by James Newman
Kate said nothing for a few seconds. She stopped mixing the pancake batter and listened to the silence on the line between them. The line crackled and popped almost like a living thing.
“Whatever would you want to go out there for?”
“It’s not that I want to,” Joel said. “I need to.”
“Do you really think that’s wise?”
“I do. I need to see it again. Where it happened.”
“Why don’t we visit him up at Brookside Hills instead?”
“I have. Every day. It’s not the same.”
“I’ll spring for the flowers. David can watch Becca and Christopher. It’s not a problem.”
“It’s not the same,” Joel said again.
“How’s that?”
“I don’t know. But it’s like...he’s not there. Like when I visit him at the cemetery I’m just talking to this cold gray stone. It doesn’t mean a damn thing.”
“Oh, Joel...honey...”
“I feel like he’s...as if his soul is still stuck out there at Heller Home. Shit, Kate, I know it sounds crazy, but I don’t know how to explain it better than that.” When Kate said nothing for the next few seconds, he went on: “I need to do this, Kate. I will do this, whether you go with me or not. But please...I need you.”
“You know I’m here for you, Joel. I just don’t understand—”
“Will you go with me, then? Please?”
“We’re not supposed to be messing around out there, I don’t think,” Kate said.
“It’s okay. Even if we do get caught, what’s Sheriff Guice gonna do? Lock me up? I hardly think he can afford to do that.”
“You have a point.”
“Please, sis...”
“Um, sure. I guess I could go with you,” Kate finally relented. “When?”
“Now. Please.”
“How about after breakfast? I’m making pancakes.”
“Fine. I’ll pick you up. Around nine?”
“That’ll work,” she said. “Hey, Joel, why don’t you come eat breakfast with us? You know you’re more than welcome.”
“I’ll be there at nine,” Joel said, as if he hadn’t even heard her.
He hung up.
The day was cool and more than a little foggy. After breakfast, Kate tied her hair back in a ponytail, grabbed a light jacket and her pocketbook for the drive.
“Are you sure you don’t mind watching the kids?” she asked David before she heard the rumble of Joel’s Mustang outside.
“No problem,” David said. “I need to work on that new painting, but it can wait ‘til this evening.”
“I won’t be long. An hour or so at the most. Christopher’s taking a nap. He should be fine.”
“Take your time.”
“Becca, you be good,” Kate said to her daughter. Becca had propped Lucky the bunny beside her on the couch, and was reading to him as if she were a parent reading her child a bedtime story.
David smiled up at his wife from his armchair, but his smile quickly disappeared as he watched her leave.
The weeds about the old Heller Home property seemed unnaturally still, like yellow-brown spikes guarding the land from unwelcome intruders. Joel’s Mustang pulled off Pellham Road and came to a smooth stop on the shoulder. In the distance, a whippoorwill’s high-pitched song greeted Kate and her brother as they exited the Mustang. The sound seemed far too lively, too merry, for the melancholy scene before them.
“I still don’t understand why you want to do this,” Kate said.
“Just humor me, will you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He walked to the back of the car, opened the trunk and reached inside. “I appreciate your coming with me, sis.”
“What’s that?” Kate asked, as her brother pulled something out of the trunk.
It was a massive wreath of flowers, REST IN PEACE printed in red across the plastic white cross spanning its width.
“Oh.” Kate offered her brother a sympathetic smile, but then her gaze quickly averted from him. She stared down at her feet. She didn’t want to see his eyes. Such sad, sad eyes.
Joel hefted the flower arrangement in one hand, came around the front of the Mustang to hook his other arm in hers.
They said nothing as they headed through the meadow, past the craggy black ruins of Heller Home, toward where Michael’s crash had occurred several weeks earlier. The ground was still scuffed, the Charger’s treadmarks still visible in the dirt like the tracks of some ferocious animal that had been dragged there to die. Pieces of glass glistened like diamonds in their path as they approached the large oak tree that had stopped Michael’s car so suddenly. Its base was ruined, pieces of it hanging off as if from some giant, half-peeled banana.
Joel sat the wreath upon the ground a dozen feet or so from the site of his lover’s accident. He knelt there for a few seconds, his lips moving silently. He stood again and looked off toward Pellham Road, at the other side of the woods bordering the meadow, at what used to be Heller Home. Everywhere but at that blackened tree. In the day’s fog, the ruins of the old children’s hospital resembled the bottom jaw of some crooked, rotten mouth.
“God, this is tough,” Joel said.
“I’m sure it is.”
“You know,” Joel said, “I realized after Michael died that I didn’t tell him I loved him as much as I should have.”
“Oh, Joel...”
“I know it sounds crazy, but there’s this weird part of me that thinks...if I’d told him just one more time how much he meant to me...this never would have happened. He’d be here, now.”
“I’m so sorry,” Kate said, feeling useless as she stood by him and watched his eyes grow moist. “You loved him very much, didn’t you?”
“He was my soul-mate.”
Joel stared off toward Pellham Road again, and a light breeze lapped at his hair like the hands of a phantom lover. He licked his dry, chapped lips.
