He hadn’t wanted children. He’d resisted Judy’s arguments for the first two years of their marriage. At first, he’d said that they simply couldn’t contemplate having a family until they had at least a semblance of financial stability. He’d believed his own line too. He’d thought his resistance would melt away once the money worries weren’t as severe. He’d thought he did want children, Just Not Right Now. But then their situation had improved, and he’d still said no. That was when he’d realized what the problem really was: he was afraid. He was afraid of the vulnerability a baby would bring into his life. More than that, he was afraid of the sort of father he would be. He was worried he would be tested and found wanting.
He had given in, though. Judy was in her midthirties. Tempus fugit. But his anxiety had grown, a coiling snake, until Lisa’s birth. And the instant he’d looked into her eyes—that was the instant he realized he’d been a first-class, foot-stomping idiot. His fear had evaporated.
And transferred, it now seemed, into Judy. Postpartum psychosis—so the doctors had named her terror, as if in the naming they could tame it. Judy’s descent into the dark had been precipitous, allowing her not even an hour to enjoy her daughter. The fear had consumed her with its black fire. She was convinced she was an unfit mother. She was convinced she was going to hurt Lisa. Her days turned into jittery icescapes as she tiptoed around her child, often too terrified to go near. She rarely touched Lisa. Her nights were eyes-wide cavalcades of pain, worst-case fantasies building and feeding each other. Judy tortured herself with visions of herself dropping Lisa, shaking Lisa, strangling her, bashing her, stabbing her, cooking her . . .
That was the point Gil had taken her back to the hospital. That was the cue for the intervention. Enter medication, stage right. Judy slept now. Sometimes. The therapy didn’t seem to be making many inroads. Gil didn’t want to criticize, though. Faith didn’t seem to be helping much, either.
He finished getting Lisa into her fresh diaper. He cradled his baby back to bed, watched her nestle into sleep, then went to his study to sort out his thoughts for the next day’s service.
Gil was familiar with two types of preaching. Some ministers wrote every word of their sermons, then either read from the notes or (and this was rare) committed the result to memory. Gil knew some very fine writers, and had heard some sermons done in this fashion that had left him weeping. They were the exception, though.
The other method, the one he used, meant a deliberate avoidance of notes. He would sort out the topic for his sermon the day before, then pray on it before going to sleep. Come the moment, he would approach the pulpit and let fly. Improvisation? No—inspiration. He simply opened himself up to God and let the words come as they would. And they always did.
He was good in the pulpit. He knew that. Pride was a sin, but false modesty could be as well. A man had to know how best he could serve his God. When Gil spoke, he felt thunder and fire, ecstasy and rain. When he spoke, he saw the Spirit in the faces of his congregation. When he spoke, he did God’s work and he did it well. He was one of those chosen to spread the Baptist ministry, and he accepted the role with thanks.
He and Judy had moved around a lot, starting one seed church after another. Seed churches founded on the strength of a charismatic minister often folded once the minster moved on, but his special gift, his blessing, the thing that, apart from Lisa, had him giving the most heartfelt thanks, was that the churches he seeded took root. He moved on and they flourished. And now he was digging furrows into the earth again.
The Church of the Infinite Spring was a converted restaurant, a failed steakhouse by the side of the highway. The hall was small, the acoustics terrible, but it served, it served. Gil and Judy had been here six months now, and the church was full for every service. The congregation was growing, and with it, the demands on Gil’s time. There were many senior citizens in the neighborhood, and Gil was often out till well after dark on his rounds, visiting, tending, giving the comfort that had fled from his own home. The week Judy began to paint again, the flu arrived in town, and Gil was kept running from one elderly invalid to another.
On Tuesday, he was out until after eleven. That was late. He didn’t like leaving Judy alone that long. Not because he was worried she might do something to Lisa. The whole thrust of her illness was precisely her terror that she would. He just didn’t like leaving Judy to the stress of her fears longer than he had to, a stress that got worse the more she had to look after Lisa on her own.
