He knew where he was going. By now the way was familiar to him, even in the night. As the whiskey sang softly to him, calling him to sleep, something deeper urged him on. He kept moving forward, the desire in his heart growing stronger with each step he took, first down the sidewalk and then down the dirt road that led to Drowned Girl Pond and then to the white farmhouse with its peeling paint.
This time he went directly to the door and knocked. When a minute later the door was opened and Titus looked out, Ben resisted the urge to fall into his arms.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Titus said. “Go.”
Ben, puzzled, shook his head. “But I came to you,” he said. “I want you.” The words came of their own accord, surprising him with their directness.
Titus shook his head. “You don’t know what it is you ask,” he said. “Please, go before you lose more than you already have.”
He moved to shut the door, but Ben reached out and grabbed his hand. At his touch, Titus closed his eyes, as if the contact caused him pain.
“Let me in,” said Ben. “I want to be here. I want to be with you.”
Titus opened his eyes and looked into Ben’s face. “I’ve already taken too much from you,” he whispered.
Ben stepped forward, putting his other hand on Titus’s chest. “I want you,” he said, leaning in and trying to kiss Titus.
Titus turned his head, Ben’s kiss landing on his cheek. Ben put his hands on either side of Titus’s face and turned him back to face him. Then he pressed his mouth against Titus’s. For a moment Titus resisted. Then his lips parted and he drew Ben’s tongue into his mouth.
Ben ran one hand down Titus’s body, slipping it between his legs. Titus was hard, his prick pushing against the fabric of his pants. Ben squeezed it tightly. Titus pulled him inside the house, shutting the door behind them.
Ben took little notice of the house as Titus led him up a stairway to the second floor. Down a hallway, a door led into a bedroom. Titus drew him into the room and to the bed that was pushed against one wall. A single candle sitting on a bureau filled the room with pale light.
The mattress groaned as Ben sat on the edge of the bed. Titus, standing a few feet away, looked down at Ben. Moving slowly, he unbuttoned his shirt and let it fall from his shoulders onto the floor. His pants followed, Titus stepping out of them and pushing them aside with his foot. He stood before Ben naked, his cock jutting out from between his legs.
“Is this what you want?” he asked, his voice soft.
Ben nodded. Seeing Titus there before him, the desire that had taunted him all day quickened. He reached out to touch him. But Titus grabbed his wrists, holding them tightly in his fingers. Pressing forward, he pushed Ben back onto the bed, then climbed on top of him, straddling his waist so that he was leaning over Ben, his cock stretched out along Ben’s stomach.
“Do you know what it is you want?” Titus asked him.
“You,” Ben said. He could feel the heaviness of Titus’s cock on him, the weight of his balls where they rested against his own imprisoned dick.
“You don’t know what it is you ask,” said Titus. “No idea of the price you might yet pay.”
“I don’t care,” Ben said.
Titus shut his eyes. When he opened them, the gentleness that had been there, the worry, was gone. In its place was the dark light of passion. He bent down and kissed Ben, hard, his teeth biting at Ben’s lip. Ben, groaning, pushed up against him.
Titus reached for Ben’s shirt. Pulling roughly, he ripped it open, the buttons flying onto the floor. Ben’s chest lay exposed to him. Titus moved forward, sliding his cock and balls over Ben’s skin until the head of his dick rested on Ben’s lips. Ben licked at it greedily, hoping Titus would give him more. But Titus taunted him, keeping his cock just out of reach.
“Please,” Ben said breathlessly. “Give it to me.”
In answer, Titus moved back down his body until he was standing beside the bed. Then he undid Ben’s pants and pulled them off, leaving him naked. Ben’s cock rested in the soft hair of his stomach.
Titus crawled back onto the bed, putting his hands beneath Ben’s legs and lifting them up as he pushed forward. His head lowered towards Ben’s cock, and Ben waited to feel the warmth of a mouth surround him. But Titus dipped passed Ben’s dick and pressed into the space between the parted cheeks of his ass. A moment later, his tongue fluttered against Ben’s asshole.
