In the Garden of Rusting Gods

by Patrick Freivald

  The urge to create is also a destructive urge.

  She stumbled into the pile of canvases, knocking them aside with her legs, and fell to her hands and knees. Scrabbling through them, she found a dry one she’d ruined days before, back when she still ate, before she’d run out of booze, before her phone had died and taken with it her link to the world outside her apartment. She wiped paint from her hands onto her shirt and picked it up, adding fingerprint smudges to the edge as she set it on the easel.

  Streaks of red and green melded through the dark brown substrate, whorls and streaks that were, at least, possible whorls and streaks. Far too possible.

  With a trembling hand, she picked up a brush, and a pot of canary yellow paint, almost the same color as her wife’s jogging suit. She dipped the brush, and pulled back with a hiss. A bead of red blood formed across the inside of her thumb where she’d cut it on the lid. Another her, one from another life, she might have sucked the blood from the injury, applied a Band Aid, perhaps some antibiotic ointment. Instead, this her, the new her, the her who couldn’t unsee that abominable shape, gripped the brush and let the blood run in rivulets down her forearm and across her fingers.

  Tess’s shattered body screamed through the void, guiding Cassie’s hand as it slashed across the canvas, painting streaks and bends in too many dimensions to mimic the broken form her murderer had left on the grass. Cassie’s blood trickled down the brush and spotted the canvas. She attacked it with the bristles, melding it with the yellow to create a cacophony of hues from deep ochre to bright sunshine and everything in-between. Layer built upon layer as the sun set in ambers and slept then rose blood red to the sounds of distant church-bells and set again under stars that blazed blue-white, until at last Cassie stumbled back and fell to her knees, eyes locked on the dark majesty of her creation.

  The yellow glyph blazed from the canvas like the moon—no, as the moon—and somehow stretching up to and beyond that moon stood jagged spires that reached into an infinite midnight sky, a great crystalline city formed complete from whorls of dark red and green and brown. A city she had no memory of painting. In such a city, lovers could shatter into impossible tangles of flesh and bone yet live still to shed their moonlight, and under such moonlight could dark between-creatures raise their haunted voices in dissonant, piteous praise of a master that knew no pity.

  In such a city a spouse could die yet become the moon.

  Cassie reached forward as if to touch the moon that was her wife, and her eyes widened in wonder. Her fingers took on a pallid gleam not from the windows, not from the incandescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling, but from the moon-glyph’s soft glow. She basked in her wife’s cool mystery, arms dotted with goosepimples from the breeze off the lake.

  A thought seized her, wonderful and terrible and inevitable.

  Towers so tall they touch the moon.

  Dark waters, before unseen and also unpainted, lapped at the cracked, rocky shores of the impossible city, yellow moonlight also flickering from those moving waves, Tessie-shimmers in an eternal, dappled dance. From that shore a faint breeze carried the taste of salt, and blood, and the faint, nose-wrinkling memories of dead fish and rotting seaweed.

  With that breeze on her skin, the scent of the ancient shore in her lungs, she closed her eyes and crawled through.

  Water, too hot and so, so cold, covered her hands and knees, lapped at her thighs and elbows, soaked her clothes and weighed her down. It caressed her, called to her, tugged gently at her sweatshirt, offered her sweet sleep under its glossy surface. But that surface reflected the moon. With murmured thanks for the offer, she shed her wet clothing and stepped onto the shore, let the wind bring goosebumps to her pale, paint-smeared skin. The water’s cooed disappointment drowned under the lap of waves.

  Jagged rocks pricked at her feet, cut them as she crossed the dark crystal shards, some as large as swords, most ground to fine sand. Wet footprints tinged red with smeared brushstrokes behind her as she approached the great, clutching spires, taller than the tallest of mountains, taller than the heavens. She turned from them to look up at the spires.

  Taller than the moon. My moon.

