I crest the hill and look out over the rest of town—more little houses and wide yards, a million treetops in between. In the distance, the lake sits like a puddle of silver, reflecting the sky like a mirror. I check the phone screen again, then decide that if I can’t get a call out from up here at the top of the world, I’m not making one at all.
The first number I call is my mother’s, more out of guilt than concern, more out of ingrained obligation than any real wish to share my new situation with her. Besides, I’d still rather deal with her misery and guilt than try to explain myself to that pretentious moron Rhodes.
“Ma?” I say as the line clicks open.
“Jimmy? Oh my god, Jimmy! What have you done? Where are you?” She’s practically screaming into the phone. I hold the receiver away from my head, trying to shout at her to calm down and listen. Once the furor dies off on her end, I bring the phone back to my ear and try to explain, suddenly eager and excited to share everything about the whirlwind that’s enveloped me. I’m all of a sudden five years old and bouncing off the walls to brag to Mommy.
“Ma. I found it. I found her.”
“Her who? What are you talking about, Jimmy? Where are you? Doctor Rhodes . . . the police. The police, Jimmy. The police have been here asking questions. What am I supposed to say?”
“Ma, would you just listen. I’m here. I found Bensonhall.”
Silence. Dead and absolute silence.
“Ma?”
“I told you to forget that nonsense.”
“Ma. Listen—”
“Did your father put you up to this? Has he contacted you somehow? He promised me to leave you alone. You can’t live that way, Jimmy. You can’t.”
“Live what way? With my family? As what I am? Say it, Ma. We’re fucking wolves. Strong Wolves. Dressed of fur and fierce of tooth. You told me that.”
“I never . . . I took you away from that place because they were all insane. They were going to . . . your father . . . he tried to kill you! Did you know that? Did you?”
“I don’t think he did. I remember now. He lost control, sure. But he didn’t hurt you, did he? He wouldn’t have hurt me either. You just took the excuse to run away, didn’t you, Ma? Dad’s dead. Did you know that? Did you? Is that one more thing you’ve been hiding from me?”
There’s a pause. A hitch in her voice. “Your father . . .”
“Is dead.”
Silence again. A long silence. I can hear something, sobs maybe. She’s covering the receiver with her hand so I don’t hear her crying for him. For the monster she’s pretended to hate for thirty years.
“Ma.”
She clears her throat. I can see her composing herself. One hand holding the phone to her chest, the other straightening her shirt, her face, her hair.
“James Finn, you listen to me . . .”
“No, Ma. My name is Finn Bar MacTyre. Right? Isn’t it? Don’t you fucking call me James. Never again. Lies, Ma, all of it!”
“Jimmy!”
“And tell Doctor Rhodes I don’t need his help, his medicine, or his shitty fucking chairs.”
“Jimmy!”
“Thirty years, Ma. Thirty fucking years I let you treat me like I was sick. Convince me that I was crazy, that there was something wrong with me.”
There’s a tiny crowd gathered a half-block away, staring and mumbling, judging me from a distance. I see teased-up hair on a fat little troll doll of a woman in the middle of it, whispering to her equally fat and judgmental friends. She’s clutching at her neck, something in her fist, eyes to the sky, begging her imaginary friend to save her from this spectacle in the street.
I turn around and throw a finger her way.
“Fuck you, lady!” I holler. “Get a TV.”
I can hear my mother sobbing on the other end of the phone. Part of my heart breaks off and lodges itself at the base of my spine, sending a tingle of pain through my body and buckling me at the knees, but it’s only for a second, then I’m filling with rage again. Ready to rip and tear and bite at the world.
“Jimmy, please.”
“No, Ma. That’s it,” I say softly, quietly, but with absolute surety.
“Jimmy.”
“I am home, Ma. You know where to find me if you ever need me but, please, don’t.”
“Jimmy, they’ll destroy you. Just like they destroyed your father. They ruined my life!” she caterwauls. I can see her, clear as day, on her knees, clutching at the phone cord, wailing to the heavens. Elizabeth Taylor groaning for salvation, for a hero to come and take her away. More melodrama. More guilt.
