Calamity

by J. T. Warren

  Ultimately, it was simple: he believed Sasha’s mother had cursed his family because Sasha believed Tyler had raped her. Now, now, he might as well be totally honest—no one was listening but himself, after all. He had raped Sasha, even if he hadn’t realized it until after it was over. No matter the intent, he was guilty and she had seen fit to punish him. She seduced him at her house into a trap and then he stupidly believed he could reason his way out of the mess. You can’t reason with a witch; you can’t make sense out of something insensible. How could witchcraft even exist? What sense was in that? Why would she kill Delaney instead of make his balls rot off or something? Why was she punishing his whole family when only he was to blame?

  The answer was obvious enough: because she’s either totally crazy (crazy in love) or completely evil.

  Yet, he had hoped he was wrong. That was the real reason he had made Paul drive him to Trailer Trash Town. He had believed that it was all some crazy string of coincidences. Sasha’s mother wasn’t a witch (that was preposterous), and while Sasha might be upset (maybe even a bit delusional herself about what happened), no one had cursed his family. He had gone there not to end a curse or reason with a witch; he had gone there to reassure himself that the world was still a rational place.

  Instead, he dropped into a black ocean of madness and had now slipped beneath the surface where he could no longer tell which way was up. Sasha’s mother was a real witch, an honest-to-God, broomstick-riding, spell-casting, malevolent witch. She had wanted Tyler to fuck Sasha in front of her while she cast yet another spell. Perhaps she meant to convert him to witchcraft. She had cursed him and that curse had made somebody drop a bowling ball off a bridge and into Delaney’s face.

  Brendan’s composition book lay on the bed next to him. Tyler picked it up, flipped to the page that had been folded over, conveniently enough. It read in a scribble across the top: Tyler’s Problem. Beneath that it read:

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Discovery. The Darkman is around here somewhere, thought Bo Blast. He had tracked the mad killer to an abandoned warehouse where tennis shoes used to be made.

  And on and on it went about some detective named Bo Blast and a killer named The Darkman who apparently killed people only in the dark. The chapter was nine pages front and back and Tyler read over them twice and even skimmed the next chapter (Chapter Seven concluded with the Darkman pointing a gun directly at Bo Blast’s chest and though he wouldn’t admit it openly, Tyler wanted to find out what happened next) before assuring himself that Brendan hadn’t overhead anything about Tyler’s situation. But then why did he write Tyler’s Problem across the top of the page? A few suspicions lurked at the corners of his mind, but he wanted to talk to Brendan before making any accusations.

  How the conversation with his brother went would determine what happened next and how much deeper into the black water Tyler sank.

  * * *

  Tyler knocked once on Brendan’s door and opened it without waiting for a reply. Brendan was kneeling next to his bed, elbows on the bed, hands folded in prayer, forehead resting against his hands. Their family was not inclined to say blessings before meals (not even on holidays) or offer prayers to God, so Tyler stopped mid-step and gaped at his brother as though he had discovered him naked humping one of his stuffed animals.

  Should he say something? Had Brendan found God when no one was looking? No, that was unlikely. Brendan was a young kid and sometimes when the world went to shit, young kids turned to the man in the clouds. Hell, old people turned to that same floating overseer as well. Maybe they were on to something.

  Was it rude to interrupt? How did you know if someone was deep in prayer or merely browsing through their thoughts like scrolling through a webpage of products?

  “Brendan?” The name came out in a croaked whisper. When Brendan turned to him, Tyler realized he was holding the composition book and he held it up like a prize. “Guess what I found?”

  Brendan appreciated him for a moment, stood. “Do you believe in God?”

  “That’s quite a question, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve never thought about it?”

  “Yeah, I have. Don’t have any answers though.”

  “Do you think He has a plan?”

  “You mean like, everything happening for a reason?”

  Brendan nodded.

