by Aaron Dries
Weaving his children into his life was a little like his occupation, like architecture—both existed in an ethereal place within his head, in the swamps of the Internet. There was nothing tangible about it—like a design drawing. But the rewarding thing about being an architect was watching your plans become a reality. What had no shape or texture before was now riddled with nails and cast its own shadow. Something with no substance was now a three-dimensional object.
A house.
A headstone.
Napier’s cell phone buzzed to life, filling the room with green light. He picked it up and looked at the display. The name NORMAN was printed across it in flashing text. He sighed—a work call was the last thing he wanted to take right now. He was riding on a high. The blood was flowing. He didn’t want to come down out of the sky.
Napier lifted the phone to his ear and wedged it between his shoulder and neck. He felt himself adjusting within his body; some other personality shifted and awoke. This second person was a man of humor and professionalism. This person ironed his shirts and shook hands with clients.
That person was fading, day by day.
“Norman, speak to me.”
As Napier half-listened, he read his Children’s messages, answering in faux Internet abbreviations and lingo.
“They can’t have the house that high because the council regulations forbid anything over thirty feet. Yeah, they can try to go to the board of Variances with their changes, it’s only two feet, but I don’t know. Probably not. What else?”
Tashigal was having problems with her mother. He could use that. Every downfall needed to spring from a place of reality, otherwise he was creating drama from nothing—which never worked. It was a waste of time and energy.
“Generally, we don’t want to see the toilet from the kitchen so adjust the designs. I don’t care. Trust me, they’ll appreciate it later on. Norman, you’re the salesperson, you deal with it, okay?”
Ben sent him a media attachment and Napier clicked on the icon, his tongue toying with one of the seeds. He crushed it between his teeth. A photograph started to download. It was a picture of the thirteen-year-old with his best friend who had been killed in a head-on collision six months prior. Here was a kid who was burned by the pain of loss. Napier didn’t think Ben would be able to withstand losing another close friend. More ballast for the blast. He loved it.
Napier’s online stalking filled him with a very different feeling from the physical. He felt in control and uninhibited by Joe’s slow moving body and dim wit. He was playing a dangerous game…but he was playing it on home turf. If he played his moves with precision and care, then there was a very real possibility that he would hit a home run.
Don’t flinch when I throw the ball, Guy!
Napier pushed the memory away and focused on the voice buzzing in his ear. “They should only build the stone facing up to the windowsill so that it creates a balanced look on the elevations.”
Ben was in the later stages of his manipulation. Napier had already given him suicide-related websites and links; he wouldn’t linger for much longer. He liked Ben. Ben provided him with great pleasure and satisfaction; he was a worthy offering.
“Look, Norman, I’ll be in the Seattle office on Friday, call me then. It’s getting late and I’m going to be turning in soon… Yeah… No problem. Just shoot me through the details and I’ll have a crack at them tomorrow.”
His voice was so smooth. Controlled.
Meanwhile, his fingers shook against the mouse. The arrow cursor quivered over Ben’s photograph. Ben looked younger than he was; it somehow made it all the more exciting.
This won’t last forever, Napier thought to himself. I’ve got to draw them in quick. He could feel something in the air tightening in on him—the pressure of time, perhaps. He couldn’t identify it. Napier wondered if it was fear. Given time, he would be caught and tried and sent to prison. He would never, ever be released. Every so often, this concept riddled him with doubt. Could he spend the rest of his life behind bars that may prove more strong and unbreakable than his faith?
Yes. Yes, I can. And I will.
“Good night, Norman.” Napier flicked the phone shut. He returned his attention to his Children.
Chapter Fifty
The house was a moonlit carving in the dark. Racked by the north winds. Fog swirled in fingers outside. Birds retreated to their burrows and nests as the great trees swayed. The clouds were like taffy, stretched thin over great distances. Were someone outside, gazing up at the sky, they might see the occasional star before the wind blew again, obscuring their view. A thinly grasped hope. But there were no people on the streets. North Bend, from its very outskirts to its heart, had turned in for the night.
The Napiers’ residence was no different. The windows were locked tight. There were scurrying sounds in the walls. Scratching.
The hallways seemed longer and deeper in the night as they trailed off into darkness. Each open doorway was a mouth.
Marshall Deakins continued to sleep in the bowels of the house. His dreams were turbulent and fitful. His legs ran with shit from where he’d voided himself in an unconscious state. He coughed up blood in his sleep.
Guy Napier slept in his room upstairs. A bottle of whiskey sat on his bedside table next to a crystal tumbler, a jar of Valium next to it. The photographs and records on the shelf continued to gather dust. The computer was in sleep mode and the monitor had been switched off. There were greasy fingerprints illuminated by moonlight on the screen from where Napier had touched the images of his Children. A woolen quilt lay on the floor. The sheets were wrapped around Napier’s legs. He always slept naked and kept the heating up high. He sometimes woke in sweats.
Napier was too drunk to dream, but he stirred, restless. Bedsprings squawked. He moaned high-pitched girlish noises, incongruous sounds to his muscled body.
The creak of the floorboards were almost masked by the groaning wind.
