by Russell Moon
I do not want to know what that is supposed to mean, cannot take one more reason for my fear, which is already all-encompassing. I refuse to ask him, knowing that the more I follow, the more I seem to get trapped.
“Don’t you worry about my blood,” I say instead, reaching my good hand toward my neck to check it.
“Your blood is my blood,” he says, dropping to one knee and reaching toward me.
“Back off,” I snap, and make a half-assed attempt to get to my feet. Really I just manage to scramble in the dirt a few yards. “My blood is not your blood.”
He crouches there, gazing at me—mostly at my hand, so I must look at it myself. In a few minutes, it’s not going to be anyone’s blood anymore; it is pooling, seeping deep into the ground.
He comes to me once more. He bends over me, takes my wrist in one hand, and ever so lightly touches his index finger to the torn flesh. Then, with a little more pressure, he pushes the finger inside the gaping wound. Inside the skin, inside the fiber between the knuckles.
“Christ!” I scream, and try to yank the hand back.
But the hand doesn’t go anywhere. He holds it tight, keeping me completely locked there.
“Ahhhhh!” I yell, hammering the ground with my other fist. Smoke is coming off my hand where he is contacting it.
“Stay still,” he says.
I continue to scream until he is finished. The whole time I smell my burning skin, like grease drippings on a grill. And then I stare at the odd new configuration that is my right hand. Blistered, puckered, patched, as if with bad skin grafts or fried bologna. But healing.
There appears to be nothing left to do but follow him. Because there is no escaping him—specifically, as well as in the larger sense.
“Where are we going?” I ask as I trail along in his footsteps, following him through my own woods, the woods of my boyhood, my simpler days and now my haunted ones. The woods I am supposed to know better than any other because I spent more hours here than I ever did in my own house.
“You are evil, Marcus,” he says.
Was that what I asked him? Did he not hear me?
“That is nonsense,” I say, though I am not remotely sure that it is. I quite frankly don’t know what I am, what I am capable of. It occurs to me that being so unsure of oneself and one’s capabilities may be a pretty fair working definition of evil. “Where are we going?”
“You are as evil as you are good. You have powers—which you already know—but there is much more to discover. Your powers, Marcus, like your nature, can cut both ways.”
“I’m not evil.” It’s as much a decision made out loud as it is a statement. “Even if I have powers, I don’t have to be evil.”
“No, you don’t have to be evil. But you’ll probably want to be. Being bad, Marcus, can feel very good.”
“To you.”
“To everyone. The difference is, you have the power to be bad in a big way. You have to stop denying this right now. You have to commit yourself right now, or son … you cannot even contemplate how dark ‘dark’ can be.”
“Where are we going?”
“You either master this power—this magic, an obair, and the dark impulse that comes with it—or you succumb to it.”
He stops now, turns and stops me in my tracks. “I think you understand me. I think you grasp my meaning. And what’s more important, I think you feel the impulse I am talking about.”
I suppose—from the expectant look, from the fact that nobody’s going anywhere—that he’s waiting for a response. I suppose I had better give him one, before he slices or gouges me again.
“No,” I say. “You’re talking about yourself. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now tell me, where are we going?”
He shakes his head, so disgusted with me, so disappointed. I cannot care about that. I cannot care what he thinks. I have to sort things out for myself, because on top of being evil in general, this guy is not to be trusted.
“So who is to be trusted?” he asks, as he approaches the bank of the river. Where Jules wound up. Where I crashed the truck looking for her and almost joined her. Where I wish I had joined her. Only now, it is the last place I want to be.
I back up as he walks into the water. Steadily, he strides out until he is up to his waist, his chest, his neck. The river is running medium fast, but it appears not to trouble him at all.
“I’m not going out there,” I say.
“Marcus,” he says calmly.
“No,” I say, not calmly.
He marches purposefully back out of the water toward me. I take one, two more steps back, but my eyes—my whole body, it seems—are glued to him. I have no idea what he is going to do, but I know I need to get away, and I know that I can’t,
He is up and out of the water now.
And dry as a stone.
He takes my hand. I do not—cannot—struggle.
“I have to take you a little more in hand now, so to speak,” he says as he leads me into the water with him. “We cannot continue having messy scenes like that last one. We cannot continue battling one another. And you have to appreciate that truly, you do not have the power to resist me if I want to overpower you. Not yet.”
I am up to my neck in water that seems not to be even touching me, though it is all over me. Water that does not even seem wet.
“Well, yes. That much I’m learning. When it comes to you, I am powerless.”
“For the time being,” he says with gravity as we submerge. “For the moment.”
He leads me down and down and onward, like I am some underwater kite. Finally we hit bottom, and we walk, as if the pull of the current and the buoyancy of our bodies mean nothing to us, as if we are breathing real air. Fish flick past. Litter and debris and plant life all do what rushing water is supposed to make them do. We pass bottles and shopping carts, an old car, a sofa …
And finally, we come to the point.
No. This is too much. This, I am not prepared for. I feel my heart tearing….
“No,” I say, and try to head back. I pull out of his grasp and take two steps toward shore.