Not for me. I’m done living her lie.
“Goodbye, Ma.”
I don’t even wait for a reply. The phone clicks, and I’m free. The miserable troll is tut-tutting from her street corner, and it rolls right past me.
Serenity.
I wander down the other side of the hill and veer off on a side street until I find a quiet corner, under the shade of a tall tree. It’s high enough that I can look out across the groves of deciduous trees skirting the town. Orange and yellow and green so dark that it looks black. Halloween colours, just beginning to fill up the world.
I feel calm, and easy, and for the first time, peaceful.
The rollercoaster comes to a stop, and I can look back at the tracks and see every rise and drop and loop-de-fucking-loop that’s brought me home. I don’t even realize the phone is in my hand until I’ve hit the button and lifted it to my ear again. The line buzzes, waiting impatiently for its turn.
“Yeah?”
“Devil. It’s Finn. Jimmy.”
“Jimbo! You okay?”
“Yeah, man. I think so.”
“Good. Cool beans, right?”
I start walking, back in toward Main Street.
“There’s some weird shit going on up here, man.”
“Family is always weird. You find your dad?”
“He’s dead.”
Silence, but only for a second. Unlike with my mother, I feel the emotion behind the pause. I can hear Adam DeVille’s heart crack, one little drop of blood and sympathy for a friend.
“I’m sorry, Finn.”
I feel my lips curl, and that little dagger in my spine dissolves, reassembling itself where it belongs, pumping, beating, solidifying into something warm and alive. That single drop of sympathy from Devil patching a lifetime of misery and disappointment from my mother.
“Thanks, but it’s okay. I’m okay.”
“Of course you are, dude. Big Bad Wolf, right?”
I’m over the hill, past where the troll doll and her friends had convened. Now the street is empty.
“You figure that shit out yet, hero?” Devil asks.
“Kind of?”
“I’ve been thinking. Remember Terry Halloran, from gym class?”
“You’ve been thinking about Terry Halloran?”
“He was, what? Six-three and three hundred pounds in the tenth grade? There was that time in wrestling. He belly-flopped on top of you, folded you up like an accordion. I thought you’d be paralyzed.”
Where the fuck was this going? “Yeah, and?”
“And you tossed big Terry off of you and across the room. Everybody joked that it was adrenaline fury, like those people you hear urban legends about—lift buses off of their kids and stuff . . .”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Maybe this isn’t something new, something happening to you in the now. Maybe you’ve always been this, and you’re just waking up to it.”
“Yeah,” I say with a smile, finally one step ahead of Devil DeVille. “I’ve already figured that much out, Professor.”
There’s a moment of silence, and I imagine Devil swallowing a little lump of karma. Then he clears his throat. “What about the dream girl?”
It’s like we’re fourteen again, busting balls and gabbing about crushes. Talking about Amanda Sorenson’s rack, or how the MacDonald twins always smelled like Hubba Bubba g
rape.
I realize I’ve never had a friend other than Devil DeVille.
“She’s married. Some kind of fucking magician. He’s this Goth dude, can control people.”
“Goth, like a Visigoth German Viking of the middle ages, or a Neil Gaiman-looking, Robert Smith, make-up-and-moonbeams Cure fan?”
“What’s a Neil Gaiman?”
“You’re an idiot.”
I laugh out loud and climb up to sit on the back of a street bench.
“Cure fan. Skinny black jeans, long black coat. Thinks he’s David Blaine or something. He keeps doing these card tricks with fireballs and shit, but he made me see things that weren’t there. And I think he’s mind-controlling my cousins. He says his name is Simon Magus.”
Devil takes a long breath. “Jim. Be careful. Don’t fuck with the magic man.”
“He does card tricks.”
“Watch your back. Sure, sometimes it’s just silly card tricks—sleight-of-hand and rigged-up bullshit—but sometimes it’s terrible ancient power and the kind of evil you can’t imagine in your worst nightmares. Secret shit that should stay secret. I’ll check out the name.”
