by J. T. Warren
Brendan had forgotten how creepy this guy seemed or how his large hand had felt like it was crushing his shoulder. The story of Abraham and Isaac grabbed him and he imagined how scared the kid must have been when his father tied him up and prepared to kill him. He imagined what Job must have felt when everything he valued died and his body became a breeding ground for all sorts of horrible diseases. Brendan hated having a cold, never mind boils spewing puss all over his body. Yet, in those stories, Brendan also found a common link, like a jigsaw puzzle piece that fit in two puzzles.
“God can do whatever He wants,” Brendan said.
The man’s gray eyes softened. “You are a perceptive boy. And very special, no doubt.” The eyes hardened again, like a coating hiding something on the inside. “God can do whatever He wants, and His will is often unfair.”
Capricious, Brendan thought.
“He may demand a sacrifice and then rescind it or He may take and take whatever He wants before ever giving something back. He may never give anything back. He can be cruel, unjust. He took your sister. That was cruel, perhaps unfair. But perhaps she was a sacrifice God demanded. Do you think it’s possible that God has a plan so complex that we can never possibly understand it?”
The bowling ball slipping from his hands, the shattering windshield, the car smashing the tree, the bumper stickers on the back: EDITORS DO IT FOR MONEY.
“God takes,” the man continued, “but He does give. You just have to ready your heart to receive. There is much more to tell you about His power and the great works of Jesus Christ the Empowered, of course. But there is no point unless you think there is a possibility that your sister did not die in vain, that there was a reason for her death, for her sacrifice. Do you believe in that possibility?”
He didn’t need a moment to answer: “Absolutely.”
The man stood, draped an arm over Brendan’s shoulders.
A few minutes later, the man was on the floor near Delaney’s coffin, blood slicking across his face as Brendan’s father punched him again and again until two people dragged him off.
4
They were in Paul’s car, speeding away from the funeral home when Paul finally told him what had been going on at school all week.
“She’s one psycho bitch.”
“What happened?”
“I thought you were nuts, saying that shit about her mother, the blood and whatever, but you must be telling the truth.”
Was Sasha walking around school in all black waving a bottle of blood and shouting how her mother had cursed Tyler Williams for raping her in his car Friday night? Maybe she posted the newspaper article about Delaney’s death on the bulletin board next to the announcements about track practice and the PTO Bake Off and scribbled on it that her death was only the beginning. More blood would spill until Tyler admitted what he did and begged forgiveness. Then she’d sever his penis and store it in a jar in her basement where she and her mother worshipped their evil gods.
“What is it? What is she doing?”
Paul laughed, turned to him. “She says you two are in love.”
“What?” He actually meant to say, What are you fucking joking because you better be, but the shock limited Tyler to one-syllable exclamation.
“Yeah, man. She’s been walking around all week saying you and her are true love and shit. She’s got a heart up in her locker with your picture on it from last year’s yearbook. At least that’s what the girls been saying. She’s whacked out. She walks around with a stupid smile on her face and, ha ha, she’s already talking about prom. You guys are getting a stretch limo, I hear.”
“Bullshit. This is a joke, right? Trying to lighten my mood?”
“I wish I was. She’s nuts. She told Patti Holt that you practically proposed to her on Friday and she just couldn’t resist how sweet you were.”
“Did she say we … you know.”
“Fucked? Not exactly, but people are putting things together. You’re not there to defend yourself, so the rumor mill churns and churns. By next week, everyone will think you two got married in Vegas or something.”
“What is up with her?” He was staring out the window, vaguely aware that Paul was driving toward Sky View Estates. “You taking me home?”
“Your father got beers?”
“Maybe. Why?”
Paul laughed again. “You think he’ll notice we take a few?”
Tyler said he doubted it considering how out of it his dad was, but they couldn’t drink them all and get drunk; he had to go back to the funeral home before the viewing ended. There was some kind of coffin-closing ceremony or something.
“Of course.”
At the gate, Tyler nodded to Michael the weekday guard and he pressed a button to open the gate. Did Michael know about Delaney? Did he even care? The community was as empty and lifeless as usual. Some of their neighbors were at the funeral home but most of these people were strangers. Even if they read the obituary page, they probably didn’t realize the dead girl used to live among them.
Paul downed half of one Sam Adams in a single gulp. Tyler sipped his beer, which tasted bitter like it had been sitting past its freshness date. He didn’t care too much for beer; it reminded him of fat guys who ate pork rinds. Whenever he and Paul wanted to get really trashed, they hit up Value Liquor, where the ninety-year-old woman who owned the place never checked ID and they could buy a bottle of Wild Turkey Rare Breed and then slip off into the woods and finish it between the two of them. Dad probably knew of these occasional drink trips to the woods, he’d have to be stupid not to smell the whiskey burning off Tyler’s tongue, but he never said anything.
“Everybody is asking me what you have to say,” Paul said and belched.
“What do you mean? She’s nuts. We’re not in love, we’re not going out, we’re not anything. We fucked but that’s it. A one-time thing. That’s all. Better not even spread that around, though. Just say I took her on a date but she weirded me out and we never did anything and now she’s out of her skull.”