Water overtakes me, the way it does other people. I accidentally inhale a lungful and feel a brief rush of terror. I am lifted, tipped up by the current, spun, and thrown downstream. I fight it briefly, then I give in. Yes, I want this. Let the water take me.
And then his hand is on me again, and I am back down, dry and walking. My lungs feel as though they are on fire.
“No, please,” I beg.
“Yes,” he says serenely, and before we can say more we are standing, the two of us, like a pair of solemn mourners at a wake, in front of her. In front of Jules’s prone, perfect self.
She is not the blue and bloated creature I met when I crashed the truck into this river. She is Jules. Dressed in her Jules-made, flowing and billowing and rainbow-colored hippie garb. Her face is calm, beautiful and untouched. She rests upon a great shelf of rock, as if lying in state—as untroubled by the nature of the river as we are.
“Ah, Jules,” I choke. “Ah … my Jules.” I feel as if the water is very real now, and salty, and touching only my eyes. It is an effort to keep them open, to look at her. I want to close them and lie down next to her, and remain there for as long as she will let me.
My father waits an appropriate, respectful couple of minutes before he goes back to whatever he is trying to do to me.
“You knew, of course. You knew she was gone for real.”
I nod.
The water takes Jules’s flowing garb and her mass of straight, dark hair and makes it fly all about her, billowing as if blown by the wind.
I look down.
“Look at her,” he insists.
I do as he says.
“You know about responsibility, son.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You know, now, about power and responsibility.”
I look down again.
“Look at her.”
; I want to cry.
“Say it, Marcus. Look at Jules—”
As he says her name, it is as though a harpoon has been shot through my back, my lungs, my heart.
“Look at her and say it. ‘I did this.’”
That, of course, is the thing I do not want to say. Can’t I just leave it? But it is too late, because spinning in my mind is that night: Jules lying below me, and then the screaming and then the blood, and then the screaming and then, my God, the blood.
“Say it, Marcus. Let me hear you say it. Let yourself hear it.”
I wait. I look at her. I can’t look at her.
“Look at her.”
I look.
“I did this,” I say suddenly, struggling for breath. “I did this. I killed Jules. I did this.”
I cover my face with my hands. He cannot make me look anymore. Well, he probably can, but I don’t care. I am broken. There is no more trying—to resist acceptance or responsibility or anything at all. I am coming apart.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, his arm is around my shoulders. I want to fight him off, but somehow I don’t want to, either. The river is turning by degrees back into a normal river, as the current sweeps past us now, carrying debris, leaves, a solitary fish. He holds me and begins walking me away.
I snap to and realize we are leaving; we are leaving Jules—leaving at least the remains of her—and I don’t want that, not yet, not before having had a chance to say my proper …
She is gone. There is no Jules there when I look back at the shelf of slate where she lay seconds earlier.
He continues leading me on, away, up the gradual, easy bank sloping out of the river, past old tires and frogs and bikes and barrels.
I keep looking back.
When we finally emerge from the water, Port Caledonia is not waiting to greet us.
We are in the stream directly behind our house in Blackwater. Eleanor, my mother, is up there, visible at the kitchen window.
We are standing ankle deep in the lazily moving water. Jules is a memory again, and I feel the need for something familiar, normal, innocent, to push that memory farther away. I can’t resist the urge to do what I do. I pick up stones, sorting through them for skippers. And I start skipping them across the stream.
“So now what?” I ask, numb.
“Now you know more of what you need to know,” he says. “Now it is time for you to be with me. To learn the rest.”
“Be …” I have to stop throwing rocks for this. “Be … with you?”
“That is the way it has to be, Marcus. You know now what you are capable of, and you know it is not all good. You know there are others out there with an interest in you. And you know—or are beginning to know—my power, yes?”
I look at my mangled hand, rub my neck, and think about him—as living flesh in the hospital, as he is now, and as he appeared to me before: the ephemeral flashes of him—in my tree, in my house that first time … and that terrible night with Jules. He was there then, too. Then as now, there was a power radiating from him—a power that is unmistakable and scary. He is not to be trusted. I skip a stone.
“The time has come for you to be educated and trained, and I am the only one who can do it. It is time for you to be who you are, and to be with me.”
I feel my face flush. He can do—and I mean this from the bottom of my good and evil heart—whatever he deems fit to do to me now. I don’t care.
“Son of a bitch,” I say, “it is time for me to be with her.” I point to the window, where we can see Eleanor at the kitchen sink. “Just as it has always been time for me to be with her. Your time, old man,” I say—and I am aware of taking a massive risk as I drive my index finger repeatedly into his chest—“passed, a long, long time ago.”
He stands there, looking off, then looking up at Eleanor. The longest time passes. It’s weird, even for him. The scary something pouring off of him is gone now, replaced by something a lot more uncertain. A lot less powerful.
“I’m sorry for that,” he says softly. He does not appear to be speaking to me.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, to no one in particular.
Finally he focuses once more on me.
“I’m sorry,” he says for the last time. “But there are more pressing issues than that.”
