Gideon

by Alex Gordon

  She took out her father’s book and paged through it more carefully. In addition to Emma, he had drawn a few others, their names traced beneath in the same block printing. Jimbo, next to the sketch of a lanky, shaggy-headed boy. Connie, a solemn, pigtailed girl, no more than eight or nine years old. A stocky young man named Lolly, crew-cut and sullen, with a face like a fist. An older girl with a long face and a self-conscious smile. Gin.

  Another page. Amid pencil sketches of trees, rocks, and the edge of a river, she picked out a head-and-shoulders rendering that she had somehow missed before. A man, his features misshapen, knots of scar tissue or growths bulging his cheeks, forehead, and neck. Pizza Face. The name printed beneath. A face to hide in the shadows. Lauren studied the deformed visage, then hunted for more depictions.

  Pizza Face finally turned up on the next-to-last page. A full-length drawing this time, tucked into the gutter margin. He wore clothes from another time, a greatcoat and top hat, and flourished a cane or tightly rolled umbrella. He gave the impression of youth with his straight posture and slim build, but his twisted face altered it into something from a horror film. A Victorian ghoul out for a midnight stroll.

  PF, Mullin had penciled at the man’s feet. Connie called him Mister Lumpy.

  Lauren studied the drawing. Who the hell are you? The town creep? A legend that everyone knew about but no one ever saw? Parking-Lot Man? No, he had been dressed in regular clothes. Pants, shirt or sweater, a light jacket.

  She opened her phone’s browser and ran a search on “Pizza Face,” waded through references to Italian restaurants and acne medications. The closest hit she found was a site devoted to “drive-in” movies. Pizza Face—the title of a cut-rate early seventies slasher film about a deformed killer who lived in the woods outside a small town. A single still frame centered the page, a low-res image of a mangled visage, eyes bulging, skin like raw meat.

  You always hated horror movies, Dad. Lauren set down her phone. You said anything that wasn’t real was a waste of time. His voice rang in her head, that man who had called himself John Reardon. His stern warnings to keep her feet on the ground, stay in the real world.

  The only monsters are human, daughter. We make our own hell.

  Lauren closed the book and stashed it in her handbag, saved the directions to Gideon on her phone. Then she keyed in the speed-dial sequence for Katie’s number and followed with the code that sent her directly to voice mail. “Katie, I have to leave Seattle for a while. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Something came up with Dad’s estate, and I need—I need to find out what’s going on.” She spoke a little longer, promises to call as soon as she could, to explain everything when she returned.

  By the time she left the sandwich shop, the clouds had thinned enough to allow a few stars to peek through. Once she hit the road, she would see Mount Rainier in her rearview. The breadth of the Cascade Range. She would bid them farewell, not good-bye, and tell herself that she would see them again soon.

  PART FOUR

  * * *

  INTO GIDEON

  And the Lady entered the village and found those who lived there sore afraid, for their homes had been overtaken by demons and they did not know how to fight them. ‘Do battle as you have been taught,’ said the Lady. But their Master had not instructed them in the ways of Endor, for years before he had fallen under a spell. Now he lay asleep in his chamber, like unto dead, and spiders and beetles made homes in his flesh.

  —ENDOR 4, 3–6

  The clock radio lit like a beacon, filling the bedroom with a chilly blue glow. Then came the manic voice of the morning-drive disk jockey. “—and it’s going to be another rainy day in north-central Illinois. But if it’s snow you want, just wait five minutes—”

  Jim Petersbury mashed the snooze button, then yanked the cord out of the wall. Silence settled and the display went dark, the afterimage of the hour floating before his eyes like spots from a camera flash: 4:30 A.M.

  Petersbury lay on his side, blinking until the numbers faded. It was his third night sleeping on the floor, and his back ached as though he had been punched in the kidneys. The thin carpet didn’t cushion worth a damn, and the old blankets he had found in the basement hadn’t helped. He straightened his legs, then drew his knees up to his chest, felt the pull of tight muscles all along his spine. “I thought sleeping on the floor was supposed to be good for you, baby.” He listened to the quiet, pretended that Norma would answer if he waited long enough. Reached behind him, and felt the curve of her hip. Remembered how she would stir and put her arm around him and stroke his chest and whisper good morning in his ear.

