by James Newman
“David, it’s George. How you doin’, man?”
“Not so good.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I hate my life. I hate this goddamn town. I think my wife’s losing her fucking mind. Everything okay on your end?”
“I’m old and I got hemorrhoids. Life’s a bitch.”
David didn’t laugh. “And then some.”
After several more seconds of awkward silence on the line between them, David said, “Did you need something, George?”
“Oh, yeah,” said the ex-Marine. “I was wondering if you’d heard the news.”
“News? What news?”
“Shit. You haven’t heard.”
“I guess not,” David said. “I don’t read the paper anymore. Nothing but bad news, anyway.”
“Sheriff Guice is dead,” said George.
“Fuck. No. What happened?”
“His patrol car exploded. With him in it.”
“Jesus...”
“Supposedly they found three more bodies as well. The priest, at the Catholic church. Pastor Nordhaus, at the Lutheran. Guy who owns the local junkyard.”
“My God. This place is a walking morgue.”
Neither man said anything for several long seconds.
Finally, George said, “I’ll letcha go, David. I just thought you would want to know.”
“Do you think all of this has something to do with...”
“Yeah,” George said. “I do think there’s some connection with what we were talking about last night. No doubt about it.” George cleared his throat. “I gotta run, David. Let’s get together for that beer soon, okay?”
“Sounds good.”
“Watch your back.”
“Will do. You, too.”
David walked back into the kitchen and hung up the phone. He walked quietly down the hall, stood for a minute or two outside the splintered bathroom door, listening to the sound of running water in the bathtub. Listened to the sound of Kate laughing and playing with Christopher as if everything was fine.
As if she wasn’t changing. As if Moloch hadn’t crawled inside her mind.
David grimaced, forced that thought from his mind as he turned from the bathroom door, shoulders slumped, and headed back to the living room.
CHAPTER 65
The hardest part of all was the unreality of living his life without Michael. On those lonely nights when he sat in the darkness, feeling as if he were drowning in his grief, Joel often expected the phone to ring. It would be Michael calling, on his way home from work, and over the rumble of the Charger’s engine he would ask if Joel wanted him to pick up some dinner. Every second of the day, Joel expected Michael to walk through the front door, to shout out his customary “Honey, I’m home”.
That was undoubtedly the hardest part. The surreal feeling that nothing had changed, nothing at all...that Michael was gone, but he couldn’t really be gone. Not forever. Surely he had just stepped out for a moment. For a few days, even. They had been fighting, after all, the last time they had spoken.
But no...reality was so much crueler.
If he hadn’t seen his boyfriend’s coffin slowly lowered into the earth, if he hadn’t thrown that first handful of dirt into his lover’s grave, Joel would have been unable to believe that Michael Morris was truly dead.
That he was never coming back.
Three days had passed since he had told his soul-mate goodbye, and still it all felt like some sick fucking joke.
Shortly after nine p.m., Joel got drunk. Not just drunk, but—as he and his buddies used to say back in college—“positively obliterated.” Joel might have been disappointed in himself had circumstances been different, as he had never been the type to turn toward drugs and alcohol to ease his problems. People who did that earned no sympathy from Joel, as he had witnessed all too often the tragic consequences of such behavior. He had assisted in numerous autopsies—more than he could count—during the last few years, postmortem examinations upon the bodies of folks whose lives were cut short due to drug overdose, cirrhosis of the liver, and of course accidents caused by drunk drivers.
He didn’t want to be one of them. Joel didn’t want to be a statistic.
Tonight, however, he was in mourning.
Tonight he was grieving the loss of his lover. His best friend.
More so, Joel told himself, this was a celebration of Michael’s memory. Of the short time they had spent together.
Tonight, Joel figured, he had every right to numb his pain.
He deserved this.
He planned on getting “positively obliterated,” and it was nobody’s fucking business.
The water was hot. Almost scalding hot. It turned his flesh bright pink.
Joel didn’t care.
Like passing through the fire. The phrase leapt into his mind as he made himself comfortable. Joel frowned, wondered where the hell that had come from, but then he shrugged. It didn’t matter. Nothing fucking mattered anymore, except Michael’s precious memory.
“I love you, Michael,” Joel wept, his voice echoing off the walls and floor of the small bathroom. “God, I miss you.”
He sank deeper into the bubbles filling the tub, letting them swallow him up to his chin. He sighed loudly. On all sides of him, the candles he had placed about the room cast their flickering light. The shadows of the toilet, the sink and Joel himself twitched and danced in that melancholy orange glow.
Joel sighed again, took a long pull off the bottle of merlot on the edge of the tub. He planned to drain the whole damn thing if he didn’t pass out first.
“To you, Michael,” he slurred.
Again, he tipped the bottle back, letting the wine burn down his throat.
His senses began to dull, and an odd, droning hummm filled the room.
And the smell of something...burning.
Joel’s heart skipped a beat when Michael rose up from beneath the bubbles on the opposite end of the tub, rose up as if he had been hiding beneath the water the whole time.
Joel let out a soft gasp.
