by Joe McKinney
Then he stormed out the screen door and let it slam behind him.
***
It was nighttime now, and he was standing in his old bedroom. Moonlight filtered in through the window above his desk, silvering the wooden floor. The air felt cool. On the bed a younger version of himself huddled beneath the blankets, listening to his parents screaming at each other down below. Paul, the boy, whimpered. Paul the man took a deep breath and walked out of the room and down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he saw his father slapping his mother to the floor.
She looked up at her husband and sneered through her bloody lips. “You can’t stop me,” she said. “You can’t. He’s mine, and I won’t let you have him.”
“You ain’t got no say in it,” he said.
“I won’t let you have him,” she said again. There was no fear in her voice. Nothing in her eyes but contempt.
He raised the back of his hand to her, but she just laughed.
“Go on,” she said. “Hit me. Hit me, you dumb bastard. You think you can break me. You can’t break me. You’ve tried. For six years you’ve tried, and you still haven’t done it. You hear me? You haven’t!”
He lowered his hand and said, “You don’t understand.”
“Then tell me what it is I don’t understand, Martin. I see you’re trying to corrupt our son with your witchcraft. I hear you claim he’s going to be some kind of god among men, but I can’t think you actually believe that. You’d have to be insane to believe that. Are you, Martin? Are you really that fucking crazy?”
He regarded her with a cold intensity that made Paul’s bowels quiver.
“You don’t understand, Carol. You won’t ever understand. Not fully. But I can show you.”
He bent down, grabbed her by the hair at the back of her neck, and dragged her into the living room.
Once again Paul fought back the urge to intervene. But he knew that would be pointless, maybe even impossible. Whatever was about to happen had already happened twelve years ago. He couldn’t change the past. And besides, he was being shown this for a reason.
His father dropped his mother onto the floor next to one of his stick lattices.
“You can close your eyes if you want. It don’t matter. You’ll still see.”
He grabbed Paul’s mother by the arm with one hand and placed his other on the stick lattice.
“Watch,” he said, and focused on opening the doorway that led into the visionary landscape Paul had seen when he made his lattice.
Paul could feel a rush of energy swirling around him, moving through him, filling him up with its power and giving him a high like endorphins coursing through his veins. His father was feeling it, too. His eyes were closed, his head thrown back, his mouth open in ecstasy.
And then the world fell away and they were standing in a rubble-strewn street in the middle of a ruined city. Whole city blocks had crumbled into heaps of concrete and dust. Those buildings that still stood had been reduced to their frames. The sky above them was a swollen, unhealthy red that was filled with windblown ash. Towering columns of oily smoke rose all around him. The columns entered the sky and trailed away into black shoestring clouds. Everywhere about them, scared, dirty people scattered like mice for shelter.
Paul didn’t recognize the city, but he knew that didn’t matter. What he was seeing was happening all over the world. It was the same lowering sky over every living thing.
Strange, keening moans filled the air.
Paul turned toward the approaching moans. On top of a tabled slab of concrete not far away he saw a much older version of himself, scarred and bent-backed, but still obviously him, chanting, arms raised high over his head as an army of the dead poured into the streets. They came from every direction at once, rooting through the rubble, pulling the screaming people from their hiding places, devouring everything they touched. This was the end here. This was the turning point his father had promised him, the new world devouring the old.
Screams filled his ears.
Paul wanted to vomit. Beside him, his mother was covering her eyes with her hands. But Paul knew it wasn’t making any difference. Eyes shut or eyes open, she saw it all just the same.
She was sobbing helplessly, and when she spoke, her voice was so shaken Paul could barely understand her.
“Why?” she said. “Why would you want something like this?”
***
When the scene cleared Paul realized he was crying. Could he really be responsible for what he had just seen? Even if he was only some sort of conduit for the power his father worshipped, it was still unacceptable. Even now he could smell the smoke and the ash in his nostrils and he hated it. He spit on the floor, and he gagged on the oily taste of his own saliva.
He was standing in the darkened living room of his old house, his father on his knees in front of a stick lattice, rocking back and forth and muttering to himself.
Somebody was banging on the screen door in the kitchen.
Martin Henninger rose to his feet and walked to the door. A pair of Comal County Deputies were standing there at the foot of the concrete stairs, Paul’s mother between them. She looked utterly defeated. She was barefoot, wearing an old yellow housedress that accentuated the thin frailty of her body. She looked as unhealthy as an old used up crack whore.
Paul’s heart went out to her. The vision his father had shown them had sickened her to her soul. It had sickened Paul, too, but it had affected her even more. It had sickened her so thoroughly that she had left Paul alone with his father, despite her promise to never give him up. Looking at her, he sensed that that was why she felt defeated. She had drawn a line for herself that she said she would never cross, a low to which she would never sink, and she had promptly sunk below it.
“We found her walking along County Road 131,” one of the deputies said.
“Yeah?” said Martin Henninger. “So what?”