Ben moaned, closing his eyes as Titus’s tongue entered him. He felt Titus’s nose pressing against his balls as the other man’s mouth worked over his opening, his tongue making warm, wet circles on Ben’s skin. Titus pushed inside and retreated, gently easing Ben open.
Several times Ben thought he might come. Titus brought him close, then pulled away at the last moment, letting Ben’s desire ebb a little before beginning again. Ben’s balls, already aching, longed for release, but Titus teased them relentlessly.
Lifting his head from between Ben’s legs, Titus knelt and looked down on him. Wordlessly, he positioned the head of his cock where his tongue had been moments before. Then he was inside, the thickness of him spreading Ben’s hole even wider. Ben gasped at the invasion, his hands gripping the sheets as he tried to breathe.
Titus didn’t wait for him. Pressing forward, he buried his cock in Ben’s ass. Heat ripped through Ben’s belly as Titus pulled back and slammed in again. All Ben could do was give in. He waited for the next thrust, trying to open to it. Again the pain came, a kind of delicious thrill that rippled through him.
His thoughts swirled in his head like a cyclone, images passing by and disappearing again as he lost himself in the rapture of the moment. Trey’s face. Titus disappearing into the water. A dark cloud of tiny, buzzing things circling overhead. They all swirled around him, moving more and more quickly as Titus continued to piston in and out of him.
Then, just as Ben was picked up by the rush and carried to its highest point, Titus pulled out. Ben felt himself falling, the whirlwind that had lifted him gone and his body once more heavy with the weight of disappointment as he tumbled down through darkness.
He opened his eyes to save himself. Titus was on the floor, kneeling. His face was cupped in his hands. After a moment, he looked up.
“I won’t do it,” he said, speaking to himself and not to Ben.
Ben scrambled off the bed and knelt beside Titus. When he tried to touch him, Titus pushed him away roughly, so that Ben sprawled on the floor.
“I don’t understand,” Ben said.
Titus shook his head. “No,” he said. “You don’t.”
“What did I do?” asked Ben.
“You did nothing,” said Titus sadly. “Nothing at all.”
“Then why—” Ben started to say.
“The funeral is tomorrow,” Titus said, interrupting him. “For the Mickerley boy. Go to it. You’ll find some answers there.”
Ben stared at him, not comprehending. “What does the Mickerley boy have to do with this?”
“Go tomorrow,” Titus said again.
Titus made no move to stand up. Ben hesitated for a moment, wanting him to say something else. Then he gathered up his clothes and pulled them on. His shirt, the buttons gone, hung open, but he didn’t care. Giving Titus a final look, he left the bedroom and stumbled down the stairs to the front door.
Chapter Nine
The interior of the Holy Oak Gospel Church was packed. Ben took one of the few empty seats in a pew toward the back, sliding into it quietly and exchanging a nod with the sad-faced woman nearest to him. Dressed in black, she had the look of someone who had been crying for some time and no longer cared whether anyone knew it or not. He understood the feeling all too well, but he wasn’t there to mourn.
He didn’t really know why he was there. He’d left Titus’s house the night before and gone home, trying to make sense of what had occurred between them. He didn’t understand what had caused Titus to stop his lovemaking, or why he had insisted that Ben attend the funeral of
Paul Mickerley. It was an absurd request, and one that Ben had intended to ignore completely right up to the moment he’d found himself pulling into the church parking lot.
He didn’t like funerals. In truth, he’d only been to two—his paternal grandmother’s when he was eight and then Trey’s. That was enough. He’d been relieved when his father had decided against a funeral for Ben’s mother. He didn’t like being among the dead, even if it was to mark their passing. Excuses for public grief, he called them, opportunities for the assembled to let everyone know just how sad they were. He preferred to do his mourning in private, where only he had to deal with the embarrassment of the tears.
