Harsh Gods

by Michelle Belanger

She pouted, then used her middle finger to shove her glasses up her thin, straight nose. On anyone else, it would have been a none-too-veiled response to my smartass comment. With her, it seemed both habitual and oblivious.

  While she hovered at the threshold, I buckled the biker jacket like I was girding for war. A vintage piece from the post-punk ’80s, it had been through a lot with me, especially one cold November night on the dark waters of Lake Erie.

  My friend Lil paid a professional leather cleaner a small fortune to restore it—a “kindness” she gleefully dangled over my head whenever she could. I’d had my own guy go over it back in January to make a few strategic changes, including a whole new lining with a custom inner holster for my new favorite gun. The thick, black leather with its many zippers and buckles settled across my shoulders with a reassuring weight. I felt comfortable in the hardy second skin. The subtle lines of the SIG against my ribs certainly didn’t hurt.

  “All right,” I intoned. “Take me to your leader.”

  She stared blankly at me. I was kind of used to that. One thing I’d retained was a near-encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. I found the references amusing, but had long ago stopped expecting anyone else to follow along.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Nodding, the girl turned and headed down the stairs. Pushing through the vestibule door, she fought with the outer one, straining against the wind. It was practically like an airlock, and an icy blast from off the lake swept into the glassed-in space. March had come in like a lion, and was still mauling the city with chilly tooth and claw.

  Once outside, she winced as the relentless fingers of the wind plucked at the edges of her coat. Quickly, she zipped it all the way to the top before tugging her hat down to cover her ears.

  My body registered the temperature in a distant manner. She stared for a moment, then led me to her car—an anonymous white compact. I climbed in and ended up sitting with my knees up my nose. As she put the keys in the ignition, she stole a sidelong glance in my direction. She pursed her lips, but didn’t say anything.

  A colorful, laminated rectangle dangled from her rearview mirror, decorated with a little brown tassel. I sent it spinning as I struggled to adjust the seat. Then I caught it between my first two fingers, stilling its wild orbit and muttering an apology.

  Looking closer, I expected to see a picture of Saint Christopher. Instead, the image of a woman in a headscarf gleamed in bright, almost cartoon-like colors. She rode a white horse through what looked like a Mughal horde, casually lopping off an opponent’s head with her gleaming scimitar.

  “That’s Mai Bhag Kaur,” Pompom Hat Girl explained. “She’s a warrior-saint.”

  “I’ve heard of her,” I replied. “She’s Sikh, right?”

  My reluctant chauffeur gave me another sideways stare.

  “Yes. Not many people know that.”

  I snorted. “Don’t let the leather jacket fool you. I’m not some knuckle-dragger. I taught at Case, remember?”

  She did that nervous thing with her glasses, then turned her full attention to her crowded ring of keys. Singling one out, she inserted it into the ignition. I tapped the icon of Mai Bhag Kaur, sending it spinning again.

  “I didn’t think Sikhs believed in anything like Christian possession,” I said casually. “How’d you end up doing exorcisms with Father Frank?”

  “I don’t do exorcisms,” she said curtly. “He teaches me judo and mixed martial arts. In exchange, I give him some of my time. Tonight, that involves driving.”

  It was my turn to stare. “Trying to live up to your warrior-saint?” I asked.

  She grabbed the icon, stilling it. Her throat worked as she swallowed.

  “I don’t like being afraid.”

  So I shut the hell up. She put the car in gear and headed toward Mayfield Road. Instead of making small talk, I scoured my cellphone for any calls or texts I might have missed, especially from this mysterious Father Frank who taught judo to Sikh girls and did exorcisms on weekends.

  My sibling Remy had sent about a dozen texts over the past two weeks, all of which I’d chosen to ignore. Most of them only said, “Call me,” anyway. There were a couple of calls from work—likewise ignored.

  Nothing about an exorcism.

  “When did you say this guy was calling me?” I asked. If I hadn’t gotten such a wholly guileless vibe from her, I would have been plotting ways to get out of the vehicle—there were a lot of reasons to doubt her story. Given the life I led, it was a good policy to assume everyone was out to get me. Most of the time, they were.