  “I guess we can hope. Delaney took a bowling ball to the head; how can that be part of some god’s plan?”

  Brendan looked away. Tyler was being too harsh on the kid. He was only twelve. The soul-searching, religion-questioning phase of his life was just starting. Tyler had to be supportive, even if he thought it was all a bunch of bullshit.

  “Where’d you run off to today?” Tyler asked.

  “Nowhere,” Brendan said, “just wanted to get away.”

  “I understand.” He held out the composition book. “I read some of it. Really cool.”

  Brendan’s eyes brightened. “Really?”

  “Yeah, that Darkman guy is really something.”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a story.”

  An awkward pause grated on Tyler’s nerves until he finally told himself fuck it, and dove for the truth. “I noticed you wrote Tyler’s Problem before Chapter Seven.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sorry.”

  “What do you mean? Chapter Seven was about hunting a killer in a warehouse. It has nothing to do with me, right?”

  Brendan glanced at his hands, which were still locked in prayer. “I know something bad happened and you’re involved. I know because I heard your conversation with Paul Friday night. I thought if I wrote that in the book you’d get curious and eventually tell me what was going on.”

  The answer was so perfectly composed, so logically-reasoned that it had to be a lie, yet it rang with such honesty that Tyler couldn’t refuse its authenticity. “You’re pretty cool, huh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You looking out for me and stuff? You’re my little brother, you know.”

  “After the baby died, everything changed, you know. Things turned dark, like the sky before a storm. I figure we’re still in the storm and I’m trying to make the skies clear again. I hope what is going on with you isn’t another thundercloud moving in.”

  For a moment, Tyler couldn’t respond. Brendan was twelve and yet spoke with maturity far beyond his age. Hell, beyond Tyler’s age. He was like one of those prodigies. Or an idiot savant, one with acute emotional insight. “Don’t get weirded out or anything,” Tyler said, “but I love you. You’re my brother and now, well, we’re all that’s left. For the briefest of moments, we had two siblings. But they’re gone now—it’s just us. That’s fucked up, but we have to stick together if we want to survive, right?”

  Brendan nodded, glanced around. “So, what happened? What kind of trouble are you in?”

  Tyler wouldn’t have expected the truth to pour out so easily, but it did, like water from a garden hose. He told his little brother about Sasha, about their date that ended with her accusation—you raped me—and carried the story right through to the Delaney spread-eagle conclusion. He hesitated before relaying the sex stuff but decided that the story wouldn’t hold as much, if any, meaning if he omitted it. Brendan was mature for his age and even if he really didn’t understand what sex was, he wasn’t too young to learn that it was something that could strangle you into a tangled web of madness. Talk about coming of age.

  When Tyler finished, Brendan’s face contorted as if he had eaten something sour. He sucked on his teeth for a moment and scratched his head. He reminded Tyler of Mr. Agles, an aging math teacher who was always stumped by particularly complex equations. My brother is a forty-year-old in a twelve-year-old’s body, he thought with no sense of humor or irony. It was just a fact. Brendan the freak.

  “You think they’re real witches?”

  That depended, but Tyler erred on the side of well, this is one fucked up situation and it’s probably more fu
cked up than I can even reason. “Her mother, definitely. Sasha, I don’t know.”

  Brendan caressed his chin as if he had a beard. “I’m glad you told me.”

  “You sound like a guidance counselor.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “There’s things going on that are bigger than you, bigger than both of us.”

  “What?”

  “Do you want to know where I went this afternoon?”

  “Outer space?”

  “To a church in Newburgh.”

  “What? With who?”

  “One was named Ellis, the other Dwayne. They were from the First Church of Jesus Christ the Empowered.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I’ve been confused, but I’ve learned something important.”

  “Wait, wait—who were these two guys, Ellis and Dwayne? Where did you meet them?”

  “They found me, brought me to their church.”

  “They kidnapped you?”

  “Dad punched Dwayne in the face. I think he knew him.”