  Between-creatures carried their shadows with them as they slinked from building to building, watched her approach with chittering anticipation. She walked, and walked, for unknown hours, hours and days, as the curve of the earth revealed more and more of the city below the horizon. When at last she got close enough that the impossible city met the ground, the between-creatures sang to her shrill notes no human voice could sing, Riemann harmonies no human mind could hold dancing in prime numbered time-signatures, hard warnings and soft blessings in a language she didn’t understand.

  She hummed to them in her own rough way, too human, too real, and yet they heard her, and sniffed the air, and came to her. They offered their hands, as jagged and broken as the rocks that had shredded her calloused, scarred feet so long ago. Cloaked in shadow and tipped with shining black claws, their hard fingers dripped a silky venom that twinkled with unlight. She took those offered hands, ran her soft fingers across their roughness, touched her fingers to her tongue to taste their poison, bittersweet like honey and turpentine. It burned her throat, brought a rough edge to her song, and they sang it with her.

  They took her hands again and led her forward, into the city, and then up, and up, always higher, toward that soft yellow light. Where there were stairs or ladders leading upward or bridges across the black chasms between spires she took them, and where there were not she made them, painting them with her mind in reds and greens and browns in her quest to reach the moon that was her love.

  Bright blue stars birthed and died and birthed and died, born and reborn from the nuclear ashes of their ancestors, an endless ballet without rhyme or purpose casting metals through the void, to live and die in an endless dance of birth and death and heavier, explosive rebirth. Yet in those strange eons the sun never rose, never set, never dared show its face, never dared hide her love, the moon.

  And the moon, her moon, never moved, never once yielded its place in the sky. Yellow paint dripped from it to spatter across the gantries and bridges and towers of the silent city, Tess’s broken light swallowed by the darkness that could not be satiated even as it dripped across Cassie’s bridges and staircases, even as it dribbled into the dark, hungry seas that surrounded the impossible city. But still the moon dripped, and never did its paint-light wane.

  She climbed, and the between-things climbed with her, and as they climbed her body withered, skin stretched tight over bone and gristle and desiccated muscle, organs drying and crumbling to nothing, yet still full of glorious, unending purpose. It didn’t matter—she could still walk, still paint, still climb.

  And how she climbed.

  The between-creatures sang to her their impossible songs while she climbed, and as the eons passed she learned them, joined their harmonies with her own, singing their song to the moon, her moon, her broken love, dripping its yellow light across broken spires and breaking waves. Again and again she reached for it with shadow-cloaked claws dripping silky black venom that twinkled with unlight, her straining voice keening with the need for one more touch, one more embrace, one more kiss of her lover’s yellow light.

  TAPS

  Molly froze, her backpack half-in and half-out of her locker. It came again, a series of taps and scrapes behind the wall, a repeating rhythm that reminded her of the classic jazz drummers on her dad’s old CDs, Billy Higgins and Jack DeJohnette, Art Blakey and Buddy Rich. The old guard who’d inspired her to pick up the sticks while her friends gravitated to the clarinet or the flute, the tomboys maybe braving the trumpet or sax.

  For eleven years she’d played the drums, straight through to her junior year, and she knew a great beat when she heard one. It sounded again, almost urgent, then cut off in a shriek of metal on metal.

  “Hey!” Kirsten’s voice cut through the
rhythm like a scythe. The five-four brunette bounced on her heels and clutched her geometry book against a pale green sweater that matched her fingernails. “You’re late for class.”

  “Speak for yourself.” Molly pocketed her cell phone and produced a blue slip of paper. “I have a pass.” She nudged her locker shut with her hip and hustled into step with Kirsten, the rhythm a memory hammering at the back of her mind.

  “What did your mom say? About Saturday?” Kirsten’s voice held too much hope, and Molly hated to crush it.

  “She said, ‘No.’ And not the maybe kind of ‘No.’”

  “Did you tell her there wouldn’t be any boys?”

  Molly nodded. “Yeah, and she agreed. And no girls. Or animals. Or pizza delivery. ‘Just because it’s February Break doesn’t mean you don’t have work to do.’”