The house was quiet when he stepped in. He hung his jacket up and stood still, listening. The silence thickened, waiting for him. “Hello?” he called, needing a response, even if it was the sound of a woken Lisa crying.
“Up here.” Judy’s voice, barely audible, from the studio. There was a quaver in her tone, triggered by something that was punching through the drugs. The quaver made Gil run up the stairs, but he paused just long enough to quell that senseless, irrational worry and peek in at Lisa. She was in her crib, sleeping. Cursing his lack of trust, his lapse into Judy’s fantasy, Gil trotted the rest of the way to the studio.
The room was dark except for light that spilled from the hallway and washed over the easel. Judy was standing in front of the painting. She was hugging herself and swinging her torso in tight little arcs from left to right. “Look,” she whispered. “Look. Look.”
Gil looked. No sketch this, but a complete work. The jaw midway to being closed. The effect of frozen speed and strength was startling. The teeth were thinner than in the original sketch and seemed longer. The work was a palette of gray, giving the teeth a sheen that was both grave-clay and iron. Gil opened his mouth, but his throat closed over anything he might have said.
Judy turned to face him. Her eyes were sinking deeper into her skull. Her hair was sweat-plastered against her head. “Something’s coming,” she said, and her terror was undimmed by medication.
Gil reached out to take her hand. It was cold, clammy—dead fish. “What is coming?”
Judy shuddered, glanced over her shoulder at the painting. “I don’t know. Something. It’s going to hurt Lisa.”
Lord, I really, truly, desperately need your strength now. He pulled Judy into his arms, kissed the top of her head, and felt hopelessly out of his depth. She was transferring her distrust of herself on to an outside force now, that much was clear. What did that mean, though? Was this good? Was this an improvement? He didn’t think so. “Do you mean someone?” he asked.
“No. Some thing.”
“Are you talking about evil, Judy?”
A long pause. She nodded, then shook her head against his chest. She said something so quietly he tried to convince himself he had misheard. But he hadn’t. She said, “The truth.”
“What?”
“The coming truth.” Her voice was flat, detached, as if it were not she who was speaking.
“Listen to yourself,” he said. He tried to ignore the chill that spread from his heart and raced through his limbs. “You’re not making sense. And evil can’t simply come and hurt us. It doesn’t work that way. Satan acts only through us, and only if we let him. All we have to do to keep him out is turn to Christ. But you know this.”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.” It was very important that she agree with him. He needed to hear one word from her, and that word was yes.
She shook her head again. “This is something else.”
“What do you mean, ‘something else’? Not one of Satan’s works?”
“No.”
“Whose, then?”
No answer, but she pulled away from his embrace and looked at him with eyes growing wide before some awful revelation.
“Honey,” Gil tried, “God would not permit—”
“He can’t stop it.” The flat voice. The dead voice. The eyes staring at the infinite and the monstrous. The words of relentless blasphemy. “It doesn
’t care. It’s coming for him too.”
Judy’s deathly conviction sucked him in. It broke down his defenses, and the question slipped out before he could check it, “What is?”
“The Reptile.”
Later, lying in bed, Judy sleeping, actually sleeping, beside him, Gil stared at the ceiling, his own chances for sleep ashes and dust. Lord, he thought, Lord, please hear me. Please tell me what to do. Please. The night took his prayers into its silence, into its vastness.
When dawn came, it was at night’s grudging sufferance, and Gil had received no answer. Instead, he felt the tickling claws of doubt. What if Judy was right? Not about the approach of supernatural evil. (No?) No. What if that belief opened the wrong door? What if she really did harm Lisa?
No, he thought. No, to it all. No, no, no, no, no.
(But what if . . . )
On Wednesday he asked Judy to stop painting the teeth.
“That won’t make a difference,” she said. “It’s still coming.”
“I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the difference moving on will make.”
“You didn’t hear me.”
“Yes, I did. I really think this is for the best.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Please try.”
