Decatur (38 page)

“Get away from him!” Marilyn shouted as Gar turned to look at her, his face a thundercloud, eyebrows knitted together, vein throbbing in his temple.

“What are you doing, this has nothing to do with us.” Gar yanked on her, pulling her towards the house.

The kid looked up then, and Marilyn saw the confusion and fear in his face. Ham looked up too, but his face was full of terrible knowing, and Marilyn knew in that instant that the country gypsy was now under the sway of J. J.

“My lady, my desire runs ahead, we must go,” Gar said by way of an excuse, sniffing her hair, pulling the red scarf off, because he couldn’t help himself. Yes, it was there: the sea-salt, the rosemary and the cedar. This place, he was finally in the right place with the source.

The sound of more sirens filled the afternoon air, and Gar felt the urgency of completing the renewal ceremony, feeling in every move a precious leak of his energy;
it really was time
, as he used the dead cop’s gun to shoot his way into the walnut double back doors of Charlesworth Place, not minding but even enjoying the kid’s shrieks by the pond.

Hearing what sounded like firecrackers going off, Max, moving carefully, poked his head around the corner of the house. He froze for a millisecond seeing Marilyn in Gar’s grip, and she saw him too as she was being pulled through the splintered back doors of the mansion, her red scarf slipping from around her shoulders and onto the back steps like a bloodstain;
surprise is our only hope
is what her whole body telegraphed in that moment. Then he saw the gun in Gar’s hand and dropped down under the thick glossy leaves of a massive rhododendron in full purple bloom, not wanting to get into a shooting spree with Marilyn in the middle. From his hiding place he then saw John, one of his independent study group; staring down into the depths of the now filled koi pond and the odd man standing near him. A sense of dread came over him knowing the history of the pond and its legend, this place had already had one suicide and John was a sensitive kid, hell, they were all sensitive kids.
John’s face looked so sad, and the man seemed to be feeding him more sorrow because tear drops were starting to form, leaking out of the clumsy broken and taped framed glasses.
Oh, God, was this creep some kind of willing or unwilling agent of J. J.? Max held the pistol Gretch gave him, weighing it in his hand, and thought never again, never again would he let a student fall prey to the dark corners of the occult. He charged out from the rhododendron as John took another step closer to the stone edge of the large rippling pond.

The pond was singing up to the boy reflected on its surface
:

Come away with me, come away and I’ll drown all your sorrows

Come away with me, come away and end all sad tomorrows.

“John, look at me, it’s Professor Rosenbaum. What ever you’re feeling right now, it’s temporary. Emotions last twelve seconds; don’t let caught in a negative loop. Your life’s too important to waste.” John heard his professor’s hoarse voice but it felt like it was miles away. He plucked at his untucked shirt tails, seeing how wrinkled his second-hand oversized oxford shirt was suddenly
. Trying to look so college, trying to forget about the bullying abuses of high school. He looked like a dweeb
.
Why not just end it? But the professor sounded like he really cared; could he care about him?

Ham had gotten into the day’s activities for beer money and had pulled his costume out of an old trunk they kept in Josie’s crawl space. That was before he met the old man on the mansion’s front porch who welcomed him to his home and then, when Ham climbed the steps, locked his mind on Ham’s own and came through him like a hot knife through butter and suddenly all Ham’s half longings and disappointments melted and he was left with a clear purpose. He would tell these privileged college bastards what life really had in store for them; he would blow their fucking minds and feel good about it. So when the tall college professor came out from under the bushes Ham began to feel the spit and piss rise in him.

“Professor, none of your lessons can save this one, he’s going right into the shitter,” Ham said, feeling the sour taste of all his lost opportunities in his mouth
. Ham should have been a professor, Ham was smarter than any doctorate, Ham had a PhD in life’s real mysteries and for ten dollars he’d give you a glimpse.
All too familiar with the stolen cash boxes and broken whiskey bottles of fairs and walk-up palm reading joints, the psychic turned to give the professor a little street medicine only to have the bookish instructor land a left hook while slamming a gun butt down on his right shoulder
.
“What the hell kind of professor are you? Fuck!” Ham cursed and sagged, falling to his knees, blood coming from his nose.

“Get away from my student,” Max said, standing over him, the gun raised high as John looked up at him with a sense of bewildered wonder and took a step back from the pond. Max put his hand out to the kid and gave him a half-lopsided smile. “John, this guy’s a nobody; but I need help, I want you to get the others, and get them out of here. Can you do that, John - can you help me? We got to move fast now.”

“ Yeah” John nodded, choking up as Max put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, even as he held the gun on the panting Ham who had fallen silent on the grass, wanting them to just go away and leave him.

Max looked at the back door thinking that he might have a better advantage if he surprised Gar by coming through the front. “Come on,” he said and they began to run, leaving the humiliated necromancer holding his bloody nose.

Tina, wearing a long copper dress that had layers like leaves, had a claw-like grip on Julie, the plainest of the independent study group, the one nobody ever noticed, and was dragging her from out of the astrology tent and up to the house,
up to the turret room
, when Father Weston and Gretch Wendell planted themselves square in her path.

“Let go of that girl,” Gretch said.