“Nobody is going to rag on you for fucking her. She’s alright. Except for that snaggletooth. I’ll tell them you duct-taped her mouth shut just to be safe, didn’t want to get mauled.”
“What does she think is going to happen?” Tyler was thinking aloud. “I’ll come back and say, ‘yeah, we’re together’? She think it’s going to be beautiful with roses and shit. And prom? What the fuck is wrong with her?”
“You sure can pick ‘em.”
“You told me to go for it.”
“Yeah, but not to make her fall in love with you.”
Tyler sipped his beer, smiled. “What can I say? I’m just that good.”
“Yeah, right. More like that desperate.”
Tyler touched his face where the blood had splattered… . sack rice … luff chide … “It could be worse. She could be spouting all that rape shit. That’d be worse. Right?”
Paul hesitated, downed his beer to the last drop. “There’s something else.”
“Ah, fuck, what?”
“Well, this isn’t coming from her mouth to my ears. This is one of those round about things. This girl said that this girl heard such and such and so on. Okay? This isn’t necessarily anything, so don’t freak. Could be rumors, probably all it is.”
The beer tasted metallic and sloshed in his stomach like oil on ocean waves. “What?”
Paul admired his empty beer bottle. “She says she’s pregnant.”
Tyler almost dropped the beer bottle but part of him had known this was where it was going and he squeezed the bottle instead. Lightheadedness threatened to crumple him to the floor and little black dots even peppered his vision but he ground his teeth and breathed in forcefully as if preparing to lift something heavy. He held the air in his lungs, focused on it.
“This is seriously fucked. If she’s—”
He exhaled the air with the vocal force of an orgasm (like the one that impregnated the weirdo bitch). “I have to talk to her. Now.”
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“Whoa.” Paul put down the empty bottle and held up his hands. “You have to think rationally. Thinking fast and acting stupid got you in this mess. We go over there and then what? She’s all happy and everything you came to see her and shows you her sonogram?”
“She had a sonogram?”
“Fuck, what do I know? This is all shit I heard. It might be a lie.”
… sack rice … luff chide … Sacrifice and … luff chide?
“No, it’s not.”
“The odds of her getting pregnant, I mean it was your first time. Jesus. Of all the fucked-up luck. Is it even possible for her to know so soon?”
“You remember anything about Bio? I don’t.”
… luff chide …
“I told you about her mother, how she slipped into the room whispering something and then splashed that blood on me. I told you I couldn’t make out what she had said, but I know now. She said sacrifice and love child.”
“Love child? That sounds like a hippie thing.”
“No, it sounds like a fucking curse.”
“She’s not a real witch. Just some psycho.”
“I didn’t tell you everything.” Tyler filled him in about the rest of the events on Friday night. He explained how angry Sasha had been, how she threatened to call the police and tell everyone at school that he raped her. But how, upon exiting the car, she had mumbled, “Mother is not going to be pleased.” Who said things like that? And, finally, he told Paul about the figure in the window that night whose mouth had been opening closing in silent words. Maybe that hadn’t happened (just a dream), but he saw it so well in his mind that he couldn’t deny it. Each time Tyler said something as if it was a piece of evidence in a trial, Paul said, “Yeah, but … ,” and couldn’t finish his retort. Tyler replayed the experience in Sasha’s bedroom on Saturday, how she had been both come-hither like and also reserved, like she had a split personality.
“She cursed me and you don’t have to believe it but it’s true.”
“There’s no such thing as witches and curses. That stuff is for horror movies and stupid kid stories.”
“Well, maybe it is, mostly, but maybe also there’s a chance that all that hocus pocus shit does work and, under the right circumstances, can work. She cursed me for what I did.”
“Fucking her?”
“Raping her!” His head started swimming again and he had to sit down. He inhaled and exhaled deeply several times. “I did. I raped her. Doesn’t matter if I didn’t hear her say no. She said it and I kept going. I’m guilty.”
“Bullshit.”
“Her mother knew something was wrong because of how Sasha looked getting out of my car, crying and shit. She cursed me.”
“With a baby?”
“Sacrifice love child. I didn’t catch it all. She probably said something like sacrifice this man because he wronged my love child. The love child is Sasha. The sacrifice is me.” He stabbed his chest with his beer bottle and some splashed out of the top and spilled on the floor.
“Relax. Your dick didn’t fall off, did it?”
“She’s not doing stuff to me,” Tyler said. “She’s doing it to my family.”
After a moment, Paul’s eyes went wide. “You think she killed Delaney?”
“I don’t know.” He gulped the rest of his beer in increasingly bitter swallows. “But I have to find out.”
* * *
Paul assured Tyler he was fine to drive (Tyler didn’t really care; he just asked repeatedly to try to calm himself) and belched three nasty beer burps in the car as proof that he had digested the Sam Adams.
“If it’s a curse, why is Sasha parading around school about how you two are so much in love?”
Tyler hadn’t found a satisfying answer to that yet except the obvious one that she was nuts. “If she’s really pregnant then she’s trying to trick herself into believing some kind of fairy tale scenario.”
