The Influence

by Bentley Little

  They encountered nothing unusual on their stroll, and instead of staying on the road, she led him onto a trail that wound partially up the mountain before circling back to her neighborhood. There was something reassuring about everything being the way it was supposed to be out here. The brush was normal, the rocks were rocks, they even saw a jackrabbit and a lizard and there was nothing the matter with them. It had the effect of making what had happened with Puka seem small. In fact, looking out at the vastness of the desert, even the angel and its spooky influence on everything around it seemed small.

  By the time they arrived back at her house, the sun was starting to go down. Jill was feeling much better, much braver, much more herself. There were no lights on in any of the rooms and the windows were dark, but that didn’t faze her. She did shoot a quick uneasy glance at the garbage can at the side of the house, but then she walked inside, turning on first the living room light, then the kitchen. She poured both Ross and herself glasses of water, and when they were through drinking, she gave him a wet kiss on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad you came over.”

  He gave her a kiss not on the cheek, and then they were embracing, their bodies pressing together, their tongues entwined. They moved to the bedroom, quickly shedding clothes.

  There was no reason for foreplay. He was hard, she was wet, and they just did it.

  Afterward, they put their clothes back on. Ross offered to stay, but the walk had calmed her down, her fear had faded, and she told him that she’d be fine. Besides, she needed to make at least an hour or two more of calls. She smiled tiredly. “Dinner and after-dinner pitches. Everyone’s favorite.”

  “So you’re one of those…”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am.”

  “Are you sure you’ll be okay?” he asked.

  She put a hand on his arm. “I’m sure.”

  It was just as well, Ross admitted, because he had work to do as well. “If I can go through everything that’s piled up and send off some suggestions by early tomorrow morning, I’ll be in good shape.”

  Jill gave him a quick kiss, though she was slightly annoyed that he’d given in so easily. She’d been sincere in saying that she needed to work this evening and that he could go, but it would have meant something if he had insisted on staying. It was unfair of her, she knew. He was only doing what she’d told him to do. But, nevertheless, she felt disappointed.

  Together, they walked out to the living room. Outside, through the windows, the darkening clouds were building up. The eastern half of the sky was a deep gray wall that looked distinctly threatening. “I think it’s going to rain,” Ross said.

  An hour ago, she would not have thought that likely, but now it seemed inevitable. Maybe you should stay, she almost told him. Instead, she said, “You’d better get going before it starts coming down.”

  They parted with one last kiss, and although she closed and locked the door behind him, she watched him go through the front window. It was dark enough now for him to put on his headlights, and as he pulled away, she thought that his taillights against the blackness of the building clouds looked like the eyes of some gigantic feral creature staring back at her.

  THIRTY

  The storm hit at midnight.

  ****

  Ross was awakened by the thunder. It didn’t sound like any thunder he’d ever heard before, and he lay in bed listening to it over the rattle of rain on the roof. Immediately before each peal, lightning flashed, and for brief irregular seconds it seemed as though some hidden cameraman was taking flash pictures of the room.

  The truth was, the thunder reminded him of the roar of some monstrous beast. Rather than a loud echoing whipcrack, the traditional noise of air heated and expanded by electrical discharge, the sound was throaty, animalistic, building to a crescendo rather than starting big and fading. It did not seem possible that such a sound could be formed by mere weather, and he imagined some massive creature hiding in the night, behind the clouds, ready to tear apart Magdalena…Arizona…the United States…the world. It was a ridiculous thought, but none the less frightening for that, and he remained in bed, waiting for the flashes, listening for the roars, knowing in his heart that at the root of it was that thing in the shed, that fiend they were calling an angel, that dead monstrosity that was metamorphosing into…something else.

  Staring at the horrorshow window with its runny rain backlit by periodic lightning, he tried to think of what could be done. But he had been trying to think of that for days—as had Lita, as had Dave, as had Jill—and nothing had come to him. He was not a person who thought outside of the box, and even under ideal circumstances his imagination was what could be charitably called compromised. In a situation like this, where the box was an octagon made out of flypaper and cheese, he was next to useless.

  Still, he told himself that even illogical problems had logical solutions, and he tried itemizing in his head everything he knew, everything he’d seen, heard and suspected, hoping that an idea would occur to him.

  It didn’t.

  He fell asleep thinking of one of Jill’s paintings, the one with the chrysalis in the shed and the skinned dog in the corner, walking on its hind legs.

  He dreamed that Lita was lying naked atop that black chrysalis, and Jill was lying on top of her, and little sparks of blue lightning were shooting up from the dark egg beneath them and illuminating their faces with expressions of ecstasy.

  ****

  Not only was this type of thunderstorm out of season, but it was by far the largest one they had ever experienced. Lita and Dave were sitting up in bed when the thunder and lightning started. They’d been awake already, had heard first the wind, then the rain, but it was not the storm they were discussing, nor was it the angel and its ramifications. They were talking about Dave’s parents. The subject had come up on its own, and, for the first time since the accident, he was crying. He had never been the most emotionally demonstrative guy, and she wasn’t surprised that he had not cried at the funeral. Detached numbness was the biggest response she figured he’d show. But she was surprised tonight when he had started talking about his childhood home in Sonoita, and she was even more surprised when he had started welling up. Surprised, touched and ultimately pleased. She had always been of the opinion that emotions were better let out than held in. It was much healthier, and she was relieved to see Dave opening himself up this way.