Napier’s eyes snapped open with a click. He emitted a single snort.
The blade caught the moonlight as it descended, shining like a tooth. It was so bright that it obscured the person holding the knife. That tooth stabbed into the middle of Napier’s chest, his flesh opening up around the serrated edge. He’d been speared through the heart.
It was his seven-inch long Bowie hunting knife.
Napier bolted upright, knocking Sam off his torso and onto the floor. He looked down at the handle sticking perpendicular from his body. It looked so silly, jutting out like that… He grimaced, confused. A moment before there had only been a sleep so deep that not even dream withstood the darkness. And then this. The tooth in his flesh. The blade. Knife. And how it had thumped, a hollow sound. The pressure on his lungs.
His first thought was: heart attack.
But if he was having a heart attack, then what was this thing sticking out of him? And what had his son been doing on the bed?
Napier could taste something sweet and yet bitter on his tongue, like water drunk straight from the tap. His head thumped. I’ll have me a bitching whiskey thumper come sunup, he reckoned.
Again, the pressure.
“Wh-what?” he stammered, blood oozing out from between his lips.
His son was standing at the end of the bed, pale and crying.
“Sam—” Napier said.
He would have said more but now there wasn’t only pressure. Now there was pain. Bright, bursting agony funneled down into a point. He could feel his heart fighting against it, pushing upwards with all its might, trying to force whatever had skewered it up and out. But the blade wasn’t going anywhere. Working on site, Napier was used to splinters stabbing into his palms and fingers, and given time his body flushed the wood out. The knife would not go the same way. It had gone too deep too fast, so much faster and deeper than his comprehension. Only now, as death crept in, did he understand what had happened.
Napier pulled a shaking hand—
(oh, Jesus, so heavy)
&nb
sp; —up to the handle and wrapped his fingers around its girth. Strength seemed to evade him. It took so much energy to take the knife and pull it out of his chest. But he managed to do it. The blade came loose with a jolt, a sickening crunch. Napier watched, helpless, as a torrent of blood jetted from the hole in his body. It spurted three yards through the air and splashed Sam’s face, running with the tears. He heard the patter of blood on the mattress, like rain. The sound reminded him of Leander—storms building and the rumble of thunder, followed by those first initial drops on the rooftop.
He swiveled his legs off the bed and was shocked by how cold the floor was. Something caught his eye and he looked up to see another huge spurt slashing across the opposite wall. It looked like oil, only thicker.
Napier stuck his index finger into the wound and probed, worming and inquisitive.
I’m dying.
He fell backwards, the last fountain of blood landing on his neck and lips.
White dots were forming over his vision, floating from side to side like the bubbles on the computer screen saver.
“Sam,” he moaned. The room faded away and he saw a baseball diamond, clouds of yellow dirt blowing in the air. He stepped up to the pitch and was afraid.
Napier flinched, and died.
Chapter Fifty-One
Sam Napier walked the hallways of his home barefoot in a daze, streaked with blood. He stopped to rest his hand on the staircase balustrade and left a scarlet print in the shape of a star behind when he moved away.
He looked over the railing and down onto the living room below.
I’m so high up.
When he was younger, he used to be able to put his head through the staircase bars to peer down at The Man as he paced back and forth across the floor below. The Man was not his father. No, he couldn’t be.
He never was.
Sam had known it for a long time.
“Sam…” came a woman’s voice. Her lilting tone was enticing. He stood up and turned towards the upper hallway in the direction of his mother’s room. “Come sit with me.”
He pushed the door open and flicked on the light. The wind screamed outside, rattling the wooden plane nailed to the windowsill.
“Come sit by Mommy,” said the voice. Sam followed it to the closet. Pulled the door open.
“Moooooonnnnnn Riiiivvvveeeerrrrr—”
He saw his mother in her jar, her lips puckered up in a welcoming kiss, hair swimming about her green face. Sam followed the extension cord to the outlet and pulled out the Christmas lights, killing the display. The music died.
“Thanks, honey,” she said. “Come give me a hug. I’ve got things to tell you.”
Sam crawled inside the closet and wrapped his arms around the freezing jar. He shivered against its width, his sweaty brow leaving streaks on the glass. Despite the cold, he felt her warmth.
“You’re a good boy, Sam,” she whispered. “You did as you were told. Santa will come this year, for sure.”
Sam smiled. His mother was so sweet. He didn’t believe in Santa anymore but he didn’t tell her this.
“We’re going to be a family now, right?”
The question filled him with excitement. His heart fluttered within his chest. Please, he prayed, eyes closed. Please—
“The Man’s gone now. We’re going to be a whole family. Would you like that?”
Sam nodded, tired. All he wanted to do was sleep. It had been a big night. He wanted his music.
“But first things first, right? Can you let Mommy out?”
He didn’t know how to, though, but it was okay, Mommy could read his thoughts. She always had been able to. Mommy was kind of amazing.
“The Man used a hammer to nail up the window. You saw him do it, right? Well, that hammer’s just over there on the chair near my bed. Do you see it?”
He saw it.
“Use that. Use that and we can start.”