Right now he is very lucky that he is the all-powerful one and I am not. More pressing issues? I would cut him down without the slightest hesitation right now, if I had what it takes.
“Old man,” I say, “you’re a shit old man.”
“That I may be, but I am your old man.”
He holds up a fist, displaying clearly the ring. The twisted, bony, staghorn ring. Identical to the one I wear, presumably left by him, in the attic, for me.
“Oh,” I say, first a little startled, then not. “Is that it? Is that the symbol, the bond, the connection? Is that the big deal?” I hold my ringed fist up to his. “Well, you know … I don’t want it, anyway.”
With great drama and force, I use my mutilated right hand to wrench the ring off my left middle finger. No go. I work it and I work it, but it won’t come any looser. In fact, I cannot get the ring to even twist in a circle around my finger so that I can unscrew it.
“The ring doesn’t come off,” he says.
I ignore him and keep applying pressure, spitting on it, torturing myself trying to twist it, though it feels like it is welded in place.
“The ring doesn’t come off,” he repeats. “Only the finger does.”
I stop immediately. I stare at the finger, looking for a clue.
“My god,” I say when I see it.
“That is the Prince’s ring, and you are the Prince,” he says. “The bone of that ring is yours. The bone of that ring is you.”
He could not be more right. I see now where portions of the staghorn twist out of sight, disappear under the flesh of my finger, then reappear again. It is alive. It has grown in and out of me, snaking like a vine, and fusing with my very bones.
“You can no more deny your power or your place in line than you can deny the existence of your finger.” He holds up his other fist. He stands like a heavyweight fighter, both fists in front of his chin, displaying his Prince ring, the ring that is like mine, on one middle finger. On the middle finger of his other hand is another ring. It is bigger, more gnarled, more intricately entwined with his flesh, his bones.
I point at the larger ring. “This means you’re It, I take it? That you’re the One?”
He nods. “For the time being, yes. Someone may want these rings one day, Marcus Aurelius,” he says. “And despite our power, someone might be able to take them. We have magic, but we are flesh.”
I cannot help staring, my eyes like pinballs banging from one ring to another to another, examining them, watching them eat into my bones and his.
“The flesh is weak, Marcus. You have enemies within and without. You need protection, and education. You need me.”
I am mesmerized, and then I am shattered, as Eleanor, having seen, is banging on the window, throwing it fully open, then screaming, screaming, screaming my name.
CHAPTER
2
“Where have you been?”
“Right. Well. I guess ‘around’ won’t quite be good enough, huh?”
Very coolly—because she is a very cool mother, even under extraordinarily stressful circumstances—Eleanor declines to respond.
“It’s a longish story,” I say, desperately hoping she is late for an appointment.
“I have the time-ish,” she says. “Let’s start with, who was that with you out at the stream?”
Oh my. Now where do we go? I don’t know, but I at least know where we start. We start by ruling out the truth. If I were to tell Eleanor that I was consorting with this particular devil … well, she’d be happier to find out I was with the real one.
She needs a good, quick, convincing story.
And I’m not up to the job.
“There was nobody with me at the
stream,” I say.
“Oh Jesus, Marcus, will you please try a little harder? You vanish on me, and you’ve been gone all night—”
“Whoa. All night? Just one? Not, like, two, three days?”
“You don’t even know?”
Without meaning to, I swear, I am making this ten times harder on her than it needs to be. And it’s already pretty hard anyway.
“Where’s the truck, Eleanor?”
“The truck is in front of the house, Marcus!” she shouts. I am feeling waves of guilt now. It takes a great effort to get Eleanor shouting at me.
But even as I try to pull it together and be cool for her sake, another question comes spilling out, like we are trying to piece me together, together. I can’t help myself.
“So the truck’s okay?” I ask.
She is totally unwigged now.
“It looks okay! I haven’t spoken to it today, but I’ll ask, if you like! Marcus Aurelius, what is going on here? Where have you been? Who was that man standing in the water with you? And why are you trying to make me crazy?”
She doesn’t know the half of it, of course. She hasn’t even noticed that, though I’ve been standing ankle deep in the stream, none of me is wet.
I could make her even crazier. Her ex-husband, my ex-never-father, is not only here alive, but—it now appears—he can kill, maim, and heal with one finger. And apparently, he can also completely banjax time and throw in a little auto repair and valet service. What a guy. Where do we start?
I can do better.
“Jules is dead,” I say.
There is the kind of silence now that you normally only experience underwater. Eleanor’s mouth hangs open, and her eyes go all out of focus as she tries to concentrate on me.
“Marcus. That can’t be true. No.”
“It was a car crash, El. And it’s all too true.”
Her bottom lip pops out a bit, and her chin gets those little puckers in it, the way it does.
“I’m okay,” I say, but it has no effect.
She comes to me, wraps me up, and holds on tight. Her head rests on my shoulder, and my head rests on her shoulder, and for this moment, things feel like some version of right. Sad, for sure. Scary, no question. Uncertain and unsettling and in a big and insistent way, unhappy, yes.