Strangely enough, he found he wasn’t too surprised.
It was impossible, yes. But he was drunk.
And their love was eternal.
He smiled, felt an odd sense of peace like nothing he had ever felt before, as his dead lover stared at him, and he stared back.
Michael’s body glistened in the candlelight. His beautiful brown eyes reflected the flames, as if a fire burned deep inside his skull.
“Hello, Michael,” Joel said.
“Hello, Joel.”
Something about the whole thing felt...not quite right...like some odd, half-remembered fever dream that was not entirely good or bad...yet Joel couldn’t figure out what it was through the fog of bliss which numbed his brain.
This was too good to be true, he knew. Impossible.
“Come here, lover,” Michael said.
The water sloshed around in the tub, bubbles engulfing their naked bodies, as Joel fell into his lover’s arms.
“Together again,” Michael said.
Joel shuddered with delight. His heart raced. He could barely breathe.
“My Michael,” he gasped. “My sweet Michael, I can’t believe you’re really here...”
“Believe,” said Michael, and throughout the room the candlelight danced as he spoke.
The water was hot. But the room grew colder each time Michael opened his mouth.
Joel shivered.
And tried not to notice.
Their embrace was not sexual. They held one another, there in the tub, for what felt like many hours. And perhaps hours did pass. Time lost all meaning to Joel, as he lay there in the tub, flesh tingling, his lost loved one at last returned to him. Reality no longer felt like anything more than a nightmarish, nonsensical word...
This couldn’t be happening. But it was.
Michael was back, and Joel couldn’t have been happier.
The tears that streamed down Joel’s face no
w were tears of overwhelming joy. No more sadness. No more loneliness. His prayers had been answered...
Michael was alive. Not dead, but gloriously, impossibly, miraculously alive!
“Oh, Michael,” Joel cried without restraint now, holding his boyfriend tighter than ever lest he leave him again.
Joel blinked several times fast as it dawned upon him...the only thing about dear Michael that didn’t quite match up was that beard.
Even as he ran his trembling fingers through his lover’s stiff wet hair...as he began to laugh and cry at the same time, delirious with gratitude toward Michael for returning home as well as the merciful Lord who allowed it...Joel found himself trying to remember...through the haze of wine and bliss that numbed every part of him now...when was the last time Michael had worn a beard?
Had he ever worn a beard?
A few minutes later, Joel realized there was something strange about his lover’s voice too; at the same moment Michael reached beneath the suds to grasp him in one hand.
“Come with me,” Michael said, squeezing gently, one thumb rubbing back and forth against the tip of Joel’s penis.
“Where...where do you want to go?” Joel asked, with a nervous swallow.
“Nowhere, everywhere,” Michael replied.
“I don’t...understand,” Joel said, groggily.
“To the Land of Tears.”
“Michael...”
“Anywhere I want. Just say you will come with me, lover.”
“Yes,” Joel moaned. “I’ll come with you. God, yes!”
“Gooooood...”
And now Joel realized what was wrong with Michael’s voice.
It didn’t sound like a voice at all.
It was a sound closer to crackling leaves. Burning brush. A sound not unlike ravenous flames, consuming everything in their path...
“Michael?”
“Shhhhhh,” his lover replied.
And then he took Joel beneath the water.
Together they sank, into the abyss of the bottomless tub.
Joel did not fight it.
Even as his soul was consumed by an overwhelming sense of severe sadness, of heartrending regret, Joel allowed his lover to take him.
He went willingly, into the steaming depths, with the thing that looked like Michael.
Down into the water. Into that all-embracing beard.
It filled his mouth. His nostrils. His every orifice...
But Joel did not care.
He did not scream.
Anything to be with Michael again.
Forever.
CHAPTER 66
“Nonononononono,” Kate cried. “This can’t be happening! It’s got to be a mistake, David...it can’t be, oh, God, it can’t be...”
She fell into David’s arms and he nearly collapsed beneath her weight. He dropped his paintbrush, leaving a mark resembling a long red exclamation point on the hardwood floor of his studio, and held her tighter than he had ever held her before.
The clock on the wall above his desk displayed 10:47 P.M.
Neither Kate nor David had spoken to one another very much in the days following Kate’s bizarre blackout; for the most part David had just stayed away from his wife. He threw himself into his work, painting two new dustjackets for which he had been contracted but didn’t owe to his client for another six months...if only so he wouldn’t have to venture out of his studio and face her.
David felt as if he no longer knew his wife. As if Kate had disappeared, and in her place lived an enigma who might turn on him at any moment. Every time he looked at her, he saw not Kate but a stranger. In her eyes lived a soul no longer devoted to the teachings of Jesus Christ, but now an ancient, bloodthirsty entity whom David was not entirely sure that he even believed in.
Hell, maybe he was going crazy, too. How ridiculous it all sounded. This was Kate he was thinking such thoughts about. Kate, for God’s sake! Once again, David found himself thinking that perhaps Heatherly’s insanity was contagious, and now he was infected too.
“What, honey? What is it? What’s wrong?” David said as his wife bawled into the crook of his neck.