He turned back toward Kate. “Did I tell you we fought that night?”
“No.”
“We did. I’ll never forgive myself for not staying there with him. For at least trying to make it right before I had to answer that call. If I had known that was the last time I would see him...”
“You couldn’t help it,” Kate said.
“No. But I think I should have realized a long time ago that Michael was more important than my career. I didn’t. And now he’s gone. I’ll always have to live with that.”
A single tear trickled down Joel’s cheek, catching in the five o’clock shadow at his jawline.
“Oh, honey.” Kate reached up and wiped the tear away. “I’m sure he was very proud of you. He loved you so much. And you loved him.” She peered heavenward. “He’s looking down on you right now, Joel, and he knows that.”
Joel followed her gaze.
“Why don’t you tell him?” Kate said softly.
Joel glanced briefly at his sister, then to the sky again.
“Right now. Tell him. What’s stopping you?”
“Yeah,” Joel said. Another loud sniffle. “Maybe I should.”
“I’ll leave you alone, if you’d like,” Kate said. “I can wait in the car. I don’t like it out here anyway. It’s creepy.”
“No.” Joel grabbed her hand. “Don’t go. I want you here.”
“Go ahead, then.”
Another tear trailed down his cheek. He glanced at her again, and she nodded at him to do it. Say what he had to say. Michael was listening.
“I loved you, Michael,” Joel said. He removed his glasses and wiped the dampness from his eyes with the back of one hand. “I always will. I wish we could have gotten married, spent the rest of our lives together. I’m sorry that I always had to work, that you felt I wasn’t there for you. But I was. I loved you more than anything. And I’ll never, ever, forget you.”
He looked at Kate again when he was done, as if for her approval. She smiled sadly. He looked so tired, as if his heartfelt mono
logue had drained him. Despite the morning chill, a thin film of sweat glistened upon his tan forehead.
“I love you, Michael. I don’t know if God approved of what we had or not...but it felt right. And I think that’s all that mattered.”
He squeezed Kate’s hand so tightly she hissed through her teeth. But she said nothing.
“Oh, God—do you feel that, Kate?”
“What?”
“Come on. Let’s go.”
They took several steps back toward the car, leaving the accident scene behind them, and then Kate did feel it. A sudden rash of frigid chills splashed down her spine like ice water. She did feel something, something tangible in the air, but she couldn’t quite identify what it was. It almost seemed as if they were no longer alone. Kate had read about that sort of feeling before, but she had never felt it herself. The feeling of being watched.
More chills ran down her spine as they passed the ruins of Heller Home and drew closer to the Mustang.
“I do feel it,” she said.
“Come on,” Joel said, his voice cracking. She could see it in his eyes now—the sadness was gone. It had been replaced by fear.
The Heller Home property had been quiet the whole time, only the sound of that lone whippoorwill in the woods giving any semblance of life to the meadow, but now the quiet was different. Kate sensed a presence in the quiet itself, a silence about the area that now seemed like some living vacuum, so deafeningly silent where only minutes ago the breeze had played with the weeds and their voices had echoed through the valley. Not anymore. Now, even the sounds of their footsteps through the dead grass, crunching on the gravel as they made their way past Heller Home and ever closer to the Mustang, everything seemed swallowed up by that sentient quiet.
“Do you hear that?” Kate whispered.
“I don’t hear anything,” Joel whispered back.
“Exactly.”
Kate’s body broke out in goosebumps. She looked down at Joel’s arm, hooked into her own, and saw that his flesh was also stippled with fear. He was practically carrying her now, and their walk toward the Mustang had quickened into not quite a run but a steady, urgent trot. As if their lives depended on reaching that car.
“Joel, I’m scared.”
Joel’s keys were already in his hand. “Go. Go.”
“It feels like we’re not alone anymore, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. It does. Get in the car.”
They began to run now, faster and faster, still holding on to one another’s hands, and the distance to the Mustang seemed to grow greater with every step they took. To their left, several feet away, something metal rattled and clanged in the soot and ash that was once Heller Home.
“Oh, God,” Joel said, and despite her better judgment Kate looked toward the noise as she ran.
It was the bumper from Michael’s Charger. In the growing breeze, the battered hunk of metal scraped against a mound of broken concrete blocks and jagged two-by-fours with an intermittent, high-pitched squeak. The sound resembled an old man’s rasping cackle.
“Don’t look, Joel,” she said. “Just keep going!”
They ran.
And at last reached the Mustang.
Joel fumbled through his pockets for his keys. His hands shook like those of a man three times his age as he started up the Mustang, put it into gear, and took off. Gravel sprayed behind the car as it shot back onto Pellham Road, rattling against the undercarriage like pieces of Heller Home screaming for them to stay.
Joel and Kate both glanced back, one last time.
Joel gasped. Kate’s heart skipped a beat.
Damned if it didn’t look like a man, out there in the center of it all.
They both shivered despite the heat inside Joel’s Mustang, but neither sibling spoke of what they saw.
A man with a long gray beard, watching them leave.
A man surrounded by what looked like giant, hovering bees...with the faces of sad, haunted children.
