by Ed Kurtz
“She lived too well,” Davis said with mock-reverence, jutting out his lower lip and slowly shaking his head. “Though she died in terror, and that’s what really matters, I think. I am a god here, in this place, and I am a god of chaos. But you—you!”
Instantly the showman’s serenity turned to frothing rage. He sneered and assumed a wide, angry stance.
“You people, you shut me out! I made the world and put you in it, and you rotten shits went on with it as though it were all real.”
“It was, to us.”
“It never was. It was a cracked mirror and you simply stuck tape to the cracks and pretended it was never broken. You got married to one another and shat out babies and went to work. You could have had anything, you stupid fools. Anything. But you chose banality.”
“So, what?” Jojo seethed from the impregnable prison of roots. “You brought all this because we were fucking boring you?”
Davis chortled through his teeth and swept his hand through the air, slicing it like a knife. The roots tightened and more sprang forth to wind about his chest. Jojo wheezed.
“I would not have come at all if I hadn’t been invited, as you well know. And now that I’m here, I am looking forward to a fresh start. One that does not include either of you, naturally.”
Another broad gesture and Theodora found herself yanked back until her spine smashed against a tree trunk. Her breath rushed out of her and didn’t return for several agonizing seconds, while splintery ropes of wood clutched at her, binding her to the tree. When her breath returned it was weak and strained.
Jojo listened to her hissing breath and worried that the vines that bound her were only moments from squeezing the life out of her. He rasped her name, but it came out so weakly even he couldn’t hear it. The nurse—Minerva—tittered at his plight, fuelling his already hot hatred for her. He squirmed, and the roots contracted even more. Barker Davis sauntered up to where he helplessly laid and rested a foot on the unbreakable bonds.
“Jojo, my boy, you were always meant to be contained. A beast like you should never be permitted to run free, not unless I allow it and I can only allow it if you’re up to your eyes in malicious intent. But no matter how much I throw at you, your misery only simmers and never boils. A real shame.”
“Goddamnit, Davis,” Jojo hissed. “Why me?”
“Because you are a monstrosity, of course. A freak. And more than that, you are an angry freak. All I wanted was a circus of terror and rage, perhaps a liberal amount of depravity, and I counted on you to set it in motion. I consider myself a comparatively just god—I gave you, all of you, your free will to do with as you saw fit. But there was no imagination—hate, yes, and more than enough desire to carry that hate to its most interesting ends—but no imagination at all. I cannot begin to tell you how disappointed I am in you, Jojo. My heart weeps.”
“Tough shit,” Jojo said.
“Alas, it’s tough shit for you, my boy. Goodnight.”
He turned to bow at the waist to Minerva. She just grinned.
“Barker,” Jojo grunted, his breathing more laboured than ever.
Davis glanced at him noncommittally.
“I’m going to kill you,” Jojo said.
The magician jabbed his tongue into his cheek, jutting it out as he considered Jojo’s threat. He opened his mouth wide, staring up at the sky, and said, “I wish you the best of luck.”
He spun on his heel, dramatic as ever, and made a theatrical gesture to the nurse.
“Minerva.”
She nodded as the ground between them opened up once again: a great, crumbling maw. Jojo stared, his heart thudding furiously in his breast, unable to know whether the hole was Minerva’s magic or Davis’s. The magician lifted his arms like a kid who needed help taking off his shirt, and leapt into the waiting mouth, vanishing down its blackness in an instant. In another instant, the earth sealed itself up again, no trace that it had opened at all.
Minerva sucked at the cool, fragrant air of the woods and exhaled it with a small moan. She then walked gradually, sensually to the tree against which Theodora was bound. Theodora whimpered, turning her head but keeping her eyes fixed to the nurse, who flicked her tongue at the captive which was a snake’s tongue—long, thin, and forked. She drew up to her captive and for a brief moment the moonlight glinted in her eyes; her pupils long black slits and the rest marbled yellow and white. She hissed, her tongue thrashing wildly, and touched her hand to Theodora’s cheek. The skin of her fingertips was dry and scaly.
