The Blood Singer
Patrick McNulty
Contents
Also by Patrick McNulty
Part I
Untitled
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II
Untitled
8. Thirteen years later
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
Also by Patrick McNulty
Copyright © 2018 Patrick McNulty
All rights reserved.
Also by Patrick McNulty
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Part I
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
- William Shakespeare
1
Haden Church woke to the smell of blood. It filled his nostrils and dragged him to the surface of sleep. He blinked in the weak light that leaked into the room to find the woman standing by his bed. He knew her smell. Her shape. He had fallen asleep for years listening to the whispered wheeze of her breath, her jackrabbit heart.
The room was freezing.
Even in the dark, he saw the tiny clouds of his breath sifting up through the shadows. The woman edged closer to the bed and he saw the knife in her right hand. Wet and glistening. He wanted to scream. To shout to Jim and Lorraine Carver, his foster family, but someone had filled his lungs with sand. He could barely manage a single word.
"Mom?"
The scent of unwashed flesh covered in greasy sweat bloomed in the dark as Haden’s mother leaned closer. Her whispered voice had been cured over a lifetime of end to end Marlboro's.
"You did this, Haden." she hissed. "You did this. When you ran away."
Haden's stomach was a ball of ice. Gooseflesh rippled across his body as his staccato breaths formed a frail barrier of cloud between himself and his mother. She needed only to dip her head closer, scattering his defenses as she gripped his covers and ripped them back.
"Get up."
Gloria Church switched on the bedside lamp and chased the shadows to the corners of the small room. She was dressed in jeans and a light blue windbreaker. The windbreaker was slicked with blood as were her hands. Her face was clean of makeup and her ash blonde hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail as usual. Crimson droplets of blood had sprayed across her face, but she didn't seem to notice or care. Her flat dark eyes pinned him in place with her unblinking stare.
“Get dressed, Haden. Now."
His mother stripped out of the blood-stained windbreaker, wadded it up into a ball and tossed it near the bed. Haden's eyes followed the soiled garment all the way down. Studying it.
They were dead.
All of them.
And it was your fault, Haden.
A switch clicked inside his brain and he was able to move. He scrambled across the covers of the single bed and slipped over the far end. A chest of drawers was pushed against the far wall. In lamplight, he eased open the wooden drawers pulling out his small selection of clothes. A sweater with the Toronto Maple Leafs logo on the front, a pair of Levi's and some thick wool socks.
To his right there was a window, skeletal branches powered by the cool fall wind clawed at the glass. He thought about it. He was on the second floor with an estimated drop of twelve feet to the driveway in front of the house.
He was fast, but was he that fast?
No, his mind advised him cooly.
She’ll kill you if you run. She will kill you just like she killed Jim and Lorraine. Jim, the guy who taught you how to shoot pool in the basement while Lorraine made sloppy Joe's.
And then it will be your blood on the knife.
The quiet street was empty of good samaritans. Neatly trimmed yards and centuries-old trees but no one there to watch as the woman forced a small scared boy into the trunk of a Pontiac Sunfire. No one, but the two ghosts standing silently at the end of the driveway.
Haden felt them before he saw them. A tingling feeling that reminded him of the electricity in the air right before a lightning strike.
There were two ghosts but he felt there were more. Drawing near. He saw a young boy his age dressed in overalls and a woman wearing a nun's habit. As usual, they were silent and still. The edges of their forms trembling slightly as if thinnest around the edge. Dark eyes bearing witness to everything around them. They didn't scream or call out, and they didn't draw closer. They simply watched from their position near the street.
When he was alone and saw them in the backyards of houses or on the street he had been scared at first. But over time he had stared right back. Even approached these silent, staring wraiths. But they would never engage. They would never answer his questions. And if he got too close they would fade to nothing leaving him feeling truly alone in the middle of an alley, or a ball field. Wherever.
Gloria raised the lid of the trunk and shoved him inside. Haden did as he was told. Stealing one last glance at the ghosts bearing witness, hoping for a miracle that never came. She tossed in his denim jacket and slammed the lid closed without another word.
They traveled west along the deserted two-lane highway while the darkness seethed around them.