He had arrived late, and the service was well underway. At the front of the church a casket was placed on a table. It was open, and Ben avoided looking at the face of the dead boy inside. He knew what death looked like. It was an absence of spirit, a hollowness that no amount of makeup or embalming fluid could fill. Even the most beautiful corpses were still just shells, the material that had animated them having been extinguished at the moment of death.
Adding to his discomfort, the church stank of roses. They had been placed in enormous quantity around the sanctuary, bundles of red and pink and white that he knew were meant to suggest rebirth but which to him signified a vain attempt at erasing the smell of decay. Ring around the rosy, he thought grimly. A pocket full of posies. Ashes. Ashes. We all fall down. The childhood rhyme came to him, its words so sweet on the surface but so chilling underneath with their references to the horrors of bubonic plague, when the residents of afflicted cities carried flower petals in their pockets to ward off the stench of decaying corpses in the city streets. We all fall down, he thought again. We all fall down.
“Paul was my best friend.”
Ben’s attention turned to the speaker standing at the front of the room. It was a teenage boy. He was wearing jeans and a Creaverton Bandits varsity jacket, as were a great many of the young men scattered throughout the church. Paul’s football team, Ben thought. Of course they would be here.
“We always talked about what we’d do when we finally got out of here,” the boy continued. “You know, when we became famous football players and all.”
A trickle of laughter greeted his remark, and the boy smiled self-consciously, as if he’d only been half joking and didn’t like his secret dream being mocked. He glanced at the coffin.
“This shouldn’t have happened,” he said, his voice quavering. He began to sob, and a moment later he was joined by two of his team-mates, who put their arms around him much as they might in a huddle on the field. They stood that way for a minute, until the moment was broken by the appearance of the minister, who had been sitting quietly in the front pew.
“I think these young men express what we’re all feeling,” he said, facing the congregation. “This should never have happened. But in his wisdom, God allowed it to happen. Why? We might never know. Maybe it’s not for us to know. We are, after all, only the creations of his will.”
Fuck you, Ben thought angrily. He wanted to stand up, to tell the minister that God was a big fucking joke, and that shitty things happened to people because the world was a shitty place. He wanted to tell everyone assembled that they should be crying, that they should be totally pissed off because what happened to Paul Mickerley was going to happen to them eventually and there was nothing they could do about it.
Instead, he sat quietly and nodded politely while the pastor continued to talk. Ben distracted himself by looking at the church’s stained-glass windows. A series of them lined each side of the sanctuary, their colored pieces lit up by the sun that, defying tradition, had chosen to show up in place of the rain that was, if you chose to believe every Hollywood depiction of a burial, supposed to accompany every such occasion. Ben examined the images rendered in bits of color. The windows depicted the life of Christ, each one a different scene. They began with a window showing his birth, a single brilliant star set into a field of blue above a traditional nativity tableau, and ended with a vision of the crucifixion complete with mourners at the foot of the cross.
The window Ben found the most compelling, however, showed Jesus with several of his disciples. His hand touched the brow of one of them, and above the anointed one’s head a flame danced. The bestowing of the spirit, thought Ben, digging into the recesses of memory for the explanation. He remembered it from a Sunday school lesson he’d sat through years ago, when he was not much more than five or six. His teacher, Mrs. Barnard, had described it for them using a series of cutout figures that she’d affixed to a black flannel-covered board.
As she’d explained it, Jesus had touched his followers and given to them the gift of eternal life. Ben, however, had thought that the figures merely looked as if their hair was on fire. When he said as much, he’d been rewarded with a look that suggested that not only would he not receive any cookies during the post-class snack time, but also that if Jesus himself were present Ben would almost certainly be in for a spanking.
Despite the experience, he found the image of the Holy Spirit appearing as a flame above the heads of the redeemed a fascinating one. Equally fascinating was the belief that someone could be given eternal life. That one had always amazed him. Once it had even comforted him, offering as it did the hope that there was something awaiting him after death. But he no longer believed that, no longer wanted to believe it. Reincarnation he could handle, but everlasting life, even in a place as glorious as the heaven Mrs. Barnard had described for her class, interested him not at all.