  Who was Dwayne? Ellis? Was this just another product of his brother’s hyper-imagination? If Dad knew the guys then how come he had no idea where Brendan had been? Something was going on that didn’t quite make sense. Of course, that was beyond doubt, but this only confirmed that Sasha’s mother had done something. Witchcraft or not. Supernatural powers or superstitious bullshit, that woman had cursed his family.

  “What happened at the church?”

  “I saw God.”

  Tyler couldn’t respond. His twelve-year-old brother just said he had seen God, what could he say?

  Brendan glanced off somewhere. When he spoke, it was more to himself than to Tyler. “They could help. They would help. God would want them to.”

  “Brendan, what are you talking about?”

  Still in his world. “They could solve this problem quickly, easily. Even if this woman is a witch, she’s no match for God and Dwyane and Ellis are God’s messengers.”

  He grabbed Brendan by the shoulders, shook him. “Stop it.” Brendan focused on him again. “You’re talking crazy. I don’t need anyone’s help. Certainly not a pair of religious fanatics.”

  “But you do,” he said. “You really do.”

  “What happened at that church?”

  Brendan hesitated. “I had started to doubt it, but this is not a time for doubt. Ellis was right. With God, there is always hope.”

  “You sound like one of those freaks who ends up drinking poisoned kool-aid.”

  “This is a sign. Your trouble with the witches. It’s proof that I was going in the wrong direction. The path is clear. We can bring everything back to normal.”

  “Slow down, little brother. I know you’re upset about Delaney and maybe I shouldn’t have told you my problems, but you can’t start talking like some zealot.”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  Tyler started to speak and stopped. Saying anything more could only reap more harm. Brendan was obviously fucked up, really damaged after all that had happened. He had been coping with a drug-addled mother by writing his stories about Bo Blast and the evil Darkman, and he had seemed so damn mature even after Delaney’s death that Tyler hadn’t thought twice about heaping his own problems onto the poor kid. Now, all this religious shit had come unstuck in his brain and he had morphed into a little disciple of religious fanaticism. What about Dwyane and Ellis? Were they even real? Such an imaginative kid could easily conjure a few life-like invisible friends to help him through his problems. Maybe he had watched a few hours of Bible-TV and the ramblings of some hopped-up preacher had seeped into his psyche. Tyler had to proceed cautiously.

  “Brendan, listen to me. This is not your problem. None of it is. It isn’t your fault that Mom is messed up. It isn’t your fault that Delaney died. And it isn’t your fault that Sasha and her mother are insane. Don’t take on all these problems. You’re just a kid. You need to play video games and ride your bike. You need to continue this story of yours. It’s really cool.” He held out the composition book. “I’m sorry I told you anything but not because you’re my brother but because this is my problem. It’ll take care of it. Okay?”

  Brendan took the composition book as gently as a cat lifting a kitten in its mouth. “You don’t want to hear about God? About how He can help you?”

  Even though he didn’t believe it, Tyler told Brendan what he thought the kid would want to hear. “There’s no curse. Witches don’t exist. I’m just paranoid and frightened. Some people are weird and do weird things. I made a bad mistake and these people just want to scare me a little. That’s all. Don’t worry about it.” Tyler almost managed to convince himself.

  Brendan flipped through his composition book without reading any of the pages. “I’m glad you liked my story. I think I will finish it.”

  “Good.” He smiled honestly as cool relief washed over his scorching worry and anxiety.

  Brendan turned to his desk, paused. “I love you, too.”

  Tyler stood there a few more minutes as his little brother plopped himself in the swivel office chair Dad purchased for him last summer when he discovered how much time the kid spent writing at his desk. Brendan’s words hit something inside Tyler with a pulverizing force. He could cry if he let himself, but crying wouldn’t solve anything. He’d cry later. He only hoped it would be from relief.