  His throat tightened, and he drew back his hand. If he let his mind drift, he could hear Norma telling him that they had done all they could, that they had cast all the spells, strengthened all the wards, taken every step possible to protect themselves. It just hadn’t been enough. Their fates rested with the Lady now.

  And then he would hear Matt’s voice. Like the toll of a distant bell, it was, so soft, yet so powerful. Don’t be a fool, Jim. Thirty-seven years past, yet if he closed his eyes, he could see Matt standing in the oak-ringed clearing in the woods just west of town, his work denims whitened with sawdust, duffel bag slung over his shoulder. It’s all going downhill. Go get Connie and come with me.

  “I should have listened to you, old buddy.” Petersbury wondered if his old buddy could hear him, if he could sense him from wherever he was now. “I called you a liar. I called you a lot of things. But it’s happening just like you said it would. Took a while to get going, but it’s like a runaway train now. Won’t be no stopping it.”

  He paused to lick his lips. “Connie said that it served us right that you left, seeing how we treated you. You remember Connie, don’t you, Matt? My baby sis. She had the biggest crush on you.” He struggled for the right words as memories of the last few months came to call. “We—we had a—fight, she and I. About what to do. How to stop it. I finally told her to stay away and not come around no more.” A tear tracked down his cheek, and he brushed it away. “I just couldn’t make her understand. Sometimes you have to do things you could never imagine a human being doing. Just to stop the bad from taking you over.”

  Petersbury quieted as a wave of glitter swept across the ceiling. No magic that he could sense, just sparkles in the paint catching the headlight beam of a passing car. He had set aside the bedroom for his granddaughters when they came to visit, and left it to his daughter-in-law Ashley to decorate. She had drawn fairy-tale princesses on the walls and painted the ceiling to look like summer sky, pale blue dotted with big white clouds that went shadowed and starry at night.

  Petersbury raised his head and squinted into the half-light until he picked out Ashley’s form, bundled under a blanket beside Jim Junior. He had laid them out in the corner of the room near their daughters’ beds, taking care to turn Ashley toward the wall so he didn’t have to see her face. He hadn’t wanted to hit her, but she had shaken off the sedative, and when she saw her little Bella and baby Alice lying so still, she screamed loud enough to rattle the windows, and if he hadn’t stopped her, the neighbors would have heard.

  Crazy old man! She had beat his chest with fists as small as a child’s, then tore at his face. Killer bastard bastard bastard! He had slapped her once, then again, hard enough to knock her down, and still she kept coming. Junior hadn’t told her, the damned idiot, even though he had promised he would. But as usual he had lollygagged, then left his old man to deal with the mess.

  So Petersbury had hit Ashley one last time, good and hard, then put his hands around her neck and did what needed doing. Laid her down next to Junior, and as he did, found his boy looking up at him, eyes glassy from the dope.

  Lady’s will be done, Dad. Junior’s voice had come slurred and hoarse. Her will. He had smiled then, tobacco-stained teeth in a big kid’s face, while his wife grew still beside him. Always so trusting, Junior was, long past the age he should have grown up. See you on the other side. Th
en he had closed his eyes, taken one last shuddery breath—

  Petersbury jerked into a sitting position, gasped as his lower back cramped, choked down a curse because he couldn’t swear in front of Norma even though she was dead. Squinched his eyes shut as if that could block out things already seen. Muttered prayers and pleas to the Lady over and over as he hugged his knees and rocked like a damned baby. “All my fault—all my fault.” He stuffed his fist in his mouth, bit down until he tasted blood.

  Eventually, the tears stopped. The ache in his chest eased. He sat still until he heard the rattle of Po Barker’s old Taurus turning onto the street, the clattery stop and start as the woman tossed newspapers up driveways. He wondered what would happen if he ran out and flagged her down, dragged her into the house, and showed her what he had done. They’d grown up together, hadn’t they? She’d been born a Wickham, had been named an elder before her twenty-fifth birthday.

