“Well. Welcome home.”
She gave him one last squeeze and let him go.
“Before you go upstairs, Andrew, do you know about the rat problem we’ve been having?”
Andrew nodded, the basement was filled with them.
“There’s a bag with a skull and bones on it in the cupboard above the plates. Don’t touch it, all right?”
Andrew nodded again. His grandmother went back to cleaning and he went up to his room.
Just for a change of pace, he spent the time before dinner doing homework. He was so far behind in math now that there was no way he wasn’t going to fail, but everything else was salvageable if he got his nose to the grindstone and kept it there. He might even be able to get a C in English if he sucked up to the teacher and made a big show out of changing his ways.
He came back downstairs for dinner an hour and a half later. They were having spaghetti that night.
“How was school today, Andrew?”
“Boring.”
“That’s wonderful.” It had become a regular joke of theirs, one she enjoyed more than her grandson, but Andrew smiled too.
He was quiet as he ate. When he did say something, it surprised her.
“How long am I going to be living here for?”
Her fork stopped in mid-flight. He scrambled to clarify.
“I mean, do you think mom and dad are going to straighten things out and take me back?”
She put down her silverware and looked at him across the table.
“Do you really want to know what I think, Andrew?”
She took his silence as an affirmation and kept going.
“I think that it’s easier for your parents for you to be here than with them. It’s not your fault, they’re just being selfish. But if I called them and told them you had to leave, you’d go home. I don’t know what exactly would happen, but you wouldn’t have to stay with me anymore.”
“I don’t want to leave, grandma.”
She looked back up at him, confused, and for a second he was confused too. He hadn’t meant to say anything out loud, and he’d been thinking about it all day without being able to make up his mind. But it was true. He wanted to stay here. Things would have to be different, but he didn’t want to go.
He tried to think of something else to say, but when he tried to keep talking he saw her looking at him, the corners of her mouth turned up so slightly it was hard to tell that she was smiling, and he wasn’t sure he had to say anything anymore.
In a motel across town, Luke the Bastard lifted his hand off of a piece of paper.
#
The next morning, Cynthia looked out the window as Andrew walked to school. She stayed there long after he had left her sight and thought about how it was possible to have such an awful track record with her children and still end up with a grandchild like that.
The doorbell rang, startling her. She went to the door, looked through the peephole, and saw a man with white hair standing outside. He looked familiar, but it took her a moment to remember when she’d last seen him. He’d carved a triangle into her front door with a knife.
She doubted herself for a moment, but the doubt didn’t change anything. That was who it was.
The door was already locked. He rang the doorbell again. She thought about showing herself and shooing him away but decided to just wait for him to go away instead.
The door swung open. Andrew’s grandmother stepped back.
“If you don’t leave right now, I’ll call the police.”
The man with the white hair stepped into the house and the door closed behind him without being touched. The house was filled with the sound of windows slamming shut.
“My name is Luke,” the man said. “I need to see your grandson, but I think we should talk first.”
She shook her head and closed her eyes.
“No…”
The air disappeared from her lungs. She put her hand to her neck, was about to fall over when she felt something turn inside her chest and the oxygen rush back to her head.
“I have the ability…” Luke said, “…to open and close things with my mind. That means that all the doors to your house will stay closed and locked for as long as I want them to be. It also means that I can close your windpipe or cut off the blood flowing to your heart. Go into the living room and have a seat.”
The phone was in the kitchen, she just had to get to the kitchen. She turned around, still dizzy. She stopped and faltered back, grabbed the wall with one hand and clutched her chest with the other. Luke sighed.
“My God.” He walked past her, into the kitchen. There was a plastic shelf hanging above the phone with paper and pens and paperclips and a pair of scissors. He took the scissors and cut the wire connecting the phone to the wall.
“There we are. No more police.” He looked up at the clock, then back at Andrew’s grandmother.
“It will be a few hours before school gets out and Andrew comes home,” Luke said. “So we’ll wait until then.”
#
Anna made the trip to Wisconsin as quickly as she could without being stupid. She didn’t speed when she was driving, didn’t even think about flying. But she didn’t sleep much either. She just kept on moving.
It wasn’t hard to find the hospital once she arrived in town. The town just wasn’t that big.
Anna stepped out of the elevator. There was a security guard standing in front of Paul’s room. She walked past without straying, sat down on a bench down the hall, and pretended to read an old issue of a magazine. The security guard went to the bathroom. Anna went into Paul’s room.
“I love you, baby.”
She shot him in the head, watched him fall to the ground, and stepped back into the hallway.
#
Cynthia sat on the couch in her living room. She was hunched over, her elbows were resting on her knees. Luke was sitting in the easy chair, reading a magazine. On the table next to him was a coffee mug, two empty soda cans, and a glass plate sprinkled with cookie crumbs.
Luke put the magazine down.