Tina gave a snarling laugh and kept moving with Julie, “You’re out of your league.”

Using an old seminary trick that had kept generations in line, Father Weston put a hand on her shoulder, keeping it there even as Tina tried angrily to shrug him off. “You look Catholic to me, are you a Catholic?” he said in a steely voice like he could see through her. “Fallen away from the faith, have you? Think of your family now and let go of the student.

A shaming came up in her throat, nearly gagging her and Tina was tugged by a memory of her devout mother back into herself from where she had been, a place where the old man who owned this house owned her. Now all she wanted to do was escape. She saw her half-sister Josie, the fat bitch running clumsily up the lawn with another student close behind. Josie hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting the old man in the black hat and pointed boots. Josie just had that way about her; she always managed never to get really ensnared in anything. Tina looked around wildly and saw the carriage house door partly open: a big brown old fashioned convertible was in there. She squeezed her eyes shut picturing the dashboard and
yes there were keys
. So before she got drawn back into the old man’s spell, she could feel the pressure he was exerting, like he was pushing his fingers through her mind, massaging her thoughts along dark pathways that would serve him, she pushed Julie out of the way and ran for the carriage house and the automobile.

The keys were there in the ignition, just as her sight had told her; she was by far the most gifted of the family. The car jumped to life and as her feet touched the gas pedal and clutch she had the strangest sensation that they were glued fast to them and she would never be free. She roared the stolen car out in reverse. She couldn’t shift into drive; she was stuck in reverse, pulling, straining with every muscle in her legs to lift them from the pedals. All she could think of was the Grimm fairytale of ‘The Red Shoes’, read to her by her own strange and sweetly religious mother; as the shoes danced in her head she couldn’t pull her feet from the black pedals, the car swerving wildly in reverse. She kept trying to look over her shoulder, but it rammed rear first with a tremendous crash into the weeping pine tree, which cracked mightily. The pine broke into two with a sound like thunder and fell half into the car, crushing her in front of the horrified remaining independent study group along with Max, Gretch and Father Weston.

“Fair’s over,” Max muttered, unleashing Rowley and they started running up the stone front steps, Gretch hobbling behind.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Darkness Runs All The Way to Edges

It was nearly time to knock off when, at the edge of his field just on the outskirts of Decatur, Scott Hoover, thirty-four and a born-again Christian, felt something with sharp wings and an ugly sound buzz by his face. He batted at it with one paw and then stepped down from his tractor, his boots crunching on something underfoot in the rich black soil. Underneath his Red Wing work boots there were husks of the bodies of smashed grasshoppers, big ones still wriggling with life. Suddenly the whole field seemed to be a cloud of whirring wings and tearing crunching sounds. Scott Hoover experienced the impossible in his lavishly pest repellent-treated cornfield: thousands of black and green locusts were voraciously chewing on the leaves and stalks of the corn like the poison on the leaves was ketchup on a drive-in burger.

He didn’t take time to think; with Old Testament verses ringing in his ears he drove the tractor to the barn. It was there he hooked his sprayer up and, pouring a mixture of light gasoline into the container, he roared back out the faded white double barn doors and back into the field that was now being stripped down to the roots by the locusts. Brushing them in a panic away from his face he made several large circles in the field with his sprayer. Then he moved to the road and, throwing a lit kerosene lantern into the corn, he saw the coming harvest erupt into flames.

There were yellow Do Not Cross barricades at each end of Marilyn’s street to keep out the just-arriving news reporters, and every police vehicle that could be spared - given the South Shores homicide-fire and the traffic mess of the remainder of the funeral motorcade- was parked this way and that up and down the street. Doors were left open on the vehicles, their scanners all up, now reporting a spreading crop fire as the cops swarmed the decrepit duplex like hornets whose nest has been disturbed. Ambulances were let through and then one body wrapped in white, Patrolman Duffy, was taken out, followed in a few minutes by another, Harry, three days dead on the next gurney. The cops wiped tears, cursed, and every one had his side arm out, spoiling for a fight.
They’d show the bastard that took down a man in blue, oh yes they would
.

Agent Tooley ducked under the Do Not Cross barricade and made his way up the street with his badge in his pocket, wearing his light blue windbreaker with the navy and gold FBI seal on the front.

The rookie, Thompson, was completely freaked out. He had joined the force because his uncle, a long time county sheriff, had taunted him into it. The bristle headed man played an outsized influence on his life as he had no father of his own to lean on. But now, seeing the white wrapped body of Duffy being taken out, the reality of what he had gotten himself into poured over him and he knew that the three murders at the Lincoln Log motel, the housewife in South Shores, the downstairs resident in the duplex, and the cop must all be in some way connected, so in all likelihood the force would declare a sort of war on until they got the perp. When he saw a black man in a windbreaker weaving this way and that way around the cruisers and emergency vehicles he felt more afraid than he ever had been in his life. “Put your hands up, this is a secure area!” he barked, trying to sound like his uncle.

Tooley saw a young patrolman and he let a rush of impatience come over him
. Fuck, why was it always the same?
“FBI”, is what he said tersely but what the kid heard was “SOB” and saw the black man put his hand in his pocket.