She trembled in his grasp, her shoulders hitching violently. “Joel’s dead.”
David’s jaw dropped. “What? Oh, no...what happened?”
“He drowned,” Kate explained as best she could through her tears. “In his...in the tub. Supposedly he’d been drinking, and he...he drowned.”
“Oh, my God!”
“I wasn’t there for him, David. I wasn’t there for him, when I should have been, and now...now he’s gone.”
“Neither was I,” David said. “I should have been. God, Kate, I’m sorry.”
She stared up at him, her makeup streaked down her cheeks.
“Shh,” he said, easing her head back onto his shoulder.
“You never did like him, did you?” Kate asked.
David didn’t know what to say to that. At first, he thought he might have misunderstood her. “What? Of course I did. I’ll miss him, Kate. You know that.”
“No, you won’t,” Kate cried. His arms dropped from around her as she took a step back and glared at him. “You never liked him. Because he was gay. You’re probably happy that he’s dead. You wish it had happened sooner.”
David stared back at her, incredulous. “I can’t believe you would say such a thing.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“It most certainly is not.”
“You thought he was just a silly faggot. You didn’t even want to touch him when he tried to shake your hand.”
“Kate, that’s not fair...”
“It’s true though, isn’t it?”
“Kate, come on, you’re just upset. Please, don’t do this.”
“He was just a cock-sucking homo to you, wasn’t he? A jizz-hungry queer.”
“Kate?” David’s eyes felt wide as golf balls. His mouth hung open. “What the fuck?”
“You’re heartless, David,” she wailed. “You make me sick.”
She ran from the room.
David ran after her. “Kate, wait! What’s wrong with you?”
She ran through the house to their bedroom and slammed the door in his face.
“Kate, open the door.”
He heard nothing behind that door but Christopher, crying.
Great. They woke up the baby.
“Kate, please...you know I cared for Joel. Why are you acting like this? What’s gotten into you?”
He knocked on the door. Waited.
“Kate?”
Nothing.
“I can’t believe how you’ve turned this around,” he said to the doorjamb. “What the hell did I do?”
She still did not answer.
“Kate! Open the goddamn door!”
“Bigot!” she screamed at him through the door. “Homophobe!”
Christopher was shrieking now. David wanted to get through, hold the baby—he sure as hell trusted Kate less and less to do the job these days—but he knew this door was too thick. He couldn’t break through it if he tried.
“Open the door, Kate! Now!
“Go away!”
David stood there for another couple of minutes, his fists two tight white balls and his eyes wide and bloodshot from stress and lack of sleep.
“What is your fucking problem?” he shouted at his wife through the door, and he struck it once with the heel of his hand before turning to walk back down the hall.
“Daddy?” Becca called out as he passed her bedroom. “Daddy, what’s wrong? Why are you and Mommy fighting?”
She started crying in the darkness, and David entered her bedroom.
“Shit,” he said, beneath his breath.
Fucking wonderful.
CHAPTER 67
Tomorrow was the day of Joel’s funeral. David dreaded that event worse than he had ever dreaded anything in his life.
In an attempt to get his mind off of the whole thing, he had been working all day in his
studio. Nothing seemed to turn out right, however, and at one point he threw his brush across the room, called himself a “talentless fuck.”
He decided to wash up, relax in front of the television for a while, and maybe afterward he would have that talk with Kate he had been putting off for the past few days. They really needed to discuss some things, and procrastinating on the matter surely would not make the situation any better. Perhaps it was a tad coldhearted of him to do it today, David knew, but with her brother’s funeral coming up, he thought Kate’s vulnerable state might enable him to get some real answers.
He headed into the living room after washing up and changing into his pajamas, started to sit down in his favorite armchair.
But then he stopped.
He frowned, annoyed, as he noticed the Bible sitting on Kate’s chair on the other side of the sofa. It was a fat white volume, expensive, a copy with their names monogrammed on the cover in gold. Kate’s father had given it to them on their wedding day. Normally they kept the book on the bottom shelf of the knick-knack cabinet across the room, but Kate must have been reading it earlier and hadn’t put it back where it was supposed to go.
“And she nags me about not putting shit back where it belongs,” he mumbled. He picked up the Bible, preparing to return it to its rightful place.
As he walked across the room with it, though, a tiny slip of paper fell from the thick white book, drifting down to the floor like a pale, miniature leaf.
David bent, pinched the tiny piece of paper between his thumb and forefinger, and brought it up out of the thick carpet. Its backside was sticky, shiny with a smear of some glue-like substance.
His jaw dropped.
Six letters were printed on that small piece of paper:
MOLOCH
David’s knees grew weak. He stared at the all-too-familiar word for what felt like hours.
Finally, he staggered across the room and plopped down on the sofa. The cushions made a soft wheezing noise beneath him. He opened the Bible before him on the coffee table, his hands trembling like those of his late grandfather, who had suffered from Parkinson’s disease in the latter years of his life. He started flipping through it, stopping every few pages to stare at the text before him.