“She looks like she’s had a pretty good scare, Martin. Anything you want to tell me about that? You guys have a fight?”
“She’s fucking nuts,” Martin said. “She wanders off sometimes and ain’t got a clue what planet she’s on. What the hell you want me to do about it?”
The two deputies looked at each other. The one who had spoken first, a white-haired, big-bellied man with a walrus mustache said, “We brung her back to you, Martin. How about you take her inside and get her some water or something? You could make her comfortable. That’d be the decent thing to do?”
“Fuck that,” Martin said. “Leave her dumb ass there. She’ll be all right.” And then he walked back inside, letting the screen door slam behind him.
An awkward moment passed. The fat deputy whistled. His partner put his hands in his pockets. Paul’s mother never moved. She just stood there, sobbing quietly.
The fat deputy said, “Ma’am, you gonna be all right if we leave you here?”
She didn’t answer.
“Ma’am?”
The cop in Paul knew what the deputies were thinking. He’d been there himself. It was a bad situation. She didn’t have any obvious injuries, and she wasn’t saying anything to help them help her. All they had was a woman who appeared to be off her rocker and a husband with a reputation for being a first rate prick. But there were no obvious signs of family violence, and it wasn’t a crime to be an asshole. They had no choice but to leave her here with this guy. There was nothing else they could do.
The fat deputy muttered something about calling them if she needed anything, and then the two men walked away, leaving her there in the dark.
Paul watched them get in their car and drive away.
He said, “Momma, how come you didn’t tell them? You could have taken us both away.”
But she gave no indication that she knew he was there.
His father swung open the screen door then and said, “You need to get yourself inside, Carol. I’m about ready and I don’t want you hanging around out here. I want you up in the front room where you can’t caus
e any trouble.”
She looked up at Martin, her eyes vacant, like the eyes of the dead.
“Go on. Get inside.”
“I don’t wanna,” she said, and the sudden, country girl twang in her voice surprised Paul.
Martin’s voice was hard, but he hadn’t started to yell yet. He said, “I don’t care what you want. What you’re gonna do is get your ass inside.”
For a moment, her eyes cleared. Paul’s father must have seen it, too, because he sprang forward and grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her inside.
“You wanna give me shit?” he said. “You think you can give me shit?”
He yanked her off her feet.
One leg went sprawling and hit a chair and knocked it over.
She pulled herself up and she fought him all the way up the hallway and into the front room. She kicked and bit and screamed as he handcuffed her to the rings on the wall, but he was too strong for her, and she never had a chance.
“I’m gonna stop you, you son of a bitch!” she screamed at his back as he walked away. “I’ll stop you, I swear it!”
***
And the scene shifted again.
Paul was standing at the foot of his mother’s bed in the front room. She was still fighting, still struggling to pull her hands loose from the handcuffs that held her to the rings in the wall. Her face was distorted by an almost animalistic rage.
Somehow she managed to get one hand free.
She looked at it with a mixture of rage and pain and victory. Then she stood in front of the other ring and began to pull her hand through the cuff. It took her several long minutes of grunting and screaming and hard breathing to get her other hand loose, and when it did finally come, her wrists and hands looked like they’d been dipped in red paint.
She could barely move her fingers, but somehow she found the strength to reach under the sheet and pull up the corner of the mattress and come up with a knife.
Paul gasped. He recognized that knife. Even after twelve years, he still recognized that knife.
***
Paul was numb as he watched the scene that followed. His mother raised the knife over her head and went screaming down the hallway.
His father was in the living room, preparing to make a lattice.
He turned and caught her arm and they fought.
She slashed at him the knife and missed.
He knocked her to the ground with a loud, echoing slap.
She scrambled to her feet and ran for the kitchen.
He hit her in the back of the head and knocked her flat. Paul followed them, an icy ball forming in his stomach as the most terrifying moment of his youth got closer and closer. Even as the fight rolled into the kitchen, he couldn’t help but think what that kid up there in that room was going through. Right about now he’d be climbing out of his bed and ducking under it. He’d be curled up into a ball, convinced that his mother’s insanity had finally crested into some kind of unstoppable, homicidal rage.
His mother climbed the stairs on all fours. His father was chasing her, screaming at her, “Don’t do it, Carol! Damn it, woman, don’t do it!”
And then she was inside the room, lunging for the bed. From the top of the stairs, Paul watched her stop when she realized the child wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He saw her hesitate for just a second, and that second was all it took. Martin Henninger was on her. He hit her in the back of the head and caught her by the back of her neck before she sagged all the way to the floor. Paul watched the knife drop from her hand and stick into the floorboards.
There was no ceremony, no drama, after that. His father hauled her back down the stairs like she was a sack of goat feed, and Paul was left standing alone at the head of the stairs. And he guessed that was the way it should be. He had traveled back into a past that he always thought he understood, and was only now realizing that the water was deeper than he ever imagined.
But of course the worst was still to come.
