“Don’t bother thanking me, I’m just trying to establish my good intentions.”
“Who are you?” Andrew whispered.
“You can call me Jerry. It’s short for Jeremiah. You can call me that too, it's up to you.”
Andrew put the bag of pills under his pillow, next to the bottle.
“What do you want?” he asked. Jerry nodded his head.
“That’s an excellent question. But let’s talk about what you want first. What were you doing at that boy’s funeral?”
Andrew didn’t say anything. He glanced at the window.
“I saw them trying to get the body into shape— I don’t blame them for using a closed casket. And you’re already starting to look guilty. I don’t want to pry, but I imagine you can part with a hint. Do you regret that man’s death?”
Andrew nodded his head yes.
“Would you like to do something about it?” He reached into his other jacket pocket, pulled out a cigarette, stopped, thought better of it, and put it back. “What I mean to say…” he asked, “…is that if you could bring him back, would you do it?”
He paused to chew on the inside of his cheek, missing the cigarette.
“You can’t do that,” Andrew said.
“Of course I can. We could trade. Services for information. I’d be interested in knowing how you came into possession of Paul’s equipment, for example.”
Andrew was silent.
“You don’t want to tell me?”
He shook his head no. Jeremiah shrugged.
“It’s up to you. But let’s keep talking. Maybe you have something else I want. Paul never traveled without his books. I’d like to take a look at them— you wouldn’t happen to know where they are?”
Andrew thought very carefully.
“He had a car. He parked it across the bridge from where everything happened.”
“It’s probably been towed. That’s not a problem— we could go take a look at it right now. Assuming that you’re interested.”
Andrew watched Jeremiah, waited for him to keep talking, and was surprised as the silence grew uncomfortably long. Jeremiah had brown eyes. Andrew cleared his throat and asked a question.
“You can bring him back to life?”
“I’d have some shopping to do, but I can be finished before the night’s up.”
Andrew glanced away for a moment before he answered.
“Then I’m interested.”
“Wonderful.”
He got up. The blue light shining from his head bounced off the mirror above Andrew’s dresser and landed on the wall next to his closet.
“Close your eyes.”
#
He was walking down the street, the bald man in front of him, his familiar perched on his shoulder. His hands were immersed in blue light. They passed a cemetery; the trees and the tombstones blurred together as they rushed by.
“Beautiful way to travel, isn’t it?” Jerry said. “No one can see you, and you never get tired. It’s a shame I can’t do it all the time.”
“Why not?”
He pointed at the sky. “No moon tonight. Natural light burns you when you step over. The stars aren’t too bad, but any more than that can be painful.”
Andrew touched his own hand; he hadn’t noticed it before, but he could feel it, the starlight tickling his skin.
“What would happen if the sun came up?” he asked.
Jerry laughed, but didn’t say anything.
They entered an industrial park, a maze of fences and concrete walls and long shallow ditches filled with thick green grass. Jerry stepped to the side of the road. There was a sign— “Andrews and Lyman Towing”— and a lot filled with old cars behind it. The gate leading into the lot was secured with thick chains, bound together with a padlock the size of Andrew’s fist.
Jerry kneeled down.
“This is a little trick Paul showed me.”
He stared at the lock, took a breath, and sung to it gently. He stopped, took another breath, kissed the front of the dial, and tapped the side of the padlock with the middle finger of his left hand. It fell open with a click.
“Works like a charm.” He stood up and started pulling on the chain. A minute later they were inside the fence.
The car was parked next to the garage. There were scrape marks all around the trunk latch, bright metal gouges slicing into the black paint.
Jeremiah stood and stared, without saying anything.
Andrew glanced back at the gate. “Why don’t you open it?”
He shook his head no. “Not a good idea. Paul never would have shown me that technique if he didn’t have some way to protect against it.”
“Then what can we do?”
He pointed at the creature sitting on Andrew’s shoulder.
Andrew turned his head.
“Can you open that lock?”
The creature squeezed his arm twice.
“Do it then,” Andrew said.
It jumped onto the car, rocking it back on the shocks of its rear tires, and slid its tentacles into the lock, opening it with a loud click. It leapt back onto Andrew’s shoulder.
The trunk was empty.
“Garbage,” Jeremiah whispered. He stepped forward, leaned over, and brushed his fingertips against the felt lining the inside of the trunk. Suddenly, his hands froze, and he pressed down. A section of the floor lifted up like a trap door, revealing a hidden compartment, a wooden box suspended above the guts of the machine, filled with books.
He removed them, closed the trunk, and looked through each one carefully. They were all identical, the same size and shape, the same soft brown cover. He divided them into three piles: a group of two, a group of three, and a group of seven.
“The seven on the left are yours,” he said. He was smiling now, happy with what he’d found. “The two on the right are mine, a finder’s fee.”
He put his hand on the middle pile.
“Right now, these belong to you. If you want me to raise your friend from the dead, I will accept them as payment. Otherwise, I have no problem giving you your ten books and taking you home right now. What would you like me to do?”