She stared at the floor and chewed at a nail.
On Thursday, she was very quiet, but she made no mention of the studio, and Gil saw none of the usual evidence of painting going on. “How do you feel?” he asked her as they were getting ready for bed. She looked at him for a long time without answering. Her eyes were dark tunnels to the core of fear. Then she went to look in on Lisa. And Gil, hating himself, but obeying an even greater worry, went too and watched very closely, very carefully, as his wife touched his daughter.
There was an evening service Friday. Gil went through the day with a clenched fist in his gut. He would have skipped the service if he could. But there was no one else. Not yet. Another year maybe, when the roots of the church were strong and there was another minister in the wings. But now, it was him or no one. So he fulfilled his responsibilities to God, trusting (no, hoping) that God would fulfill his responsibilities to Gil’s family.
Full dark and rain when he reached home. Rain that fell with nail-gun force, huge drops drumming the pavement with vicious intent. Gil pulled the workhorse Matrix into the driveway behind Judy’s aging, short-haul-only Civic, and turned the ignition off. The rain drummed steel claws on the roof of the car. He would be soaked in the time it took to run from the car to the front steps. He peered through the curtains of water. He could barely see the house. He decided to wait, just a minute. He didn’t want to run that gauntlet.
Then he realized why the house was invisible. There were no lights on. Fumbling keys out of his pocket, he shot out of the car. He slipped on the lawn that was turning to mud, almost fell. Then he was at the door, unlocking the door, through the door, and calling, “Judy?”
No answer. The staccato of the rain and the silence of the house rubbed against each other, grinning. Gil felt a twist in his gut, a twist that told him he’d lost the most important race of his life, a twist that told him he was about to learn new things.
He flicked the hall light switch. Nothing happened. But now he saw a faint glow leaking down from upstairs. He tore up the steps, a moan building in his throat, ran for all he was worth to Lisa’s room, knowing what he would find.
What he saw, when his eyes adjusted to the dark, stopped him cold. Lisa was in her crib, bundled in her pink sleeper. He watched her, saw her breathe. He stood and watched for three more breaths, three more normal, sleeping-baby breaths. Nothing wrong. His unborn moan tried to become the hysterical laughter of relief. He stifled the noise and tiptoed back out of the room. He stood for a moment, catching breath, gathering thoughts, calming down.
There were still things wrong, though. None of the light switches were working. Had Judy flipped the circuit breaker? If so, why? Dim light from her studio wavered, beckoning. He followed.
A dozen storm candles were clustered and flickering in the center of the floor. The blinds were drawn over the windows. Along the periphery of the room was Judy’s teeth series, complete now, finished in secret. His eye followed the progression, moving from the first canvas with the gaping mouth, tracing the stop-motion coming together of the teeth. Each painting saw the teeth lengthen and narrow as they approached each other. The photo-realistic gray developed a harsher and harsher sheen. Gil turned on his heel, following the motion, caught by the flip-it book of pain. The teeth intertwined in the last painting, and now they were steel, now they were daggers, now there was nothing to them but pure razor edge and pure stiletto smile. And Judy sat in the far corner of the room, rocking.
“Nuh . . . nuh . . . nuh . . . ” she said.
“Judy?” Gil whispered and walked toward her. Slowly.
“Nuh . . . nuh . . . nuh . . . ” Rocking. Now Gil saw glints of metal on the floor in front of Judy. She had taken all the knives from the kitchen, laid them out with points interlocking and kissing. They mimicked the slicing smile of the last picture. The overlap of the blades was a bit more pronounced, jaws slowly sinking into satisfying meat. And still there was the smile.
Judy rocking. The “nuh . . . nuh . . . nuh . . . ” becoming louder, more urgent. Her arms uncrossed, and her hands, jerking with each “nuh”, reached step by step for the knives, for the chef’s knife, its eight-inch blade winking brightest in the candlelight. She grasped the haft. A pause then. She stopped rocking.