Then everything slowed way down for both men, as Thompson raised his gun and Tooley saw the cop’s finger press on the trigger and pump off a round. The agent was just starting to duck as he felt the bullet slam into his hip. Tooley twirled like a dancer and then he was down, down on the ground, and there was a rush of blue over him, with his silver and bronze badge still clutched proudly in his hand.

Lumley knew he shouldn’t listen to the priest but he couldn’t help himself now that every radio station in Illinois was hysterically broadcasting the breaking story of the Murder Spree of the Drifter who attacked Father Troy. So the fat orderly felt like it was his duty to listen to him as he raved about how betrayed he felt and asked repeatedly when he could go back to St. Patrick’s, because he was going to tell the whole parish to bag the entire God thing and fend for themselves because that’s all there was.

“There’s nothing, nothing, Lumley, I know,” Father Troy whispered from where he was seated in his chair with the tray that swung up over his lap, gumming the soft food they had prescribed him more out of a sense of hopelessness than anything else. Lumley had given him a cup of applesauce to get the priest to take his next dose of tranquilizers.

“I’ve got something, though, to show you, I can show you if you can get me on the roof, my man.” Father Troy squinted up at Lumley who was wavering in and out of the double vision that he had started getting since,
since who knew
.

“On the roof, now how’m gonna get you on the roof?” Lumley said, wondering what the priest was talking about. It was a mystery, alright, what was wrong with him, and most of the doctors, nurses, and patients were keeping their distance from Ward 5 E’s newest patient, but the young shaggy priest didn’t bother him. He had been through something with that serial killer that everyone was talking about, Gar. Lumley had a fascination with B-movies, prison novels and psycho killers, keeping a press clipping file on every real life case he could follow. It was a hobby.
A good thing, hobbies
.

“You want to know about Gar, don’t you?” Father Troy asked in a sly way.

“Just ‘cause I asked you something don’t mean I need to know,” Lumley countered, but inside his curiosity was picking up.

“I saw you letting somebody up there, there’s a ladder to the roof at the end of the hall, through the ceiling,” Father Troy said. “I get the big view, you get the inside stuff.” He couldn’t think about Gar without feeling a hammer of pain coming down over and over and knowing that it would never stop. He had to go up top. It was the only way.

“You would tell me what happened when he attacked you?” Lumley said, rubbing his hands on his massive thighs, thinking about what he might do with the priest’s story. He had read about how you could sell stuff like that.

Father Troy nodded. This guy didn’t have much but it might be enough. “Sure,” he said and pushed the pill that was next to the water cup away, “But not on this.”

Lumley bit his lip. Took the pill and put it in his own pocket. Sometimes he would give these out to his pimpled cousin Lucy and she would sit on the basement sofa with him.

“Shift’s changing now, there’s a little window when they’re all locking and unlocking their purses and coats and stuff. You want to go up, get some fresh air?” Lumley said in a little rush. He couldn’t help it. He wanted to know the details about Gar for his hobby. This was as close as he would ever get to a real serial killer.

Father Troy got up and the applesauce slid as he threw the tray aside, falling with a splat on the floor. “You can clean that up later,” he whispered, “Let’s go get some Gar.”

Lumley poked his head out of the door and looked down the hall. Empty. Good. Everyone was down for their late afternoon nap. He ran, his fat behind jiggling, and Father Troy followed after him, a scarecrow in a blue Ward Five East pjs. Lumley reached up and pushed the ceiling tile, it easily moved and pulled the ladder down. Wordlessly he climbed up it with surprising grace for a fat man
.
The inside scoop, he was gonna get the inside scoop. Maybe he could sell the story to the Enquirer
.

They were on the flat roof of the east wing of the hospital in less than thirty seconds. The administration had plans for a helicopter pad but in the meantime the easiest way for maintenance to reach the roof was through the ceiling on locked Ward 5 E. No one ever gave it much thought.

The processed soy fumes from Staley’s were strong and now mixed with the smell of something burning. On the outskirts of town black smoke was billowing. Some kind of fire in the fields. Father Troy stepped unsteadily and looked up, the smoke seemed like it was tempting the dark clouds to mass together, making the shadows sharp on the roof. The raw hole with a shred of what was once his very being opened like a maw in the fractured sunlight.

“Here’s what you want to know,” Mark Troy said as he walked the edge of the roof and looked the five stories down to the parking lot of St. Mary’s Hospital in Decatur, Illinois.

“Get back from there, now Father, this ain’t what you said,” Lumley called but suddenly he was afraid to be out here alone with the priest on the roof.

Father Troy turned to look at the orderly. It wasn’t worth it, he thought, as some dim memory squirmed of a badge for citizenship, his first, a round blue circle embroidered with a white scale for justice. He saw his nine year old hands sewing it
up and over up and over
on a background of khaki, the sash for his uniform, while the heavy snow weighted the black bare arms of the trees outside his window.

“I either try to eat yours, or I fall away. Gar left a broken thread of me inside and that tiny bit, all it wants now is for it to end,” said the priest, closing his eyes and stepping off the edge and falling into the abyss that he was already too familiar with.