“Do you think she knows what her mother is doing?”
Sasha had cried for him to wait and not run away after the incident with her mother; she had wanted to explain. Or so it seemed. She might have only wanted him to stay longer so her mother could administer more spells. “She must.”
“But if she is pregnant why would she want her child’s future aunt to die?”
Tyler hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I can see why you’re in advanced math. This must be like some ‘If Then’ statement to you.”
“Logically, it doesn’t make any sense.”
“She’s fucked in the head. You said so. Her mother’s a witch, there’s no telling how she’ll respond to anything.”
Paul drove onto the road leading into the hilly lands of Hidden Hills Community. “Good old Trailer Trash Town,” Paul said. “Always the sign of a good girlfriend.”
“Fuck you.”
“Just as long as you don’t rape me.”
Tyler wasn’t in the mood to laugh. He had to figure out what he was going to say to her. He couldn’t be abrasive or she’d back off and he couldn’t try to trick her (pretend he loved her) because he’d probably get himself in more trouble, end up with more blood on him.
“Want to show me where your love child was conceived?”
Tyler started to tell him to shut up again and stopped. Love child. Had Sasha’s mother been referring to the baby now inside of Sasha? How could she have known so quickly? Or had she cast a spell for a baby to appear? That sounded crazy and really unlikely, but still … It didn’t matter, though, the sacrifice part made sense. Delaney had been sacrificed as punishment. His dead sister was proof that something really fucked up was going on.
“You think witchcraft is even possible? Like casting spells?” Tyler asked.
“You got me driving out here and it better not be to show off your pregnant girlfriend.”
“But you don’t, right? Believe?”
“In witches on broomsticks and magic potions? As you said, I’m in advanced classes, not one of those morons in the tech program. Ask one of those kids and they’ll probably whip out a voodoo doll or something.”
“You think Delaney’s just a coincidence? I was at the bowling alley for God’s sake. Someone was there and took a ball and killed my sister.”
“How would they even know when she was going to cross under that bridge?”
“She’s been going to SAT Prep for weeks. Someone could have been clocking her.”
“Your brother’s on Ritalin or some shit, yeah?”
“So?”
“Take some. You’re getting all paranoid. If someone had been following her, writing down at what time she did what then how could that even relate to some evil curse a psycho bitch conjured? It doesn’t make sense. You need to take this slow. We shouldn’t have come here. You’re bound to do something stupid.”
“Careful around this curve. It’s coming up. There it is.”
He stopped the car at the foot of their grass yard, almost exactly where Tyler had been when Sasha’s mother watched from the downstairs window.
“Not exactly the boogeyman’s house.”
No lights were on upstairs and a red light was flickering again in the same downstairs window, which did create a certain spookiness, but the bright white porch light was on and it nearly washed out the red flashes. Just another house among hundreds, maybe thousands. How many other people in this neighborhood believed in witchcraft and even practiced it? Did Sasha’s mother participate in a coven?
“Her light’s not on.”
“She’s probably slaughtering the family cat in the basement.”
“Not funny.”
“Are you going to wait all night?”
“You said this was stupid and I’d do something rash.”
“No, I said you are acting rash and bound to do something stupid.”
“But you want me to go anyway?”
“No point in doing something stupid if no one is around to watch.”
“Thanks.” Tyler got out of the car.
; He stood in the dark with the red light beckoning to him from the downstairs window in Morse Code fashion. What was the translation? Welcome back. Are you scared? Do you want to run away? Don’t you dare. You think your sister’s death was bad, just wait to see how bad this can get. Turn away now and you’ll see just how ugly this can be. You’ve been chosen and now you’ve got to embrace it.
The bright light above the porch had no secret voice attached. Tyler walked toward it and tried not to glance at that red window, which he did every other step. He had to get his thoughts straight. He couldn’t start fumbling with his words the way he had feared he would with Sasha’s bra. He had to be cool and focused with just the right amount of conviction. He had to make her fear him but not so much so that she was genuinely frightened. She’d probably ask Mommy to conjure another spell.
He waited at the front door for several seconds before knocking. The last time he had been here he hadn’t known what to expect and ended up with blood on his face. This time, he still didn’t know, but he wasn’t about to be taken by surprise.
After the next knock, the door swung wide so suddenly that Tyler stepped back to the edge of the top step and had to waggle his arms like a cartoon character to prevent falling backwards. Sasha’s mother stood in the doorway, bathed in black. The red light from the downstairs flickered over the side of her face. Her long hair was as it had been on Saturday: dangling in clumps around her face. Darkness masked her eyes, though her nose jutted from the shadows like a thick worm protruding from the soil. The porch light was angled toward Tyler like a spotlight, distorting Sasha’s mother even more.
Tyler cleared his throat in dramatic fashion, hoping that would break the tension and give him more confidence, but instead it only made him realize just how unwise this decision had been. He should have listened to Paul. What could he say? I need to talk to your psycho daughter. And oh, by the way, what was with that blood you threw in my face? Better yet: I know you cursed me, so take it off before I have to get nasty with you, ma’am.