Gil held his breath.
“Coming,” Judy whispered. “Nuh . . . nuh . . . nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh.”
Gil backed up. He thought he saw a violation of God’s law. He thought he saw shadows gather in Judy’s corner, shadows coming to swallow the candle glow.
Judy whirled around to face him. “Nuh-nuh-nuhnuhnuhnuhnuh-NOOOOOWWWWWWW!”
Gil fled the howl, the shadows, the blades, his wife. Most of all, he fled what he saw in her eyes, but would not acknowledge. He barreled into Lisa’s room and scooped her out of the crib. Clutching his baby, the hell-deep scream of his wife at his back, he clattered down the stairs. Four steps from the bottom, his right foot hit the wall and he stumbled. His center of gravity leaned drunkenly forward. I’m going to fall, he thought, had time for a desperate prayer against the horror that would follow if he did, a Lord, please no against the image of his crushed daughter, and he found his footing.
Outside now, in the rain hard as teeth, Lisa crying as the stinging of the night drenched her. Struggling with the keys to unlock the car, hearing Judy’s cry “NOOOOOOWWWWW!” shrieking out of the house (blades at his back, teeth at his neck, a jaw clamping shut).
The door opened, and he fell into the front seat. Close the door. Lock it. He put Lisa in the passenger seat, started the car up, and roared away, wheels spraying water. He drove with his left hand, holding Lisa in place with his right. He zigzagged out of the subdivision at panic speed, and then he was on the highway. He breathed.
Then the thought—he hadn’t taken Judy’s car keys. He glanced in the rearview mirror. Nothing, just the glow of the last of the streetlights in the distance. Even so, he drove a bit faster. The highway, still straight, began a series of low dips and rises, with woods on either side. His speed turned the rain into horizontal mercury in the headlights. The trees flashed past, bleached negative, then returned to the body of the dark.
Mirror again, and there, oh there, my God in heaven, headlights. Foot down on the accelerator, water rising in a violent wake on either side of the car. The steering wheel shuddered in his grasp. His right hand hesitated over Lisa. Hold her or the wheel? He checked the mirror. The lights seemed closer (coming! now!), their reflection sick and big and harsh. How could she be catching up in that car of hers? Dark miracles tittered. And rushing ahead of the other vehicle came the other thing he had
fled. It took him now. All he could see was Judy’s gaze and its awful clarity. Its terrible, terrible sanity.
He was not fleeing her madness, because she was not mad. He was fleeing the truth she had seen, the truth with teeth, the truth that lurked beyond the horizon, and whose first glimmers were already marring the comforting night of the world’s ignorance.
Reptile.
He sobbed, shook his head as if he could push the horror away, and suddenly there was nothing ahead but trees. He yanked hard left, foot off the accelerator and braking into the road’s curve. The Matrix hydroplaned full tilt. Momentum laughed.
Airborne.
Flipping.
Chaos then. Roaring, crashing, slamming chaos. Batter-smash blows from all sides.
And stop. The brief silence of blocked ears, and then the pounding of the rain came through again. Gil couldn’t see. Couldn’t feel his legs. Felt deep claws in his skull, felt flattened and loose bone in his face and jaw. He moved his arms, wiped the blood from his eyes, and he could see again. He was upside down, tangled in metal, and facing the road. The other vehicle had stopped, and it was a pickup truck, not Judy’s car at all. Its headlights were pointing his way, illuminating the wreck. Someone was coming on the run.
Then, behind him, something that was more than a sound. It was the echo of an immense snarl far beyond dragon. Gil twisted around, Lisa’s name at his lips, and saw that the fragment of the coming truth had been waiting for him here, for this moment, all along. He came face-to-face with Judy’s horror. The metal of the car had been torn and molded by darkness into interlocking steel blades. They gripped Lisa. She wasn’t crying.
Lesson learned, no praying now, Gil reached for his daughter.
Borderlands 6 Page 17