  Then Petersbury looked around the bedroom at the blanket-covered bodies, and knew in the pit of his soul that however much Portia Wickham Barker or Virginia Waycross or any of the others understood, none of them would condone this.

  “They don’t know, Matt. I tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t see what was in front of them.” He thought about his last visit to the Grill. How men he had known his whole life never looked at him, not once. Not even when he told them about how the space between had gotten too damned thin. Not even when he asked them if they ever stopped to think why no one ever saw crows in Gideon. They just stared down at the drinks he had bought them, their silence like dull knives.

  Petersbury felt for his watch, pressed the tiny button that lit up the dial: 4:45 A.M. He knew he had to move, had to do what needed doing before the sun rose and one of the neighbors, Phil or Jeannie or old Margaret Corey, stopped by to check why the truck hadn’t moved out of the driveway for four days, and ask if someone was sick.

  Yeah, someone’s sick, all right. Petersbury’s shoulders shook, his laughter silent and bitter. This time, he stopped before the tears came. It wasn’t that he feared death. Whatever dangers the wilderness held, whatever punishments the Lady meted out to him for what he had done, they were nothing compared to what he would face in this world if he stayed.

  My fault. If only he had minded his own business that day. My fault. He should have turned the job down, told Leaf Cateman to go to hell. But the furnace needed work and the truck needed tires and it was Christmas, dammit. He had just wanted to get Norma something nice, see the looks on his grandbabies’ faces as Junior and Ashley carried them into the living room and they saw the tree and the colored lights and the presents.

  Besides, Leaf Cateman was his Master. Master of all Gideon. Not an easy thing for a child of the Lady to turn his Master down.

  Petersbury rolled over and kissed Norma’s cold forehead, then struggled to his feet. The night air had seeped in through the open bedroom window, filling the room with a damp chill that stank of wood smoke. “I’m sorry about the smell, baby. I know how you hate it seeping in everywhere. But the colder, the better.” He walked to the window, took a look outside before he closed it. The bedroom faced the backyard, a bare, treeless swath that sloped down to an overgrown ravine. In the half-light, the mist played tricks, swirling to form shapes like bodies that walked up the incline toward the house. Once they reached the summit, they fell victim to the morning breeze, which blew them asunder, the fragments tumbling through the air like leaves back down to the foot of the rise, where they came together once more.

  Petersbury watched the figures form, then vanish, again and again. “‘By the pricking of my thumbs.’” A line from one of Shakespeare’s plays, the only thing he remembered from four years of high school English because it was one of the few things that had made any damn sense. Something wicked this way comes.

  “Too late. It’s already here.” Petersbury closed the curtains, then walked out of the bedroom and down the short hallway to the bathroom. Showered and shaved, maneuvering his razor around the deep scratches that Ashley had gouged into his cheeks. Put on the Sabbath shirt and pants he had laid out the night before, his best laced shoes, and the narrow black tie that had belonged to his grandfather. Time to look his best. A man only died once, after all.

  He had originally planned to lay himself out with Norma and the others, but something told him that he needed to guard and protect right up to the end. So he walked past the dining room table, still laden with the spoiling remains of that last drugged dinner, and into the kitchen. From there he had a clear view straight through the house to the front door, and likewise, anything that came in through the front door had a clear view of him. It would see him first, and come for him, and leave his family alone.

  He had prepared his final resting place the previous evening. First had come the ring of framed photos: him and Norma on their wedding day, Junior and Ashley and the babies on the days the little smidgens came home from the hospital. He had set the frames atop bricks so that his blood wouldn’t touch them, and set a Christmas ornament before each one. Then he had retrieved a couple of drip pans from the garage, scrubbed them out, and set them on either side of the place where he would sit.

  Now he filled the pans with hot water from the sink. He couldn’t do the deed while sitting in a warm bath, the way the old Romans did, but he figured this was the next best thing. Keep the blood from clotting. Keep it warm and flowing.

  Finally, he made coffee, black, with sugar. Because he wanted to taste it one last time.