Andrew took a minute to think. He thought he heard a car go by, but it was just the wind. He moved his foot, kicked some gravel to the side.
“Why don’t you take them all?” he asked.
“Are you asking me why I don’t just steal them from you?”
Andrew nodded his head yes.
“I find that it’s safer to pay a fair price than to have people running around upset with me. It’s not something you need to worry about— what’s important is the choice I’m offering you. What is your decision?”
Andrew looked down at the ground for a moment, thought it over.
“I want you to bring Tom back.”
He nodded his head.
“Wonderful.”
A sliver of blue light bounced off the tinted side window of the car as Jeremiah stepped past it.
“About five hundred pages between the three of them,” he said. “A reasonable price to defy God, don’t you think?”
#
They stopped by Andrew’s house to drop off the books, hopping in and out and away so fast that once they were gone, Andrew wasn’t sure if they’d been there at all. Then they left town; they walked until the lights of the city disappeared and there was nothing but highway in front of them. They came across the body of a rabbit, split down the middle by a tire tread. Jerry took a knife out of his pocket. Andrew looked away.
A minute later, they were moving again, back into the city, past the houses, to the very edge of downtown. The building in front of them was across the street from the park, set apart from the buildings around it by a concrete lot on one side and a wide alley on the other. It had two stories, a storefront below and a row of windows on top, completely covered by white curtains. There was a set of neon tubes hanging in the ground floor window— ROBERT’
S VACUUMS.
Jerry knocked on the front door.
“What time is it?” Andrew asked.
“About one thirty, but don’t worry. Fat Rob doesn’t sleep.” He sang softly to the doorknob, kissed it, and opened the door.
It was dark inside, and the air was thick with dust. Light from the lamp outside drifted through the window, outlining the shelves and cutting through the long aisle leading from the door to the front counter. There was a green welcome mat lying crooked on the ground and a half-open metal door behind the front counter. Jeremiah walked down the aisle, around the counter, and through the door. Andrew followed him, and hardly noticed as his familiar leaped from his shoulder into the darkness of the store’s interior.
They climbed a flight of stairs and stepped into a large, open apartment. It was split into two sections, one closer to the door and one farther away, separated by a wide gateway where the ceiling lowered and the walls grew closer together. On the far side was a double bed with white sheets; between the bed and the doorway was a television set, a dresser, and an easy chair. The news was on.
The channel changed, and Andrew jumped back. He saw something he hadn’t noticed before. A man, nearly buried in the chair, his eyes like two dark headlights pointed at the television set. He was so completely still that he had escaped Andrew’s attention. He looked like a slug.
There was a glass sitting on the dresser with the remnants of a milkshake left inside of it. Jeremiah tapped it with his fingernail, and it made a sound like a bell. The man twitched. He pushed himself up onto his feet, stumbled into the bedroom, reached under his pillow, pulled out a glass vial filled with white pills, and stuffed several of them into his mouth. He blinked, and suddenly focused his attention on Jeremiah.
“What… what are you doing here?”
His vowels all sounded the same, as though his tongue were too big for his mouth. He looked down at Andrew.
“You have a kid?”
He looked back up.
“What do you want?”
Jerry took a step forward.
“I’m in need of something I hoped you might be willing to part with.”
“I don’t do this anymore…”
“I know that. That’s why I assumed that you’d be more interested in my five hundred dollars than in a pair of music boxes.”
The fat man whispered to himself. “Five hundred…”
Jerry nodded his head.
“That’s right. Pay the rent on this place for another month. How’s the vacuum cleaner business been treating you lately, anyway?”
Robert shut his mouth, looked up, hunched his shoulders, and stepped to the side, behind the wall dividing the apartment. When he stepped back into sight he was holding two black cardboard boxes in the palm of his right hand.
“Here.”
Jerry took the boxes, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a stack of dollar bills held together by a paper clip.
“Feel free to count.” Jerry said.
“Go away,” the fat man said. He was glaring at them; his eyes were still shrouded in darkness, but for a second Andrew thought he could see something behind them, something fast asleep but alive and dreaming.
Jeremiah just smiled.
“All right. It’s been a pleasure.”
He turned around and stepped out of the apartment, back into the stairwell. Andrew did the same.
#
Andrew asked Jeremiah where they were going next. Jeremiah didn't answer. He just kept walking.
CHAPTER 7
#
The church where Jeremiah led Andrew was a tall white building, layers of cracked paint slapped over weathered wooden pillars, sticking awkwardly out of the ground. Jeremiah stepped onto the grass. There was a rose bush growing just to the side of the church’s front steps.
“Are those really music boxes?” Andrew asked.
“No, they’re not really music boxes. That’s just what we call them.”
“What are they?”
Jerry laughed under his breath. He took out his knife and cut the head from the stem of one of the roses.
“I don’t think I’m going to tell you. You’d have bad dreams.”