CHAPTER 53
Father Jacob Rehm woke to a distant rapping sound. At first he could not differentiate between the thudding of his own pulse and that pounding noise, as his mind was still murky with sleep.
But then he realized someone was knocking at the door. Down in the church.
Rehm rubbed at his eyes, sat up. Yawned.
He glanced at the clock on this nightstand and frowned.
He hadn’t been in bed as long as he’d thought. Must have just drifted off. He had only turned in a few minutes after ten p.m. Now it was just eleven o’ clock. But who in heaven could be visiting at this hour?
No problem, he figured. If someone had come to make a confession, Father Rehm saw nothing wrong with politely turning them away, asking them to come again tomorrow between the hours of eight a.m. and six p.m., like the sign outside made clear. However, if some truly troubled soul awaited him, someone who was truly lost and needed to speak with a clergyman who might show him or her the way, Rehm knew he had no choice but to let the person in. No matter the time of day.
He grunted, rose from the bed, retrieved his collar from its place on the nightstand and wrapped it around his neck. It would have to suffice—with his black silk pajamas the image was as complete as it could ever be at such an inconvenient hour.
He yawned again, walked from the rectory and into the chancel.
At the front door of the Morgan County Church of the Immaculate Conception, someone kept knocking. Loudly. Urgently.
“Just a moment, please,” Father Rehm called out, to no avail. He walked through the nave, ignoring the eerie stares of the various saints depicted in the stained glass windows on every side of him.
Whoever was at the door kept knocking.
“One moment!”
Father Rehm made his way to the front door with little effort. The building was dark, all but pitch-black at this hour, but he knew his church like the back of his hand.
He unlocked the door, swung it wide. “May I help you?”
Three men stood on the church’s front steps. Behind them, a battered Chevy pickup truck was pulled onto the patio, straddling the first few steps. Its tailgate hung open like a rusty metal mouth waiting to be fed.
Father Rehm recognized two of the men. His jaw dropped, and he gave a little gasp.
“Reverend Rhodes? Deputy Keenan? What are you doing here? It’s quite late for visitors, I would think—”
Rhodes and Keenan were both unwashed and unshaven. They were also completely naked.
“What are you...why are you...”
Rehm could think of nothing to say but the obvious as the men took several steps toward him. “You’re naked...”
Hank Keenan nodded, smiling at Father Rehm in a way that sent chills down the priest’s spine.
“What do you want?”
Perhaps even stranger than the fact that these men were naked—if anything could have been more bizarre than that—was the fact that they were accompanied by a man in a filthy Santa Claus suit. Even from where he stood, several yards away, Rehm could smell the man. He reeked of urine and feces. His false white beard was long and filthy, speckled here and there with crumbs of his last meal.
“Moloch,” said the man in the Santa Claus costume.
“Is there something I can do for you gentlemen?” asked Father Rehm. He tried his damnedest as he spoke to them to ignore the fact that the men’s bare privates pointed stiffly at him in the moonlight. “I, uh...think the authorities have been looking for you, Hank.”
The man in the Santa costume stepped forward.
“We’ve come for your metal, Father,” he said. His head jerked to the left several times fast, a nervous tic, and his bizarre statement was punctuated by a hoarse little giggle. “We need more metal. We don’t have enough, and we need all we can get.”
“My...metal?”
“Your metal,” said Reverend Rhodes. “We need it.”
“I don’t understand...”
“Moloch needs it,” said Hank Kee
nan. Father Rehm no longer recognized the man who had once attended mass every Sunday with his late wife and children, the man who had done so much for not only the church but for Morganville in general.
Something else stood before him now.
The men’s eyes seemed to glow in the moonlight.
They came closer.
“What do you want? I don’t understand. Please...”
“Moloch.” All three of them said it together now.
“What—”
“The metal, please, Father,” said Reverend Rhodes. “We need your brass, your copper, your silver, your gold. All of your metal.”
“We need the metal,” said the man in the Santa suit.
Rehm’s head shook back and forth. His mouth hung open. He did not know what to say, what to do. He felt frozen where he stood.
He glanced back, just for a second, at the huge silver crucifix that hung above his pulpit area.
“We need your metal.”
And then they were upon him. Punching, ripping, tearing...
Father Jacob Rehm screamed. The sound echoed throughout his church like a thousand angels screaming along with him.
One hour later, at Rudy’s Junkyard just outside of Morgan County, the process was repeated.
Word for word.
As if the men in Fred Dawson’s Chevy pickup followed to the letter some unholy script.
“We need your metal. All of it. We need your metal.”
Again, at the St. Paul Lutheran church, out on Henderson Lane.
“We need your metal. Give us all of your metal.”
Soon, they would have enough.
And Moloch would be pleased.
CHAPTER 54
The others had gone on, to continue their work at the church.
Now Hank Keenan was alone.
The former deputy grinned, his teeth very white in the moonlight despite the fact that he had not brushed them for several weeks. He slid beneath Sheriff Sam Guice’s patrol car. The driveway gravel scratched at his bare ass, even drawing blood in some places, but Keenan never noticed.