  It was still dark when Petersbury sat down on the floor, knife in hand. Before he had a chance to think, he placed the point of the knife against his right forearm down near the wrist and slashed. The pain brought tears to his eyes, but then the warmth welled up from under his skin and flowed out, and he relaxed. He cut the other forearm, let the knife slip from his grasp, then laid back his head. A couple of minutes, all the articles on the Internet said. A couple of minutes and he would be free of the nightmares. Free of the shadows that danced at the edges of his sight, flickering like dark flame. Free of the things that had dogged him these past weeks, things no human being should ever have to see.

  He watched his blood spread through the water, felt the hollowness in his chest. The kitchen darkened, spots swimming before his eyes. His heart fluttered.

  Then he felt . . . something through his growing daze. A sensation like wind over snow, sharp and cold. He shivered, and his gaze drifted to the drip pans, the water gone from clear to deep, deep red. Swirls formed in the liquid, like currents in a pool.

  Then his blood separated from the water, combined into streams that blended together and flowed back into the gashes he had made.

  Petersbury tried to pull his hands out of the water, but something held them fast, something with a grip as cold as the wind. Blood chilled by the water reentered his veins, sending them twitching beneath his skin like snakes. His life returned, but with it came pain—it racked his limbs as his muscles cramped and his gut clenched and his heart stuttered, slowed, then quickened again.

  Yet through the shock and the agony and the fear, he heard a sound. It came from outside, a click like bone on bone, moving up the sidewalk that led to the house and up the steps to the front door. Quiet followed, for a few moments. Then the knob rattled, the door shaking so that the chain clattered like beans in a can. Then, again, silence.

  Then it came through the closed door, a tall, slim column of darkness that flowed thick as oil. Petersbury watched it approach, picked out clothing amid the swirling blackness, pants and a knee-length coat, the cane or umbrella that swung with every stride. Again, he tried to pull his hands out of the trays, but something still held him fast. “It’s you, isn’t it? Did you come for them? You can’t have them. They’ve gone over. The Lady has them. You won’t get them now!”

  The man-shape stopped just short of the kitchen doorway, his shadow coat floating around him as though tossed by wind. They called to me. I heard the weeping
of women and the cries of small children, and I thought, Ah, it must be a man of Gideon, doing what he does best. Murdering the innocent.

  Petersbury choked back a cry. He couldn’t hear the thing speak, yet its words needled through his head and raked his soul the way Ashley’s nails had raked his skin. He tried to close his eyes and turn away, but whatever spell his visitor had cast over him tightened its grip, held him fast.

  Visitor. As if he didn’t know who it was. “Matt tried to tell us. He tried to warn us, and we ran him out of town.”

  You know my name.

  “Yes. Damn you.”

  Then say it.

  “Blaine.” Petersbury spoke before he could stop himself. “Nich-o-las. Blaine.” Buzzing filled his ears, and his scalp crawled as though bugs scuttled across the skin.

  Thank you. It has been a while since I heard you speak it aloud. The shade that was Nicholas Blaine cocked his head to one side. Now, which one of you was Matt? Ah, the fair Eliza’s descendant. Ignored just as she was. History repeats.

  “He’ll know you’re here, you bastard. He’ll smell your stink from wherever he is, and he will lock you down.”

  Blaine shifted so he appeared to fold his arms, his cane dangling from one wrist. I have felt the torment of my enemy like an old wound for so many years. An ache each time I tried to move. But something has changed of late. The prisoner looks up, and sees sunlight stream through the bars of his cell. He chuckled. Your savior is no more.

  “Liar!” Petersbury shook his head, neck bones crackling from strain as he fought invisible bonds. “Matt will stop you. Somehow. He will.”

  Would you have slaughtered your family if you believed that? Blaine straightened, then turned and started back the way he had come. Stupid man of Gideon, you killed them for nothing. They never crossed the wilderness. They came to me. They were lost, and they begged me to help them. To guide them. He drifted like a bobber in a slow-flowing stream, rising above the level of the floor, then dipping below. It was your loving daughter-in-law led them to me. She is not happy with you. I fear your family reunion will not be all you hoped.