  “I miss my mom,” he said into her shoulder, great sobs wracking his body. “I miss my dad.”

  In the back of her mind was the idea that this emotional unburdening was not all his doing, just as somewhere in her brain she was thinking that this thunderstorm was…not quite right. But she refused to allow her thoughts to go that deep. She held him close, and chose to believe that a perfectly normal storm had triggered perfectly normal memories and emotions in her perfectly normal husband.

  Outside, the storm grew more frenzied. If they’d still had chickens, Lita would have been worried about them. She was worried about her horse, but he had access to the barn and had been through many monsoons. He knew what to do. The bees were another matter. The wind seemed strong out there, seemed to be growing proportionally as the lightning grew brighter and the thunder grew louder. If the hives were knocked over…

  She said nothing about it, not wanting Dave to go outside and check—which she knew he would.

  Dave pulled away, wiping his eyes, embarrassed that he had been crying. But she would not allow him to be embarrassed, and she took his hands in hers, moved them away from his face and looked into his eyes. “I love you,” she said.

  He smiled through his tears. “I love you, too.”

  The phone rang.

  They both jumped.

  There was a slight lull in the ruckus outside, and, except for the sound of the rain, the house was quiet. The phone rang again. Lita looked over at the closest extension, on the nightstand on Dave’s side of the bed. Her first reaction was to not answer. But it might be important.
So she told Dave to grab the phone, afraid to do it herself, and she held her breath, watching his face as he picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?” There was a long pause. “It’s for you,” he said, handing it to her, and she could tell from the expression on his face that it was not Ross, not one of her friends, but something serious.

  Lita breathed deeply, knowing she didn’t want to hear what the person on the other end of the line wanted to tell her, but taking the phone anyway. “Hello?”

  She listened as the woman on the other end of the line identified herself as Dr. Warren from Albuquerque General Hospital and informed her in tones of practiced sympathy that her mother had been in an automobile accident. She’d been hit head-on by the drunk driver of an SUV—

  just like Dave’s parents

  —and had been rushed to the hospital by ambulance, where emergency surgery had been performed.

  There was a pause.

  Her mother, Dr. Warren said, was dead.

  Lita did not hear any more. The phone dropped from her hand onto the bed, and as the thunder and lightning resumed with a wild fury, she screamed out her anguish in an involuntary cry of pain that came from the deepest part of her soul and felt as though it was never going to end.

  ****

  Jill was baking cookies when the rain started.

  She hadn’t been able to sleep, and though she’d gone to bed shortly after nine, she was up again by eleven, restless and wide awake. Drawing usually helped her relax, but the pencil felt heavy in her hand, and after ten awkward minutes with her sketchbook, she tossed it aside.

  What she really felt like doing was making cookies, and despite the lateness of the hour, she went out to the kitchen, put on her apron, got a mixing bowl out of the cupboard; eggs, milk and butter from the refrigerator, and yeast, flour, sugar and salt from the pantry. She hadn’t made cookies for over a week, hadn’t gone to the farmer’s market last Thursday, and even though it was nearly midnight, she felt good getting back to baking.

  After mixing and rolling out the dough, she decided to make cookies in the shapes of angels. Real angels. They were on everyone’s mind lately, and maybe seeing some of the traditional variety would make people realize that that thing they’d shot down wasn’t one. Using a knife, she carved out an angel freehand: a long-haired woman in a billowy dress, hands raised in benediction. She carved out three more, placed them on a baking sheet and put the baking sheet in the oven.

  Outside, it began to rain, the sound of it on the roof reminding her of an onomatopoeic Dr. Seuss book from her childhood. Dibble dibble dop dop. She’d been planning to whip up a few colors of frosting with which to paint her cookies, but she paused. There were no shades on the kitchen window, and she stared out at the darkness, remembering when she’d found the heavily damaged Puka walking in circles on the floor where she was standing.

  Now he was in a garbage can at the side of the house.

  Lightning flashed, and she saw the desert behind her house illuminated for a brief second. There was too much darkness, too many shadows, and as thunder roared above her, she wished that she had put in drapes or shutters or shades, something to block the view, to keep the night out of the house. Lightning flashed again, and something in the sky caught her attention. As much as she wanted to look away from the window, she moved closer, leaning over the sink, waiting for the next lightning flash. It came, and the burst of electricity illuminated the heart of the storm.

  Was there a face in the cloud?

  She waited again.

  Yes.

  But the next time it was gone, and it did not reappear, though she stood watching for the next five minutes.

  Glancing at the timer to see how long it would be before she could take out the cookies, she heard, in the lull between peals of thunder, an insistent tapping coming from the oven. Some sort of propane leak? She hurried over. For the millionth time, she wished she had an electric stove and oven. But the house had come with a propane hookup, and she couldn’t afford to—

  She stopped three feet in front of the appliance.

