I wanted to disagree with him, to tell him he was wrong, I simply couldn’t. I couldn’t, because deep within my soul I knew he was right, and it scared me. It scared me to death.

  Chapter 34

  The gravel parking lot was deserted. I turned off my low beams as I pulled in and parked in front of the porch. The lights were on upstairs. I expected the side door—the bookstore’s entrance—to be locked and that I’d have to kick it in. It wasn’t. The knob turned just fine, and then I was inside and heading through the shelves and cardboard boxes of books that still reeked of stale paper and dust.

  He must have heard me on the steps, because when I opened the door he’d already gotten out of his recliner. His eyes were wide and expectant, but when he saw me they narrowed. He growled, “What the hell do you think you’re doing, barging in on an old man like this? You best leave now before I call the Sheriff.”

  I stood there and surveyed the living room. It looked just like it had the last time I was here, only those piles of old newspapers and Life and Time magazines were back on the threadbare couch. The TV was on, its sound muted.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  “After you leave my house I will. Now get, before I call the Sheriff and have—”

  “Sit down, Gerald.”

  This made him stop. His dry face paled, his mouth dropped open.

  “What—what did you say?”

  “I said sit down, Gerald.”

  He took a slow step back, then another, until his legs bumped against the recliner. He sat with a heavy humph, like nearly all the life had been punched out of him. “How ... how do you know my name?”

  I shook my head and shut the door. The space between us was maybe ten feet, but it wasn’t far enough. Rage caused my body to shake and the only thing I wanted to do now was take the knife that had been in my glove box, the one now in my back pocket, and stab him in the heart.

  Instead I crossed my arms and said, “You have no right to ask me a fucking thing. So before you speak again, remember that I know everything there is to know about you. I know what really happened to you in 1953. I know what happened to your family and the reason behind it. And I know about Samael.”

  His eyes widened for just an instant, giving me my confirmation.

  “Let me guess. He came to you and gave you a choice to pick and choose lives, and you chose your own.”

  “No.” His voice trembled. “No, that’s not what happened.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me what happened, Gerald? Explain to me why seven children were burned alive in that stone house. Explain to me why those children’s mothers and fathers were all murdered in their beds. Explain to me why all the firstborns are dead now except you.”

  “The curse—”

  “Yes, I know all about the fucking curse. But tell me what makes you different. Why are you still alive?”

  Tears had begun to form in his eyes. He wiped at them, with no real sense of purpose, as he stared down at the throw rug.

  “I—I had no choice. He came to me and asked me if I wanted to die. I—I was only a young boy then, only fourteen. Dying was the last thing I wanted. So he told me to start a rumor about Reverend Beckett, about him and—”

  “My grandmother.”

  He looked up at me and nodded slowly. “Yes, him and Lily. But Lily and I were friends. I even had a crush of my own on her and didn’t want to ruin her reputation. So I kept her out of it but still spread the rumor that he was involved with a young girl. And then ... then they were all dead.”

  “But that doesn’t answer my question. Why are you still alive?”

  The tears now fell freely down his face; he had given up even trying to wipe them away. He just sat there, slumped in his chair, shaking his head. I thought briefly about the doors in his mind, how the ones that mattered had never be
en locked in the first place. They’d been open all his life, forcing him to remember that summer of his boyhood. Then I thought about the room just down the hall, across from the bathroom. The room that smelled of aged paper and mothballs, with all the newspapers and magazines recording tragedies. Gerald hadn’t kept those simply because they were news that needed saving. He’d saved them because Samael loved bringing tragedy and chaos to the world, and each one of those pieces of news was a reminder.

  “I don’t know,” Gerald whispered. “I swear to you, I don’t. I hate myself for what I did. I hate that they all died because of that rumor I started. I hate that I’ve got no one, absolutely no one at all. I hate that he controls me, makes me do things I don’t want to do.”

  I said, “Like killing my parents?” and it took everything I had at that moment not to rush across the room and cut his throat.

  “Your parents?” Genuine confusion filled his face. “I ... I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Joey then.”

  He shook his head. “I—I still don’t understand—”

  “Then how does he control you? What does he make you do?”

  The old man was silent, staring again at the floor. The front of his shirt was damp from where he’d wiped his hands.

  “You sold your soul,” I said. “He owns you. You’re his puppet.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Freely sobbing now, his body shaking. “Don’t you think I lie in bed every night regretting the decision I made? But I can’t ... I can’t change it now. What’s done is done.”

  “That’s bullshit. You could have said no. You could have told him to go fuck himself.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about. He’s not—he’s not human. He’s beyond our world. I’ve wanted to die for years now, I’ve even tried, but he won’t let me.”

  “How much did he tell you? About his plan.”

  “His ... plan?”

  “The thirty-four lives. He gave Joey a choice to save thirty-four lives for the price of one. What do you know about that?”