Haden pressed his lips to the gap between the trunk lid of the stolen Pontiac Sunfire and the frame to steal a sip of the cold night air. He had learned that the difference between getting a good mouthful of fresh air and bashing his nose was all about timing. Too slow and you missed your chance. Too fast and the car would inevitably jerk to a stop or lurch forward sending your upturned little ten-year-old face into the sharp metal underbelly of the trunk. He hit his head hard enough to see stars the one time. Tasted blood in his mouth on another ill-timed occasion. But even the small sips he pulled from the outside was worth it. Laying down in the trunk had proven dangerous. The cloying exhaust fumes had made his stomach feel like a greasy ball-bearing rolling aimlessly around his insides while his head slowly ballooned with blood. His skull felt too small and threatened to crack.
How long since had he been in the trunk? He hadn't felt the tell-tale vibration or heard another car pass in at least an hour. Just the whining of the car's engine and hum of the tires on pavement. Even the radio had gone silent. No doubt some progressive country song came on about getting busy or rolling in the hay and his mother, always finding that kind of music inappropriate, spun the dial away toward more wholesome fare. She had landed on a preacher for a time. A real fire and brimstone type of guy. Haden couldn't make out every word but he caught the gist. All of us were sinners and we were all gonna get what's coming to us. In
the end, she killed that as well, choosing to drive in silence.
Amen
Traveling in absolute darkness was disorientating and it made it feel to Haden anyway, that he and his mother were the only two living beings on the planet. The thought depressed him. It made him think of his last foster family. Jim and Lorraine. The sweet older couple that could never have kids of their own. They had treated him nice and fed him ice cream after dinner, and when he lived there he had his own room at the top of the stairs complete with his own bed. No more sleeping with his mom on a blow-up mattress on the floor in the basement of some church. No more reheated spaghetti-os out of a microwave. He wondered what it would have been like to grow up there, with Jim and Lorraine. Would they have understood him? Would they have tried to fix him? When they saw him. When they truly saw him, would they hurt him like his mom did when she prayed?
Haden had never shown Jim and Lorraine what he could do while he was living there. He didn't want to scare them. They seemed like really nice people, and after only two days of living there they were dead, so it didn't really matter too much now anyway.
Haden pressed his head into the balled up denim jacket he was using as a pillow and closed his eyes. He didn't sleep. Ever. It was one of the many things he had to hide from Jim and Lorraine, and Patty and Ryan before that, and the Family and Children's Society lady. It was just something he didn't do. Sleep never came. No matter how tired he got he didn't sleep. It's not to say that he couldn't. He'd been forced into it on occasion. Over the years his mother had rendered him unconscious.
Twice.
Once she had found him out of bed, back when they lived in a house owned by one of her boyfriends. He had been standing at the big living room windows staring out at the empty field behind the house. The wraiths had gathered there. He had never seen so many in one place. He stopped counting at fifty, and they were still drifting in through the trees that bordered the deep yard. Haden was not afraid and he didn't know why. Young and old they circled the little house, pushing to get closer.
To see him.
His mother had seen him then. Really seen him for the first time. It was late and she had backhanded him across the floor. He was only five or maybe six. He remembered stumbling backward, tripping over his own feet in his blue fuzzy onesie. He clipped the back of his head on the fireplace mantle, drawing a gush of blood and a trip to the emergency room. He would touch the scar sometimes. A half-inch line, soft pink behind his right ear where no hair would ever grow.
The second time was in the bathtub. He remembered lying on his back looking up at his mother and watching her expression sour. She looked at him as if he were a poisonous insect. A threat to her safety.
A sin.
Her blue eyes darkened, fading to dull stones. Her face went slack as if gripped in a hypnotists' trance. Her hands reached for him. Nails digging into his soft shoulders and forced him down. Fast. Underwater. He remembered kicking and thrashing. Feeling the air with his arms and legs while his head was held underwater. His fingers digging into his mother's fleshy arms. His mouth opening, screaming, as water rushed into his lungs.
He woke up shivering in the empty tub.
That was the first time he left. Or rather, tried to escape. He tip-toed to his room where he dug out his warmest clothes from the grocery bags they used as luggage. He carried his boots patched with duct tape to the back door, his heart beating wildly in his chest. He twisted the door handle and slipped through the gap into the falling snow.
He didn't know where his mother was and didn't care. Every step away from the house he felt the vice around his chest loosen a fraction of an inch until, at the end of the street when he could no longer see the house, he could finally release the breath he was holding.
He didn't get far.
With no money and no contacts he sat in a fifty's style diner and ordered a series of waters. Half an hour in the young waitress behind the counter took pity on him and slid him a piece of cherry pie on the house. An hour later the tiny bell above the door announced his mother's arrival, curdling the sickly sweet pie in his stomach.
The ride back to the house was silent.