  Ten minutes later, back in his room with his thoughts, Tyler answered his cellphone assuming it was Paul and got the biggest surprise of the night.

  * * *

  “Hi, Tyler,” Sasha said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Of all the responses Tyler could have said, he managed the most ridiculous: “You’re alive?”

  She laughed, but only for a moment and it sounded flat, almost dead. “There’s a lot I need to explain. Can I?”

  “I don’t know. Are you willing to tell the truth?”

  “I never meant to hurt you, Tyler. I really like you.”

  “That’s why you said I raped you? Why you’re going around school telling everyone we’re in love.”

  “I am not. I told Stephanie that I really like you, that’s all.”

  “And yet I raped you?”

  She sighed; it sounded like a gust of wind in the phone. “I was confused, that’s all. I wasn’t ready.”

  “You never stopped me.” He was the abusive husband blaming the submissive wife for every bruise.

  “Don’t yell at me.”

  “I’m not yelling.” He stopped, took a breath. “I’m just pissed. You can appreciate that, can’t you?”

  “Yes, but you need to appreciate what I went through, too. I really like you, Tyler, and when you asked me out I was so excited. I spent, like, six hours picking out an outfit, and when you showed so much interest … you were so eager and it felt so good that I didn’t want to stop you. I just didn’t think you were going to do what you did, that’s all. I was really confused. I’m not anymore.”

  “That last time I saw you, you were naked on your floor with your mother chanting over you.”

  “I know, I know, but …”

  “But?”

  “My mother isn’t right.”

  “No shit.”

  “I mean, she’s a wonderful mother. She’s taken great care of me, but after my father was killed, she kind of came unhinged. You know?”

  Unhinged. What a perfect word to describe a modern-day witch. “Wait,” he said. “Your father was killed?”

  She paused and if he could see her, Tyler knew she was probably staring off into space the way Brendan had moments ago. Was she formulating a lie or contemplating the structure of her truth, though weren’t those two things pretty much the same?

  “It was traumatic,” she said. “I don’t want to go into all the details because they’re not important.”

  He doubted that but said nothing. It was one of those things you held onto for later when you were trying to piece to
gether a puzzle.

  “My mother just hasn’t been the same since he died. She blamed herself, I think. I guess most people do.”

  Pill-popping, comatose Mom. “Yeah,” Tyler said.

  “She got weird. That’s the only way to explain it. She spent hours on-line looking at these sites about witchcraft and voodoo and ancient African curses and who knows what else. One day, I scrolled through her Internet history and found a site about raising the dead.”

  Tyler almost asked for the URL. Raising the dead could come in really handy right about now.

  “Then she was going to meetings with other people who believed, that’s what she said—they believed. I told her she was nuts more than a million times but … I had to stop.”

  “Why?”

  “We had an argument one night last year about all her meetings and her Internet searches. She created that altar in our downstairs. You saw it. I flipped out. Said she was out of her fucking mind and that I’d wish she’d of died instead of Dad.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. So, she sliced her wrists.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Not too deep, but deep enough. Took me a few days to get the blood out of the carpet. I destroyed her altar, kicked it into pieces. She was in the hospital for three weeks. They did a psych evaluation.”

  “And?”

  “My mother may be crazy but she can play sane with the best of them. She answered their questions, admitted to some stress and some depression from my dad’s death, and calmed everybody’s fears. I even started to believe she was better. Until she came back home and reconstructed the altar. She apologized for what happened and then went on with her ceremonies or whatever.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone? A guidance counselor. Somebody.”

  “So I could be alone? Go into foster care? When I’m eighteen and can be on my own, I will tell someone, I’ll get her some help. But right now, I need to just ride it out.”

  “My mother has a doctor. He gives her a lot of pills. She’s asleep most of the day, but she’s not worshipping any evil gods or anything.”

  “Neither is mine. She’s just confused, like everybody.”

  “I’m just saying …”

  “I’m not drugging my mother.”