  One of the angel cookies was upright, standing behind the oven window, tapping on the inside of the glass and trying to get out.

  She was too scared to even scream. Her first impulse was to run away, to get the hell out of the house and drive to Ross’ place or the home of one of her friends, but she realized almost instantly that in this situation, she had the means to fight back.

  Keeping her eye on that six-inch figure in the oven window, Jill took two steps forward. Turning the knob from “Bake” to “Broil,” she cranked the temperature up all the way. Almost instantly, the tapping grew more frantic. The angel was pushed aside as one of the other cookies took its place, its little baked dough arms bending at the elbow, its fists smacking against the thick glass. This cookie was darker than the first, brown in patches, and there was a desperation to its movements that almost made her feel sorry for it. But, despite outward appearances, it was not alive, and she waited and watched as it cooked in the heat, darkening further before finally burning. It had fallen over, and smoke was coming out of the oven, but she was not about to turn the appliance off until that thing was a crispy crumble, and she grabbed a chair, stood on it and pulled the battery out of the smoke alarm before it went off.

  The smoke was getting so thick that it was getting hard to breathe. She opened the window a crack, but she was afraid to open the door, and she suffered for another few minutes before putting on her heat protective gloves, opening the oven door and taking the cookie sheet out of the oven. She ran across the kitchen, threw it into the sink and, on the off chance that one of the cookies was still moving, turned on the water and tried to soak it. A gush of steam whooshed up, and, seconds later, when she could see, Jill discovered to her relief that blackened crumbs were all that was left of the angels.

  The storm outside had gotten crazy. Lightning and thunder were nearly constant, and powerful wind was forcing water into the kitchen through the small space of open window. This was flash flood weather, and she would have turned on the outside lights to see if any water was running through her property if she hadn’t been afraid that she might see something else.

  Turning around, she faced her mixing bowl on the table, where half of the dough she’d made was still resting. Not knowing what to do with it, only knowing that she was not going to bake it, she considered putting it in a plastic bag and dumping it in the garbage. But, on the off chance that the dough could become animated even without baking, she took the bowl to the sink, filled it with water, diluted its contents and dumped the runny mixture down the drain, letting the faucet run for a couple of minutes afterward to make sure it was gone.

  There was no way she’d be sleeping tonight, and she definitely wasn’t going to bake anything, so she went back out to the living room and once again picked up her sketchbook. Even out here it was hazy and smelled like burnt cookie, but she was not about to open any doors or windows, so she turned on her swamp cooler for the first time since September, hoping its stale summer air would help dissipate the smoke, and settled down to draw.

  She couldn’t draw, though.

  And she remained on the couch with the pad on her lap, pencil in hand, listening to the storm, waiting.

  ****

  “Hector.”

  Father Ramos jerked awake at the sound of the voice. Lightning flashed, and in that brief second, he saw a figure in the corner of his room, a thing of darkness and dirt, a travesty that was neither dead nor alive but somehow both. Thunder followed instantly, only the thunder sounded like a giant’s growl, and in its aftermath, the thing in the corner moved forward, closer to the bed.

  Father Ramos threw off the covers and scrambled off the opposite side of the mattress. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, he feared this apparition more than any other, though he knew not why.

  “Hector.”

  Hugging the wall, he tried to calculate whether he could make it to the door before the hulking figure blocked it
off, but it was nearly impossible to determine with the quickflash bursts of lightning in the otherwise total darkness. The thing was closer to the other side of the bed, though, and that put it slightly farther away from the door than he was.

  Taking a chance, Father Ramos ran for the doorway, made it through, and shut the door behind him, hoping against hope that those dirt hands would not have the manual dexterity to turn the knob.

  Keeping a wary eye out for other surprises, he hurried toward the safety of the chapel, turning lights on along the way. Would the chapel be safe? he wondered. He had been accosted there before.

  “Hector.”

  The voice was in his head, not in the air.

  Entering the chapel, he saw immediately that it was empty. He should be safe here. After all, he was doing God’s will.

  But he wasn’t doing God’s will.

  Father Ramos shut his eyes tightly, trying to will away the headache that was squeezing his brain.

  He locked the door behind him and started down the aisle toward the front entrance in order to make sure it was locked. Halfway there, he slowed. Then stopped. On the wooden floor was his shadow…only it was not his shadow. Stretching out in front of him was the elongated silhouette of what looked like a hunchbacked ape with the neck of a giraffe. The sight would have been comical if it had not seemed so wrong, and Father Ramos took one step to the left, one to the right, trying to see if it was the angle of the light that was distorting his shadow.

  It was not.

  Someone—

  something

  —was knocking on the double doors in front of him, the sound not particularly loud, but obvious in its regularity against the randomness of the storm, and he hurried over to make sure they were bolted. His twisted shadow rose from the floor to the door at his approach, confronting him, but he ignored it, checking the doors, grateful to confirm that they were indeed locked.