They started walking again.
“Of course, it’s nothing you couldn’t pry out of me for the right price.”
Andrew didn’t answer. Everything was quiet until they stopped walking.
“Here we are,” Jeremiah said.
They were in a neighborhood of big lawns and gigantic homes, cut off from their surroundings by rows of bushes and tall slopes and long, freshly paved driveways. The house in front of them had a tall oak tree growing near the front door and a basketball hoop hanging above the garage. It was two stories tall, and had a soft brown brick exterior. Jeremiah kneeled down, sung his song, kissed the doorknob, and opened the front door.
It was dark inside. Andrew saw picture frames hanging on the walls, curtains pulled shut over every window. Jeremiah walked into the living room and looked around.
“What are you looking for?” Andrew asked.
“Somebody crying,” he said. “It’s the night after the funeral, there’s always somebody crying.”
A door opened, and one of Josh’s sisters came out into the living room. She was wearing light blue pajamas; her sandy blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail. He took a closer look at the pictures on the walls— he saw more of them, Josh, Josh’s family. His father, his mother, his sisters, his brother, Tom, smiling with the rest of them, posing with his prom date or swinging a baseball bat.
Josh’s sister walked down the hall, opened a door, and stepped through it. Jeremiah followed her; Andrew hesitated for a moment, then did the same. They were inside Joshua’s room. There was a bookshelf on the far wall that was taller than Andrew’s head, filled to overflowing with books and notebooks and pieces of paper
Joshua was sitting in a chair in the center of the room, staring at the mirror above his dresser. He turned towards his sister. She spoke to him.
“You did this. This is all your fault.”
She grabbed his hair, shoved his head down onto the dresser, pressed her elbow against his windpipe.
“You little dipshit.”
She let him go.
“You screwed up everything.”
She turned around and walked out.
Josh let his head rest on top of the counter. He rubbed his throat, got up, and looked back into the mirror. Then, slowly, he wilted. His head sank into his hands, and he started crying.
Jeremiah took a glass vial out of his pocket and stuck it in the air where Joshua’s tears were falling. He caught two of them, turning his wrist gently to get the second one, and left the room. Andrew followed him out. They left the house.
#
The cemetery was enveloped with thick white fog, hiding the trees and the gravestones and revealing them again as Andrew and Jeremiah walked along the path. Andrew could only see ten or twenty feet in front of him, but Jerry seemed to know exactly where he was going. They came upon a large shrine, an enormous granite slab lying on the ground with an oval impression carved into the top of it, filled with water and flowers.
Jeremiah scooped up the flowers with his hands, threw them onto the grass, and started taking things out of his pockets. He put something that resembled a marble down on the stone and unfolded his pocket knife. Andrew realized that it was an eyeball, and remembered the rabbit. He turned away.
“I thought you were curious, Andrew. You were asking me questions before.”
Andrew didn’t say anything.
“Do you still want to know what happened to Robert?”
Again, nothing. Jerry shrugged and kept talking.
“I’ll give you that one for free. Robert was a very clever man whose ambitions outstripped his abilities. He had a gift for finding things that were hard to find, which is why people like Paul and myself associated with him.
“Eventually he got tired of be
ing the runt in the room and he found himself something interesting, an old clay tablet he was able to translate. I don’t even remember what exactly the ritual was supposed to do, give him the power to call lightning down on his enemies or some garbage like that. I warned him not to go ahead with it; he was a good source for me, I didn’t want anything to happen to him. You know how it is when something is too good to be true, right?
“He ignored me. Thought he knew everything. He can barely finish a crossword puzzle these days without losing his temper and losing track of where he is. You can turn around now, Andrew.”
There was a dark puddle where the flowers had been before.
“I’m still interested in finding out how you got access to Paul’s things. When we’re done with this, would you be interested in talking some more?”
Andrew thought about it for a minute.
“No.”
Jeremiah sighed.
“I hope you change your mind.”
He started whispering in a language Andrew couldn’t recognize, and struck a match against the side of the tombstone. It burst into flames and he let it go. It fell into the water and went out.
“God damn it.” He lit another match, and dropped it. Again, nothing. He lit a third match, brought it down close to the granite, and waved it back and forth.
“That son of a bitch.” He filled the glass vial with the fluid he’d mixed and wiped the stone clean with his handkerchief.
“What happened?” Andrew asked.
“I’ve been cheated. Come on, let’s go back to the store. If we hurry, we can still get this done with before the sun comes up.”
They passed back through the gates of the cemetery, down the street, through the houses, past the park, into the crowd downtown. They were like a school of fish swimming past, swarming around the ruins of the buildings, a million moving bits of color and noise gathering around him and disappearing before they could be anything except a blur in the corner of his eye.
The world came back into focus as they approached Robert’s Vacuums. The front door was already unlocked. Andrew followed Jeremiah inside.
#
White Rabbit Society Part One EPUB Page 6
