The Dampness Of Mourning

by Lee Thompson

  The cops outside stood near the bottom of the steps, watching us.

  I jabbed a finger, trying to get them to pay attention to what was behind them but their faces were too white and I knew they were dead before they hit the ground.

  Time froze.

  The sounds of night fell silent and a fire burst to life in what a moment before was a dark pit centered in the commons ground, a place that Quakers would have had picnics, cowboys would have sat playing songs and telling tales. But there were no Quakers, no cowboys, only Nutley and the men around him gathered by rising flames.

  Lucas grabbed the dead cops by the ankles and jerked their bodies across the ground and toward the men caught in the shadows the fire cast. Doug moved next to me, halfway out the door, ready to react, kill and die if he had to because they’d taken his men, his brothers, and who knew what memories the men had shared—whether on the job, or over a grill in one of their backyards with the sun bright and high, their wives laughing as everyone drank beer and children played in the yard. I grabbed his arm and spun him around, hurt by the amount of pain and rage carved into his face.

  I said, “Inside! Slam the door, give me your light!”

  The air grew colder.

  Duncan slammed the door behind us and handed over the Maglite as I spun and opened fire with the shotgun on the forms rising from the beds. Blood and bone hit the walls. People shrieked, half mad with lust or hate, their hands forming claws as they charged. I held the light tight to the slide and pointed, aimed, shot, reloaded. Doug dropped several with his pistol and I thought, We’re going to win, we’ll kill them all, Nutley can break the door in and we’ll kill him too. He can’t burn us out, it’s too risky with their homes all being so close…

  But for every one that fell beneath the blast of shotgun and pistol, the room smoky and acrid and burning my nostrils and stinging my eyes, more rose from the beds. And I saw April among them standing next to a bed where a man with half his face obliterated writhed as his last few seconds ticked down. She was beautiful, and she begged me, “Help me find him.”

  I shook my head and Doug screamed.

  A fist hit my chest and knocked me back into the wall.

  The flashlight hit the floor.

  I swung the shotgun’s stock and bone cracked in the near-dark and someone stumbled back. I stepped forward and an arm snaked around my neck. I elbowed back once, twice, three times, and it felt like elbowing a wall and pain flared up my shoulder as someone tightened their grip and panic grabbed me.

  Doug’s hammer fell on an empty chamber. He started punching men and women and children as they lashed at him, until six or seven of them pulled him to the floor and held him down. A little girl opened the door. She was one of the children from the pictures in the file Kimberly had given me. Jennifer Love Hait. She said, trying to sound like an adult, “We heard all about you,” and her voice grew tinny as she let the night in and the darkness thickened and my blood roared in my ears, tears stinging my eyes until I felt myself floating into unconsciousness.

  FIVE

  I woke to dancing firelight, my throat aching, and it hurt to breathe. My head felt packed with concrete and my vision blurred for a moment before clearing. An arm moved into view on my right, fist clenching a machete. I thought, Fuck, and looked up, already knowing Doug was dead and they’d tossed his corpse on top the other two cops, and I’d have to tell his wife—this woman who still wasn’t over the murder of their teenage daughter—I’m sorry. Division chewed them up. This is a horrible place. It attracts dark things…

  Abraham Nutley shifted on one knee in front of me, just out of reach, the fire at his back. He held Doug’s shotgun. The others were lost in darkness but I heard them moving all around us. Nutley smiled, his eyes wet and shiny. He said, “You don’t know how happy I am you chose to come back. Or was it just fate, you think?”

  I wanted to look around for Duncan just to know for certain, even if it broke my heart, but Nutley shook his head. I stared at him, Lucas motionless beside me. They’d left my hands untied. There was that at least. I cleared my throat and didn’t recognize the sound of my own voice as I said, “What do you want?”

  His smile widened and flames danced over his shoulders. My neck was so sore I could barely turn my head. I thought I heard Lucas chuckle. He stood motionless, his face placid. Nutley said, “I like that about you. I knew you’d be direct.” I met his gaze again. He scratched his wrist and repositioned the shotgun lying across his thigh. “Just tell me it’s true.”