Jojo went limp. He cried tears of rage. He heard Theodora yell out, and he knew Minerva was hurting her somehow. His throat constricted and his face burned hot. With the next sobbing scream he heard, Jojo opened his eyes to see Minerva pressed against Theodora, one leg hiked up and her reptile tongue whipping at the weeping woman’s face. Minerva’s head wobbled and her hair spun wildly out as her scalp split down the middle of her skull. She shook more violently then, her hair falling away like a wig as the skin tore further and sloughed to her shoulders. She was shedding.
Minerva had to undress to complete the metamorphosis, and she hissed and sniggered as she did so. Once the white nurse’s blouse and skirt were discarded, she began to pull off her skin with equal ease. What emerged from beneath was a yellowish-green creature with slits for a nose and needle-like teeth that dripped slime from her gaping, unhinged mouth. Theodora was reduced to a low, keening moan, her mind breaking with terror.
The Snake Woman, Jojo thought. All she’d ever done in the Ten-in-One was gyrate on the platform in a tattered, revealing costume with a drugged, half-dead boa constrictor lounging on her shoulders. Barker Davis made her into something more literal than that, a construct of his Luciferian sorcery. And now, armed with his infernal gifts, Minerva was taking substantial delight in toying with her victim prior to ultimately killing her.
A plaintive wail rumbled out of Jojo’s throat, blasting the treetops with his grief and rage. He dug his fingernails into the heels of his palms until they bled. Minerva dug her nails, which were actually something more akin to talons, into the trunk of the tree, raking them down to shower fragments of bark on Theodora’s head. Jojo saw her squirm, trying in vain to avoid the sharp talons and flicking tongue. He filled his chest with air and released it with a deafening, animalistic roar. The sound shook the branches that hung above him and sparks burst among the twisted tangle of roots that bound him, crackling and erupting into flame.
The roots burned and so did his skin, but he pressed hard against them nonetheless, depending upon the fire to weaken their hold. It did, and as the wood blackened and hot, grey ash sprayed all around him, Jojo snapped the roots one by one until he was free. His shirt smouldered with sparkling orange pinpricks, so he tore it off and advanced, naked to the waist, toward the hissing creature that scraped at Theodora’s face with its claws.
“Minerva!” he bellowed.
The creature twirled to face him, its mouth pulling back into a hideous display of sharp, crooked teeth. She arched her back and stepped out of the mound of ripped, pink skin. The segmented scales that covered her now gleamed like bits of glass in the sparse light of the moon.
“What the hell did he do to you?” Jojo said.
She lunged, bounded across the short distance to him, all teeth and claws as she fell upon him. Jojo threw a fast right jab that glanced off the side of her head, stunning her and sending her spinning away. She shrieked a sibilant scream and came clambering back at him. Jojo reared back for a second blow but she was faster, dragging talons across his hirsute chest that cut deep. The wounds burned worse than the flaming roots and he moaned, stumbling backward. She made another pass, stabbing three claws into the flesh of his right shoulder and sinking her teeth into his left bicep. Blood boiled up from the wounds. Jojo gritted his teeth until his jaw throbbed and thrust his head against hers, smashing against her left temple. Minerva whip
ped her head back, black blood hanging in ropes from her teeth. Jojo wrapped his red arm around her neck and squeezed. She withdrew her claws from his shoulder and swatted at his face as he tightened his hold, constricting her throat in the crook of his elbow. Her jaw crunched and jutted out at an awkward angle; her perfectly round eyes stared without emotion.
“Jesus, but you’re an ugly bitch,” he said as he jabbed a thumb into her right eye.
The orb caved against the pressure, bursting wetly. She bellowed in pain and wriggled in his grasp, but to no avail. Jojo only squeezed harder still and kept on squeezing until her thrashing grew weak and her screams quieted. He maintained his grip even when she stopped moving altogether, listening closely to the cracking of her windpipe and the last of her whistling breath until she was dead.