“You’re being very reasonable about this,” he said. “I thought I’d have to tie you up.”
She didn’t answer. After a minute’s silence he stood up, reached out, and brushed his hand up against her forehead.
He flinched and pulled back. “Jesus.” He sat back down. Andrew’s grandmother moved further down the coach away from him.
“That’s why you keep bringing me things to eat. Your husband would only leave you alone when he was eating something, so you kept feeding him.”
She stared out the window. The sky was gray and motionless, waiting for the next snowfall. She pressed her lips together. She took a last look at the sky and turned back towards the interior of the house.
“Please tell me that you won’t hurt my grandson.”
Luke shook his head.
“No. I appreciate that you’re cooperating with me, but it’s not worth lying about.”
Andrew’s grandmother leaned over, looked at her shoes.
“Would you like some more coffee?”
“Go right ahead.”
She got up slowly, took the mug from the table, and went into the kitchen. There was half a pot of coffee left in the machine. She poured a cup, opened a drawer, and took out a plastic bag filled with sugar cubes.
She closed the drawer and opened the cabinet above it. There was a thick cardboard bag on the top shelf, sealed along the top by a red sticker with a skull and bones printed on it.
#
Andrew was in the bathroom washing his hands when he felt the messenger. He reached into his pocket, fished out a pill from the inside of his key ring, put it in his mouth, and swallowed it, hesitating only for a moment. He reached for the light switch and the white lights overhead were replaced with a gentle blue glow.
He followed the messenger into the hall and down the stairs, keeping an eye out for hall monitors or
anybody else who might get in his way. If he was lucky he could make it all the way to the main entrance and just walk out the door. Mrs. Rehes was expecting him to come back to class, but she’d wait a few minutes before she called the office. She’d be really mad when she found out he’d ditched her class, but he’d just have to deal with that later. It was the least important thing. He wondered where Josh was.
It was cold out. He was a block away from school when he realized the messenger was taking him to his grandmother’s house. He stopped jogging and started running.
#
She gave him the coffee and went back into the kitchen. She waited a minute and looked at the digital clock on the microwave. She wanted to know what time it was. She wasn’t sure why, she just thought it was important for someone to know what time it was when a person died.
The numbers disappeared. She opened and closed the microwave door but nothing changed. The air around her got colder, then warm again. She heard the sound of glass breaking.
She left the kitchen and went back into the living room. The coffee cup was lying on the carpet, surrounded by a brown stain. Luke’s right hand was wrapped around the base of the lamp and the lampshade was on fire.
The rest of his body shook and jerked upwards, pulled by invisible strings, and the air was filled with orange and yellow.
Luke got out of the chair a minute later and opened his eyes. The house was burning and he couldn’t see anything through the smoke except the gray outline of the walls and a dark shape on the floor in front of him.
He stumbled towards the door, threw it open, and ran out into the winter air.
#
The floor of the ballroom cracked open like an eggshell. Paul opened his eyes and he was in a hospital room. It was dark, the lights were out.
He got up and saw Anna come out from behind a burning mattress. She ran towards him and dragged him out into the hall.
He was still dizzy; an alarm had gone off, people were running and shouting. He felt Anna’s hands on his shoulders. By the time they left the building Paul still wasn’t sure what was going on. A pair of police cars had just arrived, and an officer was shouting at the crowd through a bullhorn.
Paul felt something pulling at him, filling him with energy. Suddenly he was awake.
“Give me a pill.”
Anna reached into her pocket and gave him a pill. He swallowed it and blinked. A blue sphere the size of a softball appeared in the air in front of him, only barely visible in the shadow of the building. It stayed where it was until it had his attention and then began to float away.
It was all Anna could do to keep him in the parking lot long enough to wrap him in her coat and get back to the car. Paul sat in the passenger’s seat and held his hand out in front of him, pointing in the direction they needed to go.
“If it were Thomas or Rose we would have gotten off at the highway… it’s my mom. Shit…”
They reached the street where Paul’s mother lived a few minutes later. There was a small crowd of people standing in the middle of the road watching the house burn.
Paul brought his head down to the dashboard and covered his face.
“Park the car,” he said.
Anna saw someone running down the middle of the road.
“He’ll be coming soon,” Paul said, his head still in his hands. “He’ll be coming right here…”
He stood up straight and saw Andrew approaching the house, getting closer.
“We have to take him with us.”
#
An announcement rang out over the intercom, Josh’s name and three others he’d never heard before. They all came down to the counselor’s office. Josh was the last of them to make it. The counselors were standing in front of the receptionist’s desk with solemn looks on their faces.
“Have a seat, Josh.”
He sat down. The counselor addressed the group.
“We’ve called you all here because there’s been a fire at the hospital, and we know that your parents…”
Josh felt something pulling at him. He tried to keep his attention on the counselor, but something was dragging him towards the door.
