She thought, I have to get her out of here and get her home.
But she suspected that Angel might be a problem. He wasn’t interested, for whatever reason, in either finding my missing family, or absconding with his own. Her mouth grew dry. She thought she knew him. Boring, yes. Predictable, yes. But he had always exhibited that he was also reliable, grounded, and realistic. At least that’s what she had thought before their detour. Now, she wasn’t so sure what the hell she had based any of that on. He worked a dead-end job and didn’t mind it, which she could understand to a degree. He was usually on time, usually considerate, somewhat broken, and didn’t talk about other people that she’d noticed, which was one of the first things that had perked her interest. She’d known way too many people who liked to judge others, whether playfully or cruelly. Angel hadn’t been like that. But she didn’t know what to think about him now, the way he hung around the carousel, me watching him and Angel totally ignorant of it all.
Part of her was angry, and part of her felt bad for him.
They drew up ten feet or so away from the carousel. She released Natalie’s hand and wiped the sweat on her palm against her pants. Brooke said to Angel, unsure if he’d really hear her, “We’re going to try the phone in the motel.”
Neither I nor Angel said anything. We just watched her as Brooke swore softly, glared at us for a moment, and Natalie followed her inside. The air in the motel was cool, like night air, and the phone waited on the check-in counter. She lifted it.
Natalie raised her eyebrows, hopeful, but not putting too much hope in it. And Brooke couldn’t blame her. Her gut told her that they—whoever they were—were trying to cut them off from the rest of the world.
No dial tone. She traced the cord to the wall. It was still plugged in. Not cut, not removed and laying there on the red and black carpet like a dead snake. She shrugged, suddenly very tired.
Natalie said, “What now?”
“We’re going for a walk.”
“To where?”
“Around,” Brooke said. She slapped the cane into her open palm. It stung but helped to wake her up. Common sense told her that they needed to put an end to whatever game I was playing and to find a gas station and the Explorer so they could put this day behind them and chalk it up as a hard lesson learned.
She carried the cane in the middle, the way her father used to carry his single-shot ten-gauge. The double doors at the back of the room could only lead into an office or a kitchen, she imagined, and either one would have something else they could use as a weapon.
*****
Natalie liked this side of her mother. The side that took charge when no one else would. But there was pain in her mom’s eyes too, and she guessed it was because of how Angel was acting, like he didn’t even know them. And she guessed it would be hard to deal with that if it was only a friend, and she didn’t want to guess how hard it was to deal with when it was someone who was supposed to love you, someone you had just put all of your energy and hope into building something worthwhile together, not just to see where the road takes you but to design your own road.
She wanted to hug her mother and she wanted to slap Angel and tell him to pull his head out of his ass but she did nothing, being unsure of herself.
A set of aluminum double doors were built into the back of the room. They went inside, found an empty kitchen. Brooke handed Natalie the cane and then pulled a butcher knife from a magnetic rack near a large cutting table in the center of the room. Her mom smiled to herself. Natalie didn’t know what to think other than seeing her mom with the knife frightened her for some reason. Before she had much time to think about it, Brooke lowered the knife, held it loosely and walked back into the lobby. Natalie followed her.
“I have an idea. I don’t know if it will pay off, but it’s worth a shot.”
Natalie nodded. She followed her outside. Neither of them said anything to me or Angel. Neither Angel nor I said anything back, just followed them with our eyes as they walked up the street, back toward where the Explorer had been, until Brooke took to one of the side streets. Natalie glanced back toward the motel before they completed the turn and saw Angel and me standing close together, barely any space between us.
The high desert sand blew in and dusted her eyes. She wiped it away, coughed as dust clung to her tongue and the back of her throat, and did her best to keep pace with her mother.
Brooke said, “We’ll start here.” She pointed the knife at a house just around the corner. It looked to Natalie like it had been built in the days of cowboys. The wood slat siding was cracked in places from sun and moisture, the paint chipped. The windows were fogged, opaque in the streaming sunlight.
She wiped her left arm with her right hand, the cane cold against her fingertips. She followed her mother to the front door. Brooke knocked three times, loudly. When no one answered she tried the door. It wouldn’t open. Her mother cursed.
Natalie said, “Maybe the back door is open. If there is one. Who knows in this place.”
Brooke nodded, said, “Stay close to me.”
There was a back door. It was a slider that looked out over an unhealthy lawn with clumps of brown grass, across the way to other back yards in the same sad state and the dark rear doors of the businesses lining this side of Main. Brooke pushed the slider open. Natalie stood close to her but not so close that she couldn’t raise the cane if someone came running out at them.
*****
I was speaking in his head again. He watched my lips, his eyes blank, his face vacant, confused how he heard my voice and how it was that my lips never moved. He knew that fact alone should unsettle him but it didn’t. It just proved that he was right. There are greater mysteries that most people missed because they didn’t want to look, just didn’t believe, or were not part of their destiny.