“He puts them in a trance or something. Maybe he’s putting something in the food? He says he’s Emma’s husband, but there’s something strange about it . . . and Jules, he put her in some kind of coma-state.”
“Jules?”
“My other cousin. You’d love her, she’s a dancer.”
“Dancer? Like, a stripper? A werewolf stripper?”
“And she has some kind of powers too. She was dancing, and these guys were just wandering in off of the street and dumping money in front of her, like they were hypnotized. I was hypnotized. She tried to attack me, like, sexually.”
“Like, sexually? Are you for real, Jimmy Finn? She must be one hell of a stripper.”
As if on cue, a familiar voice cuts the quiet of the street. I turn to see Jules pushing her brothers out of the diner, stepping back into the street, the Troll Doll waitress stabbing stubby fingers out toward Jules, her posse crowding in behind her.
“We don’t want your kind down here, harlot! Witch!”
“You can go ahead and fuck yourself, you and your Lord and Saviour!” Jules screams at her.
I’m off the bench and running toward them, forgetting Devil on the other end of the phone.
“Jim? Jim!”
“Hang on, Devil. I’ll call you back.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“My cousin.”
“Dream girl, or the stripper?”
“I’ll call you back, Devil.”
I hit the disconnect button and shove the phone in my pocket as I skid to a stop beside my cousins.
“You see?” Troll Doll shouts, “This new one is even on the phone with the Devil himself.”
I blink and shake my head.
“Seriously, lady? Do you think I was on the phone with Satan? Like Beelzebub has a cell plan?”
I turn to Jules and the boys.
“What’s going on?”
Kevin and Jamie, as usual, seem totally nonplussed and stare ahead at the women in the doorway of the restaurant, no more emotion than a couple of statues. Jules, on the other hand, looks ready to fight.
“You lousy cunt!” She screams, “You can’t give these kids a fucking hamburger?”
Troll Doll squints her beady eyes and makes the sign of the cross.
“You just take your filthy mouth and your demon-spawn back up the mountain and stay out of our town!”
“Your town?” Jules is practically foaming at the mouth. “My family built this fucking town!”
I jump in front of her before she takes a swipe at the woman. She clips my ear with one swing.
“Ladies, ladies!”
Troll Doll shoves a pudgy finger into my chest.
“Don’t think we don’t know who you are. You’re the grandson of the beast himself. Your father was the worst one of all of you. Don’t think we don’t know who you are, MacTyre.”
“Look, lady. They’re just kids. They just want a burger for Chrissakes.”
I realize the error of my statement before it’s even fully out of my mouth.
The full assemblage of five or six of Troll Doll’s army starts swinging—purses, umbrellas, keys—and I’m suddenly crushed under a hail of blows.
“Jesus Christ!” I holler, and they redouble their efforts.
I hear Jules growl, and the old ladies scream, the barrage stops, and I look up to the slamming of the door. Troll Doll calls out to us from the safety of the storefront window.
“You’ll get yours, you shameless whore! You and your whole family are damned! Cursed! Demons! Monsters!”
She backs away from the window, and Kevin and Jamie are at either side, helping me up out of the mud.
“What the fuck was that?”
“Bitches,” Jules grumbles, grabbing her brothers by the arms and dragging them behind her as she stomps off across the street.
I jog to catch up, still rubbing the back of my head, where some stray piece of metal seems to have taken a chunk.
“Hey! Wait up!”
Jules keeps walking. Kevin and Jamie keep stride beside her, despite their shorter legs.
“Where in the hell are you going?”
“To the fucking McDonald’s, I guess. I promised these two milkshakes. What do you care?”
I keep walking behind them, trying to think of the right thing to break the impasse, the thing to set things right. This is my family. Family I’ve never known, family that I don’t understand, but it’s my family.
“I remember the milkshakes here. It’s like they mix them with ice or something.”