  Kirsten stopped dead in front of Mrs. Bigg’s room. “Oh, c’mon, how will she even find out from Atlanta?”

  Shoving past, Molly ducked inside so that Kirsten couldn’t see her eyes rolling. Even from her conference in Georgia, Molly’s mom would learn of any transgressions against The Rules. She had neighbors checking in at all hours, a task force of busybodies with one relentless goal: ruin all fun.

  Mrs. Bigg glanced their way long enough to notice the blue pass and then let them sit without interrupting her speech, something about congruent triangles and the stability of bridges. She sat next to Chris DeSouza and looked over his shoulder to copy the notes she’d missed.

  In the back of the room the heater pinged and hissed, the metal cycling through hot and cold phases. As it expanded and contracted, the incessant shudder transitioned into the tapping rhythm from her locker, then back into random noise.

  “Did you hear that?” she whispered.

  Chris shook his head without taking his eyes from the smart board.

  She tapped the rhythm on her desk. The heater answered, then they did it in unison.

  “Miss Fitzgerald?” Mrs. Bigg’s voice cut through her concentration, and the beat disappeared with it. “Can we keep the percussion in the band room?”

  Molly cast her eyes down to her page. “Sorry, Mrs. Bigg.”

  ~

  Sounds followed Molly down the hallway to the drinking fountain: a rattle as the winter wind shrieked past the window, a jingle of keys in Principal Lawson’s pocket, a subtle tapping down the lockers, each with the same distinct pattern. The hair stood on her arms, and an electric shiver coursed up her spine.

  Kneeling to collect her Anthology of American Literature, she ran her fingertips across the thick white cover, then put her nail against the back of the locker and tapped, hard, repeating the pattern as she’d heard it.

  Silence, not even her own breath, held in anticipation of a reply.

  A hand grabbed her wrist, stark white and ice-cold. Molly shrieked and fell back. Her head rang and pain blasted the back of her skull, a black void filled with frozen stars, their cruel light reaching down to rob her of warmth and love and humanity.

  Black tendrils wrapped her, squeezing and lifting her up into the darkness. She screamed again and tried to punch, kick, bite.

  “Whoa!” Chris stumbled back, hands raised in a defensive posture, as the world slammed into place, too bright and too real.

  “What … I …?”

  With his face scrunched with worry, he knelt to pick up her fallen bag.

  “You hit your head.”

  She rubbed her wrist, numb from the cold, and looked into her locker. Aside from her books and folders, it held nothing, with no room for a person or a void or stars. The Anthology sat undisturbed in the bottom.

  “You okay?”

  She dragged her eyes away from the book to look into his baby blues. “Yeah, I think so. Just a spider, freaked me out.”

  He scowled at her wrist. “I’ve never seen spider bites like that. Maybe you should go to the nurse. Get some cream or something.”

  She looked down at the string of hot, mottled-pink welts rising from her skin. They looked feverish, but felt like frostbite. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  He kept pace with her to the end of the hall, then turned left to go to history. She went to the bathroom, locked herself in a stall, and took deep, steady breaths to calm her racing heart.

  ~

  Fifth period, Molly dumped her lunch in the garbage can—chicken nuggets and mashed potatoes with lumpy white gravy and a side of boiled broccoli—and headed for the band room, ears pricked for tapping sounds that didn’t come. Mr. Stevens turned away from the shelf on the back wall, the one that hid the ugly metal access door between the practice rooms, and gave her a cursory wave on his way back to his desk.

  She sat. The smooth sticks belonged in her hands, and her right foot found its home on the pedal to the love-worn bass drum.

  A heavy beat rolled from the bass as her foot pumped. Twirling the sticks once, she set into the snare with a piano drum roll, building it up to a forte before launching into an improvised solo.

  The rhythm flowed out of her, a fire in her arms and legs to defy the cold grip of … whatever the heck that was.

  Sweat beaded on her forehead, so she switched tempo and brought it down to a dull roar.