  “Last night. Most of today,” she answered. “Maybe fifteen minutes before I showed up. It kept going straight to voicemail, but he said sometimes, you get real busy and turn it off.”

  I powered down the smartphone then brought everything online again—which was about the extent of my knowledge of how to screw with the thing. Give me a search engine and I could perform miracles—hand me the hardware that ran the search engine, and I felt like a Neanderthal working a Wii.

  The screen reloaded at what felt like a geologic pace. I checked for texts again.

  “Nope,” I said. “Nothing.”

  As I put the phone away, the scar on that hand gave a twinge. I massaged it automatically. It had been giving me trouble for a couple of months now, always itchy on the wrong side of my skin.

  “I made the last three calls myself,” the girl said. “I heard your voice on the message. You have a very distinctive voice.”

  “I don’t know what you’re calling, but it can’t be my cellphone.”

  “It’s your voice,” she insisted, pulling up to a light.

  “I’m telling you, I’ve had this phone since November, and nothing about exorcisms has come through—”

  I cut myself off, twitching with the force of revelation. Pompom Hat Girl caught the motion from the corner of her eye, turning her attention from the road long enough to spear me with a quizzical glance. Churning anxiety spiked through my gut, and I didn’t know how much of it made it to my face.

  Someone behind us honked as she idled too long, and the car rabbited forward as she gave it too much gas. I barely noticed—my thoughts spun back to a night of pitiless skies, cold, seething waters, and the nightmare shrill of cacodaimons rising from Erie’s muddy depths.

  I’d lost so much on that lake.

  “Do you have a work phone?” she asked tentatively. I made a monosyllabic sound that wasn’t really a response. Our little compact glided past the high stone wall of Lake View Cemetery, and I found myself drowning in memories.

  I’d had a cellphone before that awful night—used it to call the apartment with panicked messages for Lailah. Beautiful Lailah. Dead even in my dreams.

  I shoved the thoughts away before they could gut me. I’d spent weeks now fighting not to think of her, video games filling the hole where my memories should be, because whiskey didn’t do shit.

  The phone was probably somewhere at the bottom of Lake Erie, buried in the silt and the dark along with the Eye of Nefer-Ka. All I had left of that horror was my Swiss-cheese brain and the scar on my hand.

  Sensitive on some level to what I was feeling, my driver sat rigidly behind her steering wheel, eyes resolutely fixed on the road. It made me wonder if some of my emotions were spilling out. The laminated image of her warrior-saint rocked lazily with the motion of the tiny car as we descended into Little Italy.

  “When you get a chance, I need that number,” I said.

  Maybe there were more voicemails. Maybe one of them was Lailah, and I could finally hear her voice again outside of nightmares. But if my old cellphone lay at the bottom of the lake, how was it even taking calls? It shouldn’t even be in service—I hadn’t paid any bills on it since November.

  It made no sense.

  “You want the number to your own cellphone?”

  “Humor me.”

  She frowned, and again, I caught the sour whiff of anxiety, verging upon fear.<
br />
  “Is my head on backwards or something?” I asked, damping down irritation. “You keep staring at me like I belong in a sideshow. I know I haven’t cut my hair or shaved in a while, but seriously—I can’t look that bad.”

  Pompom Hat Girl hunched her shoulders and focused on the road. There wasn’t much cause for that level of concentration—traffic was light, and it was too cold out for snow. Old drifts piled up against the sides of the cars parked along the curb, but the street itself was clear.

  “You look like someone I met a long time ago.”

  “Pretty sure I’ve never seen you before,” I responded.

  She stopped at a crosswalk to let a trio of tattered pedestrians pass. Their clothes were insufficient for the weather, and they hunched miserably against the wind.

  “If you were him, I would never have let you into my car,” she said. Some of the night’s chill had crept into her voice. The stumbling group of homeless finished their slow procession across the road, and she nearly spun the wheels when she accelerated.

  Curiosity welled up in me—and I did my best to beat it to death with a mental stick. If I focused too hard on her while she was immersed in those emotions, there was a decent chance I’d pick up on some of what she was feeling. It didn’t take a psychic to guess it involved some kind of trauma.