He released Minerva, and her body sagged, sliding down the length of him until it came to a rest on the ground. The sharp, rusty odour of blood wafted up to his face, and he saw that the corpse at his feet was that of a skinned woman, all corded muscles glistening red and white. He gagged and looked away. The magic died with her.
Theodora whimpered again, snapping Jojo back to reality. He staggered over to her, the fresh wounds in his chest, shoulder, and arm screaming at him to stop moving. He felt like the recipient of a knife attack and knew he would have fared no worse if he had been.
“Jojo,” Theodora said quietly. “What . . . what was that?”
“An old friend,” he said as he grabbed handfuls of vine and pulled with all his strength. They did not break, but they loosened enough for him to work them up and over her head. Some of her hair got caught in the knots and was yanked out with the rescue. She yelped and her shoulders jumped.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right.”
“Careful not to trip.”
“Is she dead?”
Jojo looked to the bloody body on the ground and then back at Theodora. “Yeah.”
“Good.”
She took his hand and raised her legs, one at a time, out of the loosened vines. She touched her face where Minerva had scratched her and winced.
“Is it bad?”
“You’re worse.”
“It’s relative.”
She screwed up her mouth to one side and sniffed at the air. “Smoke,” she said.
“The preacher’s house.”
“More than that. I think it’s from town.”
“That’s good. That means the boys are getting it done.”
“Those roots,” she added, her brow creased in thought. “They burned, too.”
“They did, yeah.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“I have no idea. And I’m not going to worry about it now. He’s still out there, so we’ve still got work to do. Or at least I do. After all this—”
“I’m coming,” she said sharply.
Jojo said, “All right,” and left it at that.
“But what now? For us, I mean. Where do we go?”
He scratched his chin with one hand and patted his pockets with the other, looking for a packet of cigarettes that wasn’t there.
“Where would you go if you were God?”
“You mean the church.”
He nodded. She blinked, touched the deep scores on her face again and then started back the way they came. He caught up with her and together they navigated the dark woods until the border between forest and field came into view. The circus was gone and the night was silent, black. The church loomed in the middle distance, dark and lonesome-looking on the slight rise. They emerged from the trees and paused to look at it.
Theodora coughed, fought back a sob. “Margie,” she said.
Jojo said, “Yeah.”
They resumed walking and headed up the rise to the church.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Palace burned, the blaze snapping and roaring. The roof caved in, and for a moment the screen would have been visible to anyone standing in the street.
But no one was. The streets and sidewalks were empty, the buildings all vacant and mostly dark until the fires reached them. As the flames spread, leaping from rooftop to rooftop and seeking easy purchase in the old, dry wood that comprised most of them, there was no one around to lament the loss of their town centre. The Starlight Diner had already collapsed into a smouldering heap of wood, brick, metal and glass. Tuck Arnold’s hardware store went up in mere seconds, his substantial stock of lumber in the back providing additional fuel to help the inferno along. Finn’s drugstore burned slow for an hour before exploding, hurling burning shrapnel every which way, which in turn ignited nearly everything it struck. Even the trees burned, and there were plenty of trees around Litchfield.
By the time the rolling hellfire reached the Litchfield Valley Hotel, the last guest was long gone. None of Barker Davis’s roadshow company remained and all the staff were either dead or otherwise engaged. There had been a smattering of other people, travelling salesmen and drifters for the most part, but they simply burned up like morning mist in the sun before the fire came anywhere near the hotel. Had anyone been around to see them vanish, they would have thought it was as though they’d never been there at all. But no one had.
What people remained in Litchfield were the true locals, the people who had always been there from the very start or those who were born there. Nearly all of them were asleep in their beds in their homes which were beyond the reach of the inferno. Some were dead, however, their remains turned to ash in the conflagration. Russell Cavanaugh and Phyllis Gates, Finn and Jake and Hershal who sold shoes all cooked in the intense heat or beneath fallen debris. Tuck Arnold, too, burned in his storeroom and Betty Overturf froze to death in the Starlight’s walk-in freezer before the diner burned down.