  The sticks writhed in her hands, and as she struggled to control them they hammered out a rhythm of their own, the rhythm, and cold dread shot through her bones. Her wrist throbbed in time. She forced an improvisation, but of their own volition her arms and hands flowed back to the driving beat. She looked up in alarm to see Mr. Stevens standing at the podium, arms crossed, a bemused look on his face.

  She stopped with a crash on the high-hat, letting the discordant clang jar through her teeth like fingernails down a chalkboard.

  “Where’d you get that groove?” A baby-faced twenty-something, his light brown goatee helped keep people from mistaking him for a student, but Molly always thought his gray eyes hid a weariness he never quite revealed.

  Squirming under the scrutiny, she set the sticks down and met his eyes.

  “Not sure. Why?”

  He chuckled. “It’s Morse Code. I did two years as Signals Intelligence in Qatar.”

  Everything in her screamed not to ask, but she had to. She licked her lips.

  “What does it mean?”

  He tapped it out on the podium. “F. I. N. D.” He paused, then started again. “M. E. Period.” He played it again and again, speeding up with every repetition, and the room shuddered in time. Eyes closed, he didn’t seem to notice the shaking walls, the oppressive darkness as gray clouds swallowed the midday sun, the deep throbbing pulse of blood in her skull.

  “STOP!” She pressed the heels of her hands to her ears to block out the sound.

  His hands hovered above the podium, the smile frozen on his face. Sunlight streamed through the windows, blinding against the snow blanketing the hillside.

  “How about this?”

  He started again, a different pattern, longer.

  She waited for him to finish before speaking.

  “What did that say?”

  “It said, ‘Codes are for hiding things.’” Slumping to rest his chin on the back of his hands, he glanced at the clock—twenty-two minutes to the bell—and scowled. “Where’d you say you heard that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just sort of came to me.”

  “Hell—um, heck of a coincidence, getting every letter. Even the punctuation”

  “Yeah, that’s really weird. Maybe it came from one of my dad’s movies or something and has been bouncing around in my head.”

  “War movies?”

  Nodding, she picked up the sticks and stood. “Yup. Vietnam and World War Two, mostly. He loves the old classics, and documentaries.”

  Mr. Stevens grimaced. “Never saw the real thing, did he?”

  She shook her head. “No. Grandpa served i
n Korea, though. Mom’s dad, too.”

  “I thought as much.” Eyes raised to the clock, he clucked his tongue. “Time flies, and I’ve got work to do. Feel free to play until the bell.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Stevens.”

  He walked back to his desk and picked up a stack of sheet music off his chair, then sat.

  FIND ME. The words flashed through her mind as she picked up the mallets and turned toward the xylophone. FIND ME. She shivered, closed her eyes, and launched into a cover of Copa Cabana, upbeat and airy and not at all dark and cold.

  Behind her the wind rattled the window, and she understood what it said.

  FIND ME.

  ~

  Molly opened a math book on her dresser, turned up the volume on her iPod, and ignored both in favor of her laptop. Fingers soft on the keys, she typed in, “Morse Code Translator” and hit “Enter.”

  She tried a phrase, listened to it, tapped it out on the bedframe, over and over to commit it to memory. Then another phrase, and another.

  An hour later she fell back, head on the pillow, and stared up at the white ceiling, tracing routes through the uneven glossy patches. Beads of sweat cooled on her forehead, and she breathed hard as the songs faded into memory.

  No. Not songs. Messages.

  ~

  The next morning, Kirsten met her as she got off the bus. “How you feeling?”

  Molly shrugged. “What do you mean?”

  “Chris said you hit your head pretty good yesterday, and I didn’t see you at all after. Figured you went home.”

  They meandered toward homeroom on scuffed, faded tiles. Lockers jiggled, shoes shuffled across the floor. Heating vents flooded the hall with tepid air. Molly pricked her ears at every sound, but in the cacophony of human voices she couldn’t pick out any patterns.

  Fingernails dug into her shoulder.

  “Ow!” She flinched back and gave Kirsten a wounded look. “What the heck?”