She keeps walking. One of the boys, I don’t know which, turns an eye toward me as he’s dragged off.
“What happened to you last night?” I call after her.
Jules stops dead in her tracks; the boys move ahead and gravitate to each other, wary of the situation. I should probably take my cue from them. From the identical look on their identical faces, I should run.
“What happened to me? What the fuck do you think happened to me, asshole?”
I don’t recall telling my feet to move, but I’m backing away as her face contorts and her voice rises—a coming storm on the wind, ready to level the town around us.
“Look . . . I don’t understand any of this . . .”
“Poor fucking baby.”
“I just want to help.”
Her eyes blaze like green fire.
“Well, you sure helped last night. Thanks for that. Do you know what it’s like to have that stinking fucking ape climbing all over you? Fully conscious of what’s going on and totally unable to disagree, fight, ask him to at least brush his nasty fucking teeth, put on a condom maybe?”
She jabs one of her long, red-clawed fingers into my chest and pushes me back three feet into the dirt road.
“Maybe you should try it some time. You’ve got the same parts he likes to ravage on me. Usually he’s so drunk he wouldn’t know the difference. Ever been to prison, Finn? Ever had your black cherry popped?”
“I . . . I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know.” She turns to her little brothers, arm-in-arm and wide-eyed on the sidewalk. “He didn’t know.” She leans in close and growls into my ear. “Fuck. You.”
“Jules—”
“You were supposed to be our almighty saviour. A whole family of fuck-ups and never-weres. Your dad was a fucking waste, and now you are too. He couldn’t save Emma’s parents, or mine, or anybody else. How are you gonna help, huh? Big bad wolf, fucking Alpha dog. You look like a lousy beat-up piece of cat shit to me, cousin.”
Her rage stinks, toxic and hot, and it leaks into the back of my mouth, a bitter taste of vinegar and bile and old coffee.
“Jules, I’m sorry,” I offer. Even I can tell how pathetic it sounds. “Those women back there . . .”
“What? The Jesus-bitches? I can handle them
. I can handle all of it. I don’t need any help from you, little man. Simon’s gonna get what he wants out of you, and out of that stuck-up bitch, and then he’s going to see that I’m the one with power. I am the Alpha around here. Not you, and not fucking Emma.”
She shoves me, hard, and I tumble back into the mud, which makes Kevin and Jamie snicker in concert. She grabs them roughly by the arms and stomps off, and this time, I just watch her leave.
26
I SPEND THE next two hours wandering the streets of Pitamont, mulling over all of this bad craziness in my head. For the first time, in as long as I can remember, my head is clear and my thoughts make sense. I’m not sideswiped by thoughts of blood and haunted by nightmares about gnashing teeth tearing me apart. I haven’t even thought about a drink today. Things are coming to me faster, clearer, stronger than they ever have before. Maybe it’s because I’m off of the pills? Or off the booze? Maybe it’s the fresh mountain air? Maybe it’s because I’m finally where I’m supposed to be. Whatever it is, I know I’m thinking straight, but I’m still mired in confusion, this time from all around me instead of inside my own goddamn head.
As the sun starts to disappear out past the lake, and the trees start casting long shadows across my feet, I head down Main Street and across town to the garage. Maybe Bob can shed some light on this horror-show soap opera I’ve wandered into.
I come to the front of the Vargas Brothers Garage to find all three Vargas brothers sitting in a line, looking nearly identical, all in their blue coveralls, all staring straight ahead, all with a beer in their left hand and an oily rag in the right. They turn, nod, and lift their beverages in my direction. I salute back with a wave, and all three bob their heads in unison.
“Bob’s out back,” Jerry says.
“Thanks,” I mumble as I dodge around the side of the building, past the old tow-truck and into the garage bay.
“Bob?”
It’s dark as hell in here, creepy-calm like in a bad horror movie.
I step further into the dark garage, straining to see two feet in front of me, hoping not to walk into anything sharp. Hoping not to slip in a puddle, trip on a . . .
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