He felt fortunate, if anything, to be aware, to be part of the greater plan, a disciple of the unknowable.
I said… There once was a beautiful girl who held sway over the people of a nowhere desert town. They admired her beauty, the incantations she whispered in the light of the full moon, and the treasures she gave them in exchange for their loyalty. She kept them eternally young, this goddess, this seer of exquisite nighttime mystery. They loved her so deeply they would do awful things to protect her, and to protect the gift given.
It went on for centuries, until a cool October night when a strange young man walked in from the cold desert. His face shown white beneath the stars, these same stars reflected in his black orb eyes, moonlight and building mating, spewing shadows about his shoulders like a cape. He wore a shirt of chainmail like a knight of old. His boots were dusty. The cross around his neck was silver and a blue eye grew from the center of it. He moved with precision.
He seduced the young beauty who the town worshipped, his hands gentle, his lips warm and tickling her neck. He rarely smiled but he was so gorgeous to her that he didn’t have to.
His touch said it all, aggressive, obsessive, insatiable, as he nipped at her neck, his teeth drawing blood, him filling her, ramming, panting, licking the sweat from the hollow of her throat.
He loved her like they never could. He loved her without being gifted anything, though it would be much later, after much blood was spilled, that she discovered the pleasure and security she’d blessed Gossamer with, he had possessed before he came in dusty of cloth and gleaming of eye, into their lives.
He slept during the days and left their bed after dusk to be, she first suspected, alone with the stars and the open night. She worked her charms, weaving hair and polishing the bones she’d inherited from her mother. She’d yet to see the Devil, though she had been a studious child, a passionate teen, an angelic and stalwart adult, for centuries. She drifted daily, her mind not on her task, or her duties to her people, as he went about his lone midnight wanderings. Then the first time her lover returned with blood on his lips, she thought, The Devil has come at last…
*****
Angel stared
into the distance where the steep slope ran up and out of the bowl Gossamer resided in. He’d never cared much for the Explorer. If anything, it and its ilk only produced more bills—maintenance, payment, insurance, fuel—that he felt his life would be better without.
It didn’t take much reflection, as difficult as that was for him at times, to realize life had been much easier when he’d attended school. He’d been able to walk everywhere then, like he could here in this little town. He had time to daydream. He could sleep in and not worry about being late because his parents put only a modest amount of interest in education. His friends then were mostly miscreants, but also, upon reflection, he remembered most children fitting that description.
It made him think about Natalie and his relationship, and how, despite Brooke’s faith in him, he would make a terrible stepfather, not that he would become like his own, at least not much, but that he simply didn’t know how to be a proper one. And not knowing how to do something always threw him into an awful panic, and it brought back all the things he had tried at half-heartedly, and given up on almost immediately, due to frustration or impatience.
Something tickled his throat. He swallowed, gripped the railing that bordered the steps that ran to the platform of the ride. Earlier he vaguely wondered why there was only the one ride, but it was apparent to him now that nothing else could come close to it. The town didn’t need anything but this magnificent piece of construction.
Urgency nearly overpowered him and he sucked in a hot breath, then another. He struggled to remember what I had said, and slowly it came to him: they needed to ride it before dark. Him and Brooke. The first ride would start the process. They only needed one beautiful trip back through time to begin with; another when they felt age creeping up on them, exhaling stale breath over their shoulders and removing the gray pallor from hair and skin.
His fingernails clicked against the railing.
He cleared his throat again.
Dust stung his eyes.
He said, “I should go get her.”
I didn’t answer him. And to his surprise I wasn’t there anymore when he glanced around, taking in much of nothing, still feeling the carousel’s pull.
He had no idea when I’d left or where I’d gone.
Maybe, he thought, she’s gone to find Brooke and bring her back?
He hoped so.
His palms grew sweatier and a nervous tic found root in his eye. He blinked against the sun, the sand, the quiet, hot stillness.
Angel thought, They’ll come back and then we’ll ride.
He took a deep breath—nearly out of his mind with excitement but for once in his adult life feeling as if he’d found his purpose—and he trembled with anticipation.
*****
Brooke coughed as a gust of dust blew out from the back sliding door of the house and into her face. She could taste it—acrid yet oddly bland, as if whatever foul ingredients it possessed at its core had softened with time—and her eyes watered, caking fine dust to her cheeks. She sneezed and wiped her nose.
Natalie said behind her, “God, what the hell?”
Brooke wiped her face with her sleeve again to clear her vision.
When she looked up she saw something in the dark interior, man-shaped, against the far wall. The gloom was oppressive.
Her heart thumped.
She thought, Tell your daughter to stay outside.
She held a hand up to tell Nat to stay put, and said, “Hello?”
She watched the shape across the living room, trying to discern if it moved. As far as she could tell, it hadn’t. The room itself was unfurnished, sections of drywall missing, piles of light brown dirt on the bare floor as if it were only a model home yet to be completed and children had brought in buckets of sand and scattered it about the dwelling.