  “What?”

  Men shifted around the fire, moving closer. Their faces were waxen and sweaty. They looked like zombies who’d just climbed to shore from a sunken ship. Women moaned in sync with the wind. Nutley said, “You summoned a demon—a beautiful woman with fire hair and fire in her touch—a few months back but it nearly killed you.”

  “I didn’t summon anything.” I knew he was talking about Proserpine, but I still didn’t understand much of what they wanted. It had all blurred by, one horrible thing upon the next until I had a knife in my chest and a dark tide carried them away.

  Thinking of that made me wish Uncle Red was there.

  He’d show them magic.

  And Mike.

  He’d show them pain.

  Nutley tapped his finger on the shotgun’s chamber. He said, “Oh, but you did. And you’re going to have to figure out how to do it again.”

  “Or what?”

  He glanced at Lucas and the kid’s fingers tightened around the machete’s handle. God’s Lost Children huddled closer.

  Nutley said, “You don’t understand what we’re about. I get that. We’re just a bunch of freaks, right?”

  He smiled again.

  I nodded.

  He said, “You’re right about some of them. But they’re also gifted. Every single one has their purpose. Like you, Mr. McDonnell, they’re handpicked.”

  I didn’t know if he was saying he had handpicked me or if he was referring to the fallen angels me and Mike had sent back to hell. I cleared my throat, thought of the cave, could nearly see the three sisters with their thread, wisdom teeth, and dream sand, huddled around me like they wished to protect me.

  I said, “I can’t summon anything.”

  Nutley leaned forward and studied me, his voice soft as he said, “Don’t lie to me.”

  I could spring on him, I thought. Knock him into the fire. But it wouldn’t kill him and Lucas would bury the machete in the back of my neck and no matter how hard life was at times, no matter what tragedies slammed into me and those I loved, I wanted to live a long time, find the right woman, have a son or daughter. But Uncle Red’s voice whispered in my head: Things will never be the same for you again. And he’d been right. Nothing was the same. Once your eyes are opened, even if you don’t understand what you’re seeing, you can’t not see the shapes shifting just beyond normal vision as if through rain-dotted glass.

  I swallowed a lump in my throat as I pictured Uncle Red’s sad eyes and felt his velvet gloves on my shoulder. I looked Nutley in the eye and told him the truth. “They came hunting me.”

  “Why?”

  I didn’t know what it would hurt to tell him but I thought about the kid on the totem, remembered how a shadow had mauled Tripper, imagined Duncan’s cop buddies hitting the ground outside the door. And Duncan, Christ, he’d been like a father figure in a way for the past six months—gave me advice and let me lean on him while I recovered from the wounds I’d endured and while April took Ethan and drifted into the fog, only to turn up dead in some roach-infested motel, her boy on the bed staring at the water-damaged ceiling until the police had closed his eyes and gently placed him in a body bag.

  Nutley said, “Why were they hunting you?”

  What did I have that they’d wanted?

  I shook my head. I didn’t know.

  I clenched my hands. My jaw ached. I said, “Where is Doug?”

  A couple of dogs barked in the forest behind me. Lucas hitche
d his pants up and whistled a weird sound like a distant foghorn. Nutley jerked his head up and glanced past me, his attention, like Lucas’s, on the stone steps, and beyond where flashlights bobbed like boats trapped upon some dark sea.

  The creak of tooled leather echoed.

  Barks punctuated the night.

  The fire crackled.

  I took a deep breath, seeing Duncan’s face like fog beyond the burning pit behind Nutley, and seized a split second to gather my resolve before I lunged at Lucas. My left hand closed around the wrist holding the machete and I swept his legs from beneath him. He hit the dirt and I punched his fingers. He dropped the blade. I kicked him in the ribs and he doubled over as I grabbed the machete and swung it around me, expecting the others—men, women, and children—to lunge as well and pummel me into the dust.

  The dogs and men grew closer.