***
Now he was standing in the barn, the scene lit by the silvered light of the moon. The night was cool. A breeze drifted through the gaps in the wood siding and sent bits of hay into the air.
He heard his father’s voice behind him.
“Go on, Carol. Get in there.”
He turned and saw his father shoving his mother into the barn. She had regained a little of her sense now, but she was still wobbly on her feet.
“You can’t stop me, Martin. They’ll see what you did to me. Look at my hands. You caused this. The cops see this, they’ll take Paul away from you sure as Sunday. What do you think of that, you bastard? You lose.”
Martin Henninger walked forward and grabbed her by the wrists.
“Is this what you mean?” he said. And as he held her wrists in his hands, the wounds began to heal.
It happened fast enough to make Paul’s mother gasp. She looked at her hands, healed now so thoroughly that not even a speck of blood remained. The light went out of her. She wasn’t going to be able to fight him like this and win.
“Don’t look like that,” he said. “You wanted to stop me? Well, you stopped me tonight.”
She looked up at him, a question on her face.
“That’s right. I’d wanted to tell Paul about his inheritance tonight, but you’ve made that impossible. It’s gonna be six years before I can do it again. It’ll take that long for the cycle to come back to this point. Six years. That’s what you bought this miserable existence we call the world. Tell me, Carol, was it worth it? Was it worth dying to give the world six more years?”
“What do you mean?” she said. “Martin? Martin, please. Stop this.”
But there was no stopping, not for her, and not for Paul. For even as she pleaded with her husband, he took control of her body, bending it to his purpose. Carol Henninger’s hands took a long length of hemp rope from the wall and looped it into the coiled pattern of a noose.
“Martin, please...”
The rope went over a rafter. She secured one end to the steering wheel of a dilapidated tractor and pulled the noose over her head. She climbed onto the back tire of the tractor and tried to plead one more time with him for her life. But her pleas were in vain. With his mind he nudged her, and she stepped off the tire…
***
…and Paul gasped as he came to. He was standing in the barn. The daylight was failing, though it was still hot and the air very close with the smell of rotting wood and weeds.
For just a moment he had a vision of his mother swinging by her neck from the rafters, and the vision was so startlingly vivid that he even imagined he heard the creaking of the rope and the moaning of the wood that supported her weight. She seemed to waver in front of his eyes like a distant figure walking down a road filled with heat shimmers, and then she was gone. Everything was still again, and he was alone.
He turned away from the cavernous hold of the barn and walked out into the yard where the goats had once grazed. It was full of sunflowers now, and many of them had grown as tall as Paul. The road that led down to the horse pasture was carpeted over by weeds.
He turned away from it and walked back to his truck. There was a stiffness in his lower back and a soreness in his muscles that surprised him. He felt tired and old before his time. It was the vision his father had shown his mother that had done it to him. He knew that now. A long time ago his father had told him that his inheritance was a power money could not buy, the kind of power that changes the course of history and stamps itself upon the minds of men forever. Paul realized now that he had never truly understood what that meant. He’d listened to his father’s promises and he’d envisioned a quiet, peaceful revolution spreading over humanity, a sort of glimmering golden age of prosperity and justice and good sense.
He was only now realizing that the vision his father had in mind was nothing short of an apocalypse, an end to this world and the birth of a new one populated by the risen dead. Power, true power, he saw now, had to be by logical necessity absol
ute, or it was not power at all. It was not enough to teach a man what to believe, or tell him what he should hear and say and do. It was not enough to punish him for doing or even thinking wrongly. It was not even enough to reprogram him from the inside out when the threat or application of force failed to compel total submission. The Inquisition had tried to do just that. And they failed. The totalitarian states of the communist block had tried also, in their way, and they had failed. All across the world cult leaders were continually trying to assert their own brand of absolute power upon their little communities, but each of them were destined to failure, as well.
Every system invented by man to control other men was, by the virtue of being created by a man, inherently flawed, for men lacked the capacity for absolute control. No matter how efficient the system, that system could not obliterate the spirit of man that was synonymous with life. As long as a man lived, that spirit was with him. It drove him to create art, to speak, to love, to accept the possibility that the world was not lost, not yet, and that the future for which he fought today and may never see was still, nonetheless, worth fighting for. Only death could stop that. Only death could erase the individual and make him truly one with the whole. It could clean a man’s mind of all erroneous thought and make it a blank slate upon which that new perfect whole could be created. And Paul was the means to make that happen.
He was sitting behind the wheel of his truck, crying quietly to himself. He understood now why his mother had cried when his father forced his vision into her mind. She had seen right away what it meant. She grasped intuitively that it was more than the loss of life. It was more than the suffering and the pain and the sky smeared red and black by fire. She mourned those things also, but it was for the loss of the spirit of man that she cried. And the thought that the one person she loved more than all the world, more even than her own life, her child, was to be the agent of that loss, was emotionally crippling beyond anything Paul could imagine.