She said, “Jesus, are all of them like this?”
She still believed that there had to be people there, yet something I had said about a street of them that were—not really people—clanged in remembrance. She had no idea what I’d meant and, at the moment, barely any desire to find out.
When faced with something strange, or off-putting, or dangerous, she believed it best to focus on the task at hand instead of letting your attention wander. The shape on the far side of the room was most certainly a man, though the gloominess between her and him complicated affirming that fact.
And she wondered what the hell it meant, for surely it meant something.
She gripped the knife tighter, her vision slowly adjusting to the dankness of the gutted house’s interior. There wasn’t a phone in this room that she could see and her legs refused to carry her farther than past the doorway to check the kitchen or bedroom or hall.
A soft breeze slid like a hand between her legs, pushed on, into the house, and stirred the light colored dirt across the floor.
Natalie said, “Is that a coffin?”
She was pointing at the thing across the room.
It was, Brooke realized. A coffin, opened with a body in it, the man’s arms crossed over his chest, pale, and dressed in black clothing. From what she could see she believed his eyes to be closed.
Her mind tumbled over why it was sitting there upright against the far wall. Some type of monument? A parlor trick to scare off intruders?
The knife handle felt very cold against her palm and a chill started in the tips of her fingers, worked up her wrists, her elbows, froze her shoulders, and crossed over her chest like a large man wrapping his arms around her from behind.
She exhaled a harsh breath and then said, “We need to get out of here.”
*****
Natalie agreed, she’d been thinking for a while now that they should have never stopped. But it was hard to tear her gaze from the coffin standing upright across the room. The body was decomposed, bits of bone showing through its cheeks and forehead, a glint of teeth where one side of its cheek had deteriorated or had been eaten by some scavenger. It didn’t stink like she thought it would. It smelled like old paper, moldy, musty, shut in with moisture and prevented sunlight or fresh air.
The cane she carried knocked against the door frame.
She froze, unable to move a muscle as she looked back toward the coffin, expecting the corpse to open its eyes.
A sudden gust of wind pushed her further into the room. It was preternaturally strong, more like a stiff arm than anything else. She spun around, raised the cane, then spun back, studying the coffin and its occupier.
Had it moved the tiniest bit?
She thought so.
One arm seemed lower than it had a moment ago.
Her mother’s face was ratcheted with fear. Natalie figured she was trying hard to make sense of it all, too, but wondered if things had to make sense for them to be.
She had never believed that, despite teachers and preachers selling their own lies about the way life worked. There were millions of things happening all over the world, even back home in Colorado Springs, which made no sense at all.
She cleared her throat, held the cane out like a sword.
She whispered, “I think the body moved.”
Her mother shook her head. She said, “It couldn’t have. Not unless it shifted from us opening the door.”
“It wasn’t from us opening the door,” Natalie said. “We were in here for a minute already by then.” The wind picked up some of the sand at her feet and brushed it against her bare legs. The grains tickled her shins and she stepped back, closer to her mother, then knelt.
Brooke said, “What are you doing?”
Natalie shrugged, squinting as she scooped a handful of dirt from the nearest pile.
It had no weight to it, barely any substance, feather-light.
Not dirt, she told herself.
She carried it toward the light of the back door.
Her mother followed her cautiously, casting an occasional glance over her shoulder.
They huddled near where light and shadow met upon the threshold.
&
nbsp; Her mother said, “What is that?”
“I don’t know.”
She tipped her hand over and most of the fluff blew away. A few bits still clung to her hand. As she realized what they were—the eight legs, the soft brown torsos marked by a fiddle-shape—she shivered and smeared the dry, wispy husks against the glass.
“Gross,” she said, tense. “They were spiders.”
Brooke nodded, frowning. She looked back inside.
Natalie didn’t want to, but did anyway. There were thousands upon thousands of shed skin. At least she thought they’d been shed. She couldn’t be sure.
She said, “Are they corpses or skins?”
“I don’t know,” her mom said. “I don’t want to know.”
She pulled Natalie away from the door, throwing one nervous glance back to the coffin across the room. The arm that Natalie had thought moved before now looked like it was tight against the body again.
They walked into the brilliant light of the fall sun, Natalie wanting to wash her hands, her mother scanning the dead town until she pointed with the knife and said, “Look.”
Natalie looked, using her mother’s pointer finger as a guide, and wished she hadn’t.
*****
Angel stood on the carousel’s platform. It seemed to vibrate beneath his heels. He thought, This is what it feels like to come home after being gone forever…
And he had gone home once. But he’d felt nothing at all. His parents were long in the ground. He was a man who still felt like a helpless boy inside. The house had switched hands many times. Now it lay in ruin, the windows smashed, graffiti painted on the walls in bright colors, beer cans and various wrappers crowding the floor.
Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy Page 11