  Nutley and the others faded into the murky night without a word. Lucas huffed as he started to push himself up and regain the breath I’d stolen from him. I yelled at whoever was on the steps, “Down here! Hurry!” as I kept an eye on the kid, thinking, I’ll chop his leg off if he tries to make a run for it.

  Men called. Flashlights bobbed faster as they cleared the last of the steps and their pants swished through the tall grass and the moon, sick and yellow, bloated further.

  Nutley and the others were gone.

  The fire had burned down.

  Shadows deepened.

  Lucas glared at me in the dying light. I said, “You better not fucking move.”

  Lucas’s hand flashed and it felt as if ghost fingers touched my face as he reached for me from the ground. I blinked, and wiped soil from my face, arm raised to bring the machete down but he had rolled away from the coal’s dim light. I listened for him but couldn’t hear anything other than the cops commanding me, “Set the weapon down. Now!” The dogs raised all kinds of hell. I wanted to tell them to shine their beams around, to find Duncan, needed them to get on the trail of Nutley and the others but they’d never listen to me if I didn’t follow their orders.

  I tossed the machete to my right. Three cops grabbed me, spun me around and slammed me on the ground. Air hissed from my lungs. One kept his knee on my neck while another cuffed my hands behind my back and the third helped him jerk me to my feet. Two other state troopers shined their flashlights around the building, one of them holding on to a German shepherd. A county cop with wide shoulders flashed his Maglite over building windows. He stopped it on a couple of bodies leaning against the side of the building Duncan and I had first entered. His murdered friends looked like they’d just sat down for a rest near the steps. Two cops stayed with me. Two kept an eye out and two others hustled over to their fallen comrades. I said, “Duncan is still around here somewhere.”

  The cop holding my right arm grabbed me by the neck and squeezed. He said, “Keep your mouth shut.”

  “The people that did this are getting away right now. I came here with trooper Duncan because—”

  He said, “What did I just tell you?” The cop pulled his nightstick. One of the two flashing his beam around the far buildings stopped and said, “Let him tell his story, Reinald.” He was older, thin but wiry, large wet eyes piercing the gloom because he’d seen a lot in his time but it was something you never really got used to, even if you pretended you did. Some things haunt men like this. They tuck them away, ignore them, but they’re always there.

  The cop holding my right arm was younger and already had me pegged as a bad guy. I addressed the cop who wasn’t blinded by preconceived notions, thinking he had probably been on the force as long as Duncan, probably had memories with him. I told him everything from the start—how Duncan had gotten me the job with CPS, how Tripper and I had come out, to what happened a short while ago. They listened intently. The other two came back from their fallen friends’ sides and stared off into the darkness because in the death of their friends they saw what could become of themselves. No one could replace the men, not to their families and friends, their children. I shook my head. The older cop said, “You’re McDonnell, huh? Duncan’s talked about you. You and your friend Johnston saved his life.”

  Sure, I thought. Except not this time.

  He nodded to the cops on either side of me and said, “Uncuff him.”

  They did and the senior cop used his walkie-talkie to call for support to watch the roads south of our location, and a chopper to seize the sky. I kept waiting for him to say something like Officer down, but if he did I didn’t hear him. And I had no idea which code he spoke told them that. He gave orders to search the buildings and then asked if I was all right.

  I nodded, not all right at all.

  His nametag said McCoy. In a way he reminded me of Duncan and I guessed him to be a fair and honest man. We huddled around the nearly dormant fire for a moment and I couldn’t stop shivering, running my hands up and down my arms to warm the skin and kill the chill clinging to my flesh. McCoy threw a few dead branches on the fire and wood crackled beneath the soft rumble of his voice. “Duncan likes you a lot, kid. What happened in Division was a helluva clusterfuck, but you guys pulled through. This won’t be any different.” He tapped a finger against his thigh. The forest was quiet. I wondered if the cops he’d brought with him were already dead because Nutley might have left Lucas around to distract them while he made his escape.

  A chopper cut across the sky, search light blazing and illuminating sections of forest for mere seconds before casting it back into darkness. McCoy said, “We’ll find Doug. Tripper, too.”