  I had enough of my own shit to deal with.

  Clenching the imaginary fist in my mind while the nails of my left hand bit into my tingling scar, I got so focused on shielding myself from the echoes of her trauma that I failed to notice when she stopped the car in front of a row of houses along East 124th.

  “Someone took my parking spot,” she said, and she pouted.

  Her annoyance broke the cycle. I relaxed my hold on the shields a bit. Closing my mind off like that might keep me sane, but it also made me feel claustrophobic and—if I was being honest—a little scatterbrained. I hadn’t worked out a good middle ground.

  “It’s that house,” she said, pointing to an old Craftsman painted a fading shade of slate. “You get out. I’ll go park.”

  “It’s late, and it’s dark,” I observed. “Sure you don’t want me to walk you back from wherever you end up parking this thing?”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  The whetted edge to her words reminded me momentarily of Lil, my dead girlfriend’s gray-eyed sister. She regarded me with Lil’s same intractable glare, so I shut my mouth and got out of the car. She started pulling away as soon as I closed the door—another echo of Lil.

  At least she wasn’t as terrifying a driver.

  I stood for a moment on the icy stretch of street in front of the tired-looking house. A very practical—and legitimately suspicious—portion of my brain kept warning me that this could be a trap, but that little voice was sounding increasingly irrational. I didn’t think the girl could lie convincingly if she wanted to, and the house she indicated seemed excruciatingly normal.

  An electric-blue tricycle with shiny Mylar ribbons on the handlebars sat half-buried in a drift of snow near the front steps. Lights in pastel Easter colors were strung across the porch while the front door sported a wreath of colorful straw and plastic eggs. Little clings of rabbits, eggs, and crosses were visible in the windows stretching all the way along the porch. Even the welcome mat had a seasonal theme—though if the weather kept up, Peter Cottontail was going to freeze his ass off when he came to deliver his chocolate eggs.

  “Yep,” I told myself, just before pressing the doorbell. “Only thing you have to worry about here is being kitsched to death.”

  3

  The doorbell didn’t seem to work, so I tried knocking. Immediately, I heard footsteps from the other side of the door, then a woman’s voice, muffled.

  “Sanjeet—I told you,” she called cheerfully. “You don’t have to knock any more.” The door swung open, as she continued, “You’ve been over enough you can just walk—”

  The woman stopped short once she caught sight of me. Her mouth remained slightly agape. Comfortably curvy, she looked to be on the near side of forty. Her dark-blonde hair had even darker roots, and her hazel eyes were shadowed by bruised circles of fatigue.

  “You’re not Sanjeet,” she said.

  “Nope,” I responded.

  “Well, it’s late and we don’t want any.” She started closing the door in my face.

  “Late? You people sent for me,” I responded. “I’m here to see Father Frank.”

  She caught the door at the last instant, keeping it open a crack, peering through the narrow slice of space.

  “Where’s Sanjeet?” she asked.

  I hooked a thumb in the direction of the street. “Pompom Hat Girl is out parking her car.” Yep. I said that with my out-loud voice. Hermit life didn’t help much with my social filters.

  The woman silently mouthed the nickname, brows creasing in a frown. She was saved from offering comment when a strident boy’s falsetto erupted from deep within the home.

  “Mooooom!”

  The sound Dopplered as the child pelted from one unseen point to the next. I could just make out the rapid slap of tiny bare feet across what sounded like hardwood floors. The mother turned to respond, still keeping her body wedged against the opening of the door.

  Snow crunched on the steps behind me and Pompom Hat Girl—Sanjeet—bounced onto the porch.

  “Hi, Mrs. Davis,” she chirped. “This is the guy.”

  Mrs. Davis didn’t budge from the nearly closed door. She didn’t outright say that she thought I was a crazed serial killer, but her look was eloquent enough. I rubbed my scruffy chin, not quite apologetic.

  “I wasn’t exactly expecting company,” I said.

  From her wintry expression, it was a good thing I didn’t mind the chill. Eyes on Sanjeet, Mrs. Davis stepped away from the door, pulling it open as she went.