“…and nobody was hurt, thank goodness, but we just wanted…”
The other students were all listening to the counselors, so it wasn’t too hard to reach into his pocket without them noticing. He slipped the pill between his lips. It was hard to see the messenger with the lights on; it would have been easy to pretend that it wasn’t there, to close his eyes and ignore the urge.
He stood up and heard an adult voice. He moved for the door and the voice repeated itself. A giant pair of hands wrapped around his shoulders.
He still wasn’t thinking straight.
“Let go of me! Get off!”
The counselor started yelling at him; he tried to pull away. The messenger passed a bank of windows down the hall and disappeared in the sunlight.
CHAPTER 17
#
The minister cleared his throat and turned back to face the congregation.
“We are living with the fallout of extraordinary events in our community.”
It wasn’t like him to start so strong. He saw them straightening in their seats, looking up when they’d usually still be sleeping.
“Things have happened that fall completely outside our experience. The scientists have told us repeatedly that an explanation is coming, and that we have nothing to worry about, but they make no progress. And yet we’re not concerned either. Our lives play out exactly like they always have. Nothing has changed.
“It is long past time that we looked at what has taken place with open eyes. As the modern day equivalents of the parting of the Red Sea or fire raining down on Sodom and Gomorrah.”
A low murmur passed through the chapel. The minister wondered, not for the first time, if he’d still have a job at the end of the day.
“Now maybe I’m wrong. Maybe tomorrow morning I’ll be reading the newspaper and there’ll be a headline that will show what happened and why, and how we can stop it from happening again. But that headline hasn’t come. And in its absence, we have yet to face the possibility that it isn’t going to come.
“In the face of the miraculous, our eyes have remained shut.”
#
Towards the end of English class, everybody was studying their spelling when Ms. Rehes tapped Josh on the shoulder. He looked up from his book.
“Yeah?” he whispered.
“Do you know why Andrew didn’t make it to school today?”
Josh shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
She sighed. “All right, thanks anyway. Nobody seems to know.”
When lunch came, Andrew still wasn’t there. Josh told himself not to start worrying until tomorrow. He went to the attic and worked, and tried not to think about anything else.
He found the solution to the nine lives passage about five minutes before the end of the period. It happened very quickly, like a giant knot suddenly coming undone. He scribbled out the decoded passage and read it over.
“It really looks like this is it, the big one. I’m sure it pissed a lot of people the way it’s gotten out— nobody will probably ever know exactly where it came from, who cracked it open— but I guess a lot of people are going to have to fucking deal with it. They know they’re going to do the ritual. I know I’m going to, I don’t care how original it is.
“If you’re reading this and you’re not me, you can probably pick up this particular piece of knowledge from a dozen other places, so I’m not going to make cracking the code too hard on you. I’m putting a little more information in here though, instead of just giving you a shopping list. I just want to let you know that I don’t know what the consequences of this are, not for sure, not yet. And I don’t think anybody else does either, as of this writing. So don’t go around telling people I didn’t give you the whole story. You’re taking a chance. You should be used to it by now.
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“The spell’s not that complicated, it’s funny how the big ones never are. First thing you have to do is kill somebody in a dark space. It has to be pitch black, no light at all. Doesn’t matter who you kill, so it’s not that big a deal, if you can’t come up with at least one person you don’t mind putting an end to then you’re in the wrong business. Then you need to cut off one of your toes, one of the little ones will be fine, and draw a big X across your stomach. It doesn’t matter with what, a marker will do the trick. Then you hold your breath until you die. That’s physically impossible usually, I know, but the rest of the ritual will make it possible. It’s still really hard and hurts like crazy, but you can do it.
“Then, after you die, you come back. Your body will suck all the energy out of everything around you, so the air will get cold and nothing electrical will work and fires will go out. Then there’ll be a small explosion when your body spits out all the fire in every direction all at once, and you’ll wake up with a splitting headache and nine toes left. Every time you die from here on out it’ll be like that, except you’ll wake up with another one of your toes missing.
“So that’s nine lives right there. After that, the rumor is that it keeps on working, that you’re immortal, and I’ve heard from people who are at least remotely trustworthy that that’s true and it’ll really work. I’m not sure, but nine lives is already better than what I have right now and I’m going to do it. So hopefully it’s going to be a long time before anybody reads this except me.
“And that’s it.”
Josh read it over a second time, tore it out of his notebook, tore them into pieces, and dropped them into a garbage barrel in the corner of the room. He opened to a new page.
PAUL
He underlined the name several times.
9L SPELL
He left a few lines blank.
PITCH BLACK
CUT ONE TOE
STOMACH X
HOLD BREATH
He went back to the blank space and tried to figure out how to say it. He didn’t want it to be too obvious in case the notebook got stolen or something. He ripped out a blank sheet and tried a few possibilities.
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