  I nodded and sat, wishing I had a blanket to drape over my shoulders, the way I’d done it as a child, and I wished he’d quit talking about Duncan as if he were still alive because to put my hope in that and see it shatter would only make things harder.

  My throat hurt and I wanted a drink. The German Shepherd barked and one of the cops called out from the farthest building on the south side, “I got something here.” I lowered my head. McCoy put a hand on my shoulder and helped me up. Lucas was still around. The cop’s bodies were gone.

  I shambled behind McCoy to the glowing building, the other three cops sweeping their flashlights around the interior, their voices thick with disbelief, one of them retching. The older cop and I exchanged glances as we moved away from the fire and into that crouching darkness. He walked slowly up the steps and I figured it was due to fear and disgust. He knew he’d see his brothers in their bloody uniforms, dead eyes staring straight at him, their mouths sputtering , This could have been you.

  I stepped behind him and stopped because he blocked the doorway.

  McCoy shook his head, said, “Jesus Christ.” He stood stock still, arms braced on the doorframe, either lost in a living nightmare, or considering if he should let me see and share in more madness. The other cops echoed his statement, each of them making pleas to God whether He was willing to listen or not. I tapped McCoy’s shoulder and he turned his head, wiping tears away with a well-tanned hand. He said, “You up for identifying a body?”

  “I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

  “If you didn’t, someone else would have to. There’s always someone else.”

  “Move forward. Let me in.”

  He took two steps inside the open room and the smell hit me like a sledgehammer in the face as I crossed the threshold. The other cop’s flashlights were trained on three men against the far wall. Lucas had peeled their faces and left the strands to hang like wisps of crimson hair from their chins. They were sitting with their hands bound by barbed-wire, a mockery of prayer, their heads dipped to their chests. In each of their laps was a wooden plaque with a name burned into them.

  Johnathan. Michael. Frank.

  I thought, At least they got Wylie’s name wrong.

  Tripper was in the middle, his hiking boots melted to his feet as if they’d all held him in the pit and masturbated as he burned. Nutley had left a message painted in blood, like a lyrical halo around Tripper’s ruined head.

&n
bsp; Sonnelion Ieiunium…

  I wondered if this was another part of The Hierarchy, another deadly extension of Proserpine’s brood. Of course it is, I thought. Somehow it’s all connected. But I didn’t know where it began or why they came for us.

  McCoy pointed to Reinald and said, “Call it in.” He turned to me and said, “I think it’s safe to assume they have Doug.”

  I swallowed and wiped tears from my eyes. “He could be waiting in pieces on the trail they’ve left through the woods.”

  “Your name and your buddies are there on the wall. Frank’s a friend too, I’m guessing.”

  I shook my head.

  I read the words painted dark red above Tripper’s head—Sonnelion Ieiunium—and decided I had to get a hold of Mike and Uncle Red, hearing my father’s voice, always enthralled by an old scripture that stated a strand of three is seldom broken.

  * * *

  Me and McCoy hiked the trail back to the road, the falls a muffled roar in the distance. I was almost certain the sisters weren’t a hallucination, but ethereal guides who wished to point me in a certain direction. But gods talk in riddles, and they demand blood in exchange for truth and purity.

  They’re real, I thought. They’re tied to what came before with Proserpine and One of Three of Seven. And they’re bound to me and whatever lies ahead.

  Somewhere in their cave a trapdoor lay waiting, and once opened I’d find the path to Hell and redemption. I saw it all clearly as we walked beneath a star-studded sky, waiting for ghosts to show themselves. But they were shy now, or frightened by McCoy, or lost again in that forest that bordered the living.

  An hour passed and the old cop had kept mostly quiet, only once in a while asking simple questions about my life and offering fragments of his own. Heavy foliage rustled at our passing. The windshield of my Jeep winked beneath the light of McCoy’s flashlight. We stepped from the forest to the road and the chills finally left me, but an ache lingered, penetrating and deep in my guts. McCoy opened the driver’s door for me and said, “You sure you’re all right?”