Something in the air around him shifted, and suddenly he was aware of people standing up. The service had apparently come to an end, and the mourners were preparing to leave. Ben stood with them, not sure what to do next. He allowed himself to be swept into the tide of people leaving the church, and a minute later found himself standing on the steps. He stepped to one side, allowing people to file past him.
“Are you going to the cemetery?” a man standing nearby asked him.
Ben shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said.
The man nodded. “How did you know Paul?”
Ben thought for a moment. He hadn’t counted on being asked such a question, and he wasn’t certain how to respond. The truth, of course, was that he hadn’t known Paul Mickerley at all. But to admit as much to someone at his funeral seemed inappropriate.
“I’m a librarian,” he said finally. It was hardly an answer, but at least it was the truth. “And you?”
“I work for the police department,” the man replied. “I was one of the guys who went to get him.”
“I’m sorry,” Ben said automatically. “That must have been difficult.”
“No kid should die like that,” the man answered, as if Ben had been referring to Paul’s death, and not to the experience of having to put his body in a bag and seal it shut.
“Do they know what happened yet?” Ben asked him.
The man shook his head. “No fucking clue,” he said. “Not one damn clue. How he got into that graveyard is a total mystery.”
“The graveyard,” Ben said. “That’s not where they’re burying him, is it?”
“Christ, no,” the man said. “Not that one. No one has been buried in that place in over a hundred years.”
“Where exactly is it?” asked Ben.
“Up in the hills,” answered the man, nodding in the general direction of the area west of the church. “On old Cold Creek Road.”
Ben nodded, as if he knew exactly where the man was describing. Then he excused himself, leaving the police officer to join the rest of the people filing into cars and heading for the burial.
Getting into his own car, he left the church parking lot and turned in the opposite direction of the funeral procession. For some reason, he wanted to see the place where Paul Mickerley had died. He’d learned nothing at the funeral, at least nothing he could imagine was responsible for Titus’s behavior the night before. Perhaps, he thought, the answers he was looking for
lay elsewhere, and the place where Paul Mickerley died seemed as likely a spot as any to begin looking.
Finding Cold Creek Road was easy. Getting to the end of it was not. A twisting, turning path that wound through the hills, it clearly had not been regularly traveled in many years. Its dirt track was badly rutted in places, and several times Ben almost turned around. But something urged him on, and finally he found himself arriving at what he recognized, even in its disrepair, as a cemetery.
In front of it was a foundation of stone. A few broken timbers remained standing from the rocks, but the whole of it was overgrown with creepers and trees that had sprung up from the rotting wood. Ben walked past the remains of what he assumed had been a church and entered the graveyard. Many of the stones were broken, jagged teeth rising from the green mouth of the earth. Many more were so worn by wind and rain and time that the names on them had been obscured.
Still, some remained readable. Ben stooped and looked at one. MARY PATIENCE OSBOURNE, it read. 1846-1869. INTO GOD’S HANDS WE DELIVER YOU. A crude carving of an angel adorned the stone, its expression one of passive watchfulness. Ben stood and continued his walk through the garden of the dead.
Finding the place where Paul Mickerley had been discovered was also not difficult. Yellow ribbons of police tape remained affixed to the trees on either side, their torn ends fluttering in the faint breeze. The grass around the site had been trampled flat by many feet, and the ghostly sheen of powder dusted one of the tombstones, indicating, Ben assumed, the stone against which Mickerley’s body had been placed.
He knelt in the grass and looked at the stone. The top had been broken, a piece removed like a bite taken from a cookie. What remained was covered with a thin layer of moss that filled much of the carving, making the inscription difficult to read. Ben could just make out the rough shape of a skull at the top of the stone, its eyes round and its teeth mossy. Part of it was gone, removed along with the bit of missing stone, so that the skull had only one eye.
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