Sam sighed. There was so much to do and it required such strength and he had no idea where to muster it from. He felt drained, empty.
“Do it. Do it for us.”
Sam searched inside himself for energy and found a small flint huddled in the cold. He grabbed it and held firm; the tighter he gripped the stronger it burned. Energy tingled through his limbs. Sam swallowed, The Man’s blood sliding down his throat. He climbed out of the closet and shuffled across the floor leaving scarlet track marks on the carpet.
“Don’t worry about that, honey. I can clean it up later.”
Sam stood and the room spun around him. He had once seen a student in his class faint at assembly and wondered if the kid had felt just like this. Dizzy—wedged between two places at once, both places requiring everything he had to give. Sam focused on the rocking chair next to the bed and saw that his mother had been correct—the hammer was there, waiting for him. He crossed the room, bumping into her neatly made bed, and picked the hammer up. It felt so much heavier than he expected it to be—or was the weight he felt the weight of what was being imposed upon him? The weight of responsibility.
It’s worth it, he said to himself. I want my family back. Please.
Sam gripped the hammer in both hands. He wanted what he saw on television, what the other kids in his class had.
“Do it, Sam,” his mother said.
The hammer grew even heavier; it hurt his arms to hold above his head. The stink of the blood burned his eyes, making everything difficult to focus on. He wanted to smash the glass but he was afraid of the sound it would make.
He could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway.
His mother twitched. Her mouth widened and her kiss turned into an impatient scowl. Hair drifted over her sugar-white eyes as she pushed up against the lid.
“Hurry! Mommy’s drowning!”
Sam closed his eyes and swung the hammer. It sailed through the air and clipped the closet door frame on its way towards the jar. Wood splinters fell at his feet. The head of the hammer connected with the glass and formed a silver spider web, but it held. His mother continued to struggle. Her feet were flat against the bottom and her kneecaps pushed up under her chin. Lizard hands, all green and grey, covered in what looked like pus-filled barnacles, scrambled at her throat.
“Help, Sam! Now!”
Sam screamed as he swung the tool for the second time. The hammer struck the jar with an almighty boing and the glass shattered, bursting outwards and toppling like a falling tower. The alcohol-stunk of purified flesh and ammonia. Putrid liquid washed over Sam’s feet, fanning up behind his ankles. It flooded the floor, debris strands of meat and hair catching on the furniture, as the torrent spilled out of the room, across the hallway and ran down the staircase.
Chapter Fifty-Two
The thunder of cracking glass sent the remaining members of the film crew scurrying away; the last of the Red Head lights switched off. A female hand reached out of the dark and snatched up a soiled shot-list sheet that had been left behind. He was alone again.
In the movie of my life, this isn’t happening.
It hurt to breathe from the stab wound in his side. His knees burned from where the skin had been torn away and his chest was covered in long, open slits. A ring of fire straddled the circumference of his head from where the barbed wire crown had been embedded.
(I. Am. Not. Here—)
Marshall had been dreaming of James Bridge, his parents. Dreaming of places where there were no madmen, except for Liz Frost. Of places where bad things happened to friends of friends, on the news and in horror films that children reveled in—not to real people. But then he remembered that his father, the local postman, had known many of the victims in the James Bridge Massacre, it had been his job to know people…
There was meant to be a world between what happened to others and what happened to the people you knew—and that world was safe. Marshall wanted to go back there.
The stained glass reflected colored washes over the blood and shit-stained room, over the old church crucif
ix that had been lying on its side against the far wall. Marshall’s breath quickened; the Christ figure was gone.
It was crouched before him, the wooden head cocked to one side. Marshall could hear the groan of its joints as it shifted its weight from one knee to the other. He listened to the drip of its painted blood running from its crown, whip wounds and from the gash in his side. Christ stared at him, a vacant, waxen expression on its face. The painted eyes did not blink.
The basement door slammed open.
The Christ figure was back on his cross as though it had never crept free of its nails. It lay on its side, unmoving and cold.
Marshall watched the feet rushing down the stairs. His body tightened up again. Please, I’m not ready, he thought.
Blood had dried thick around his eyes, making it difficult to see, but the longer he watched the shape rushing at him, the less it looked like Napier. Too small, too quick. He waited to hear the discordant, off-key singing—
(“‘It breaks me to say time’s put the end in my Endsville…’”)
—but it didn’t come. There was only the slap of feet against concrete and the shallow breaths driving them onwards.
(“‘A steak in the heart of the USA …’”)
The shape took Christ’s position in front of Marshall and kneeled. It reached out to touch—
(“‘I’m waltzing with the wrecking ball…’”)
—his face.
(“‘’Cause this ain’t my home anymore.’”)
Marshall jolted when the thin fingers touched him. He felt a hot, wet rag pushed into the hollow of his eyes. Water dribbled down his skin, stinging the open gashes that were the remains of his nipples. Marshall’s tongue flicked out to lap the water off his face. Like a dog, he thought.
Jesus, what have they done to me?
There was tenderness in the way he was being handled and Marshall couldn’t help but warm to the touch, melting into the hand the way he used to do when Claire comforted him.