When the Palace’s screen collapsed onto the seats, its frame cracked Ernie Rich’s skull and sent him sprawling. He remained semi-conscious for the duration, wondering what had ever possessed him to enter the theatre after he set it aflame. His scalp trickled blood and his hands stuck to the hot, tacky floor. It occurred to him that the kids who worked for Russ Cavanaugh never did a very good job of cleaning the place up, and that was last coherent thought to pass through the sheriff’s mind before he burned to death, trapped underneath the crushing weight of the aluminized screen upon which he’d seen dozens of pictures over the years.
One of the very last institutions of Litchfield’s town centre to burn was Wade McMahon’s filling station, the source for all the gasoline that fuelled the firestorm’s first baby steps. Charles returned to it after torching Earl’s tavern, which felt devilishly good considering how Earl would never let Charles enter the place on account of his colour. Upon returning to the filling station, he discovered that he had one torch left among those he’d doused with gas and left on the curb. He picked it up and glanced around in search of something else to burn. A smile played at his mouth; in spite of what was at stake, in spite of himself, he was having a grand old time. And upon realizing that the only place left to him was McMahon’s pride and joy, and that he would have no need of torches anymore, his smile only broadened.
They were so gorgeous, those dancing flames. They surrounded him on all sides, swirling ever upward like dervishes. Only the castaway island of the filling station remained still, unmoving, unlit. So Charles unhooked the nozzle from the fuel pump and squeezed the handle, sprayed acerbic smelling gasoline at the gas-stained pavement at his feet. It splashed back at him, soaking his shoes and trousers. He hummed while he did this, a little hymn his grandmother taught him when he was just a boy. Something about racing against the Devil.
Charles let the nozzle fall from his hand and it hit the ground clattering, still spitting gas. He fished in his vest pocket for the book of matches, half of them torn out now. The back of the matchbook had litchfield valley hotel—since 1888 printed in gold lettering on it
. He read this and chuckled, shaking his head.
He said, “1888 my foot.” Then he tore a match out and struck it against the strip on the back. He dropped it.
The ground vomited flames that engulfed his feet and spread up his legs. He danced, kicking his legs like an Appalachian hillbilly, and let out a long and high-pitched wail when his trousers melted into his flesh. The pain was unbelievable, yet oddly satisfying. He laughed as he screamed.
And in the brief moments before the fire shot up the nozzle and the fuel pump exploded, Charles sang his grandmother’s hymn at the top of his voice.
“I an’ Satan had a race—
Hal-le-lu! Hal-le-lu!
I an’ Satan had a race—
Hal-le-lu! Hal-le—”
The explosion rocked the town centre, shaking the earth and bringing the filling station down in a rumbling crumble of brick and mortar and roaring fire. An enormous column of flame shot into the sky, a screaming tower of light and heat at the nexus of Barker Davis’s wonderland that could be seen for miles in any direction, had anyone been around to see it.
But no one was.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jojo had only very rarely visited Litchfield’s sole house of worship over the years, and typically only upon the occasions of birth, marriage and death. His own wedding to Beth, such as it was, had been conducted there, and she was now buried in the churchyard on the south side of the clapboard building. Regular Sunday services, however, were never his style and he avoided them like something catching, despite the countless, unwanted recommendations that came to him in the wake of his wife’s suicide that “it might do him some good.” The funeral was the last time he set foot in the church, until now.
It was a rectangular building, some fifty or sixty feet deep with white siding where the paint wasn’t peeling off. There was a stumpy steeple over the eaves with a white wooden cross jutting out of it, and a short porch sagged before the two front doors. Over the doors was a hand-painted sign nailed to the façade, its three simple words crafted with care: He Is Risen.