  A skinny little boy with a mocha complexion and brown eyes full of mischief rushed up behind her. He body-slammed her leg, throwing his arms around her thigh in something close to a flying tackle. She rocked with the impact like a ship weathering a storm.

  “Tyson!” she cried, reaching down to tousle his hair. “One of these days you’re going to knock me right over. Didn’t I tell you to get ready for bed?”

  “I’ll take him, Mrs. Davis,” Sanjeet said, skirting past me and into the house. She grabbed for the little boy but he clung like a burr, his huge brown eyes fixed upon me. I stared back, wiggling my fingers in what I hoped was a non-threatening gesture. Tyson buried his face in his mother’s thigh, giggling.

  At least the kid liked me.

  Mrs. Davis helped pluck his fingers from her slacks, muttering gratefully. Once they’d pried him loose, Sanjeet scooped the boy up, holding him in the air and rubbing her nose in his belly till he squealed with delight. He had her hat off in an instant, and streamers of her long black hair floated after it like she was attached to a Van de Graaff generator. He peered over her shoulder at me, then shoved the hat against his mouth, stifling his grin.

  Mrs. Davis watched the boy, a weary smile tugging at her lips. Then she turned back to me.

  “Father Frank is in the room with Halley,” she said, stepping further into the living room. “He hasn’t left her side since her last… episode.” Her voice hitched on the final word.

  “OK,” I said, still having no idea what to expect. “Which way?”

  She pointed to a hallway leading away from the main room, then hovered near the couch, her eyes still wary. I closed the door behind me, tapping snow from my boots onto the mat.

  The sound echoed through the quiet home. Moving past the entryway, I navigated around a spill of toys almost certainly left behind by little Tyson. Framed inspirational sayings decorated the living room walls, along with one tongue-in-cheek prayer that stated, “Bless this mess.” Despite the humorous plaque, the place was tidy enough, with simple furnishings that looked well-used but hardly shabby.

  “I’m Tammy, by the way,” Mrs. Davis blurted s
uddenly, extending a hand.

  I shoved both of mine immediately into my pockets. I’d forgotten to grab my gloves, and skin-to-skin contact often made it impossible to block out emotional impressions. Once in a while, that was useful, but mostly it was a pain in the ass.

  I nodded a brusque greeting. “Call me Zack.”

  Her hand lingered in the air between us for a few moments, her expression flickering through uncertainty, disapproval, and finally, resignation. With a little sigh, she dropped it back to her side.

  “Father Frank says you work at Case Western?” she ventured.

  “Used to,” I replied. “On sabbatical.” A family photo angled on the mantel above the fireplace. A balding man with deeply hued skin and piercing eyes sat beside a glowing Tammy, who dandled an infant Tyson on her lap. A thin girl with a tangle of dark hair slouched beside them, maybe twelve or thirteen. The girl’s face was almost impossible to see. Shoulders hunched, she hung her head, looking away from the camera. Everyone else—Tyson included—wore happy family grins.

  “Is that Holly?” I asked.

  “Halley,” the mother corrected. “Like the comet, not the actress. My husband works for NASA. He likes astronomy names.”

  “He around?”

  She shook her head. “His father died a few weeks ago. There’s a bunch of property on the East Coast. He’s handling that while I watch the kids.” She reached for my sleeve. “You can help her, right?”

  I shrugged off her clinging touch.

  “I’ll go talk with the padre and see what’s up. No guarantees. I’ve got no idea what I’m dealing with.”

  “Of course,” Tammy stammered. Tyson’s tintinnabulating laughter echoed suddenly from upstairs, followed by an answering giggle from Sanjeet. Mrs. Davis turned in the direction of the sound.

  I seized the opening to make my escape down the hallway. Soft light spilled from a partly open door at the end. The air got heavier the closer I got to that door. Not oppressive, exactly. Just… thick. Curiosity got the better of me, and I relaxed my shields a little, peering across to the Shadowside. A filmy echo of the home shimmered there, agitated by pulses of power that moved like ripples along the surface of a lake. I wasn’t certain what to make of the disturbance, but it was clear the epicenter lay beyond that doorway.