That night she broke his nose and one of the fingers on his left hand.
Lying in his room that night he had heard his mother and her boyfriend arguing. Some words stood out as they shouted back and forth. Words like police and abuse and hospital. In the morning they were back in the car traveling again.
Haden had never seen the boyfriend again.
But still, he had never slept. He had read about it in poems and stories describing these wonderful worlds you could travel to in your dreams full of fuzzy animals and buckets of candy and in some of the dreams the kids could even fly. He hoped it was true. If it was he would fly far away from his mother. He would fly so far and so high that even she couldn't find him.
If only he slept.
Rusting brakes squealed as the car slowed rolling Haden's body toward the back seat. He tensed, knowing what was coming. His small body bounced inside the trunk, as the car bumped over the edge of something. He pressed his feet and hands to the inside of the trunk to brace himself. The car rolled to a stop and he tensed. The engine died with a wheeze and a shudder. Sickly yellow light streamed through the crack in the trunk and Haden pressed his eye to the gap and read the words on the faded sign towering above the parking lot.
Big Bob's
Roadside Inn
2
Gloria Church had been staring at the yellow glow in the distance for over three hours.
When the motel’s sign finally came into focus, it wasn’t quite as majestic as it had been from ten miles away. The roadside inn part of the equation wasn’t exactly an oasis either, but she goosed the engine and steered her car over a bit of raised concrete as she climbed onto the empty parking lot.
She snugged the Sunfire straight up against the glass-fronted motel office and killed the engine.Though the glass walls of the office she watched a fat man in a red checked shirt sitting behind the registration desk look up from his laptop. He wore thick black-framed glasses, and his head was shaved. He had a puzzled look on his face as if he had never seen a car before. Or people for that matter. And judging by the empty, windswept lot, both might have been true.
Gloria reached into the back seat where all of her worldly possessions consisted of three reusable shopping bags, a half box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and her purse. Truth be told the purse belonged to Lorraine Carver, but it was hers now. Including the small silver handgun, she had found next to her husband Jim’s bedside table. Gloria dragged the oversized purse onto her lap and dug both hands inside. They withdrew Lorraine’s and Jim’s wallets and the gun. She set the gun in her lap and quickly counted out the bills.
When she was finished counting the cash, she stuffed the roll into her jeans pocket and slipped the gun into her waistband. The clerk was still watching her.
She checked her face quickly in the vanity mirror. Her face was never what one would call beautiful, but she had been pretty at least, in a dull, washed out way. But now the face that stared back at her was drawn and tired. Dark smudges ringed her eyes and her skin, the color of cement, was stretched too tight across the sharp bones of her face. She looked like a skeleton with bloodshot, jittery eyes that tried to see in every direction at once. Unfocused. She stared hard at herself and forced her mouth to smile. Her thin lips pulled into what looked more like a grimace and her eyes didn’t change. They remained flat and without light, like the eyes of a doll, or a shark.
The fat motel clerk was still watching her. She slipped out of the car and made her way inside, clouds of hot breath trailing behind her in the frigid air. A dented cowbell hung above the door clanged announcing her arrival. The fat man leveled his puzzled expression at her.
“Help you?”
“I hope so,” she said trying out her smile. “I’m exhausted and need a room for the night.”
The clerk’s expression didn’t chang
e.
“Just you?” he asked, leaning slightly to his left to peer out into the parked Sunfire.
“Yep.” She answered, holding her smile, showing her teeth.
“Where you headed?” the clerk asked, shifting back in his seat to focus all his attention on her. She watched as his eyes slid up and down everything he could see over the edge of the registration counter. The smile that was clinging to life withered and died.
“To bed.” She said. Her tone hardening. “As I said, I’m exhausted.”
The clerk sat up straighter, shuffling papers on his cluttered desk, presumably looking for the proper form. He slapped the registration card on the raised portion of his counter and gestured to the pen chained to the desk.
“Fill that out then. Just trying to make small talk.” He said. “Don’t see too many on these roads, especially at night, lest they lost or local. And you ain’t local, so I figured—”
“I ain’t lost, hayseed.” She said, pushing the form back across the desk. “Just tired. How much?”
The clerk stared at her for a beat, mouth open wide enough for Gloria to wish she hadn’t looked. He pulled the card down and read it over.
“Ain’t no smoking in the room…uh…Debra…” he said. “That your real name? Never known a Debra. But you do like kinda familiar. Do I know you from somewhere?”
The Blood Singer_A Haden Church Supernatural Thriller Page 1
