IGMS Issue 50 (15 page)

The room was thick with silence. Five adults, spellbound by a ten-year-old boy.

Jack wiped his nose on his sleeve. "They . . . uh . . . finished, I guess, and he got off her, and they smoked a cigarette, and all the time, he's laughing, and she's giggling, and I can't run or anything. They got dressed and walked off into the woods. And I could move finally. I wanted to run, but I didn't. They'd left matches and cigarettes on the ground. Other things- notebooks. Full of his symbols. I ripped them up, and I burned them, but they . . . those symbols crawled into my hands.

"He came back," Jack said, and sobbed a little. "He found me as I stuck a burning notebook inside his tower. He held me on the ground and put his hand over my mouth and hit me and hit me. But I had his symbols and he couldn't . . . he couldn't do what he wanted. So he said that if I told anyone, he'd eat Zandy, and he'd make Tommy cut her up. And he'd make me watch, and there was nothing I could do to stop him, except shut my mouth, and he'd know if I said anything, he'd know.

"He sent reminders--the wind that night, remember? So I had to get up. I had to . . . I had to protect Zandy and Tommy, and his symbols showed me how, only I don't know if I ever got it right, because they didn't sway, like his did. Not until I figured out that ink wasn't enough."

Tara's fingers were just over the rough scar tissue between Jack's thumb and forefinger. An imprint of his teeth. A crescent moon, my son Jack has the moon on his hands, carries it wherever he goes . . .

Madness. Jack had taken the world in his crescent-moon-hands and made it incomprehensible. But Tara looked into his eyes. No madness there. There was fear. Shame. Anger. And fierceness, oh, the fierceness in her little boy's eyes! What to say against that?

Say it's insane. Say, "You need stronger medication, Jonathon Lorenzo." Say something to stop the craziness pouring from his lips. Clap hands over that mouth, keep him quiet.

Someone else had wanted a quiet, obedient little boy. Tara sucked a breath, kindling the anger in her guts like a furnace pulling in air. This Greg Olsen had put his hands on Jack and had
hurt
him. It didn't matter how insane Jack thought the world was. She'd seen the bruises. He hadn't gotten that black eye in some nightmare, or through some concoction of brain chemistry and environment. A man had thrown her son to the ground, had mashed his hands over Jack's mouth, had held him down and beaten him.

"We found your papers," Tara said. Her voice cracked.

"I had to keep Tommy and Zandy safe," Jack said. "I couldn't do anything else, I'm sorry. I know what it looks like, but I couldn't think of another way to protect them. Angela was always watching me. Until you washed her hair, Mom. Then . . . I don't know, it
did
something to her, and she stopped. So I thought that maybe it was time to finish it one way or another . . . and that meant tearing down his tower and burning his books. I was scared, because he was already so angry. But today I did it. I pulled down his tower and burned all his books but one."

"This one," Andrew Dowser said, his voice as soft as Jack's. His fingers lingered over the cover of the notebook. He looked for a moment as if he feared to open it, but then he did. Tara watched him flip through the pages, and saw what was written, and drawn, there. Symbols, and pictures of children surrounded by symbols. Symbols skewering, maiming, suffocating children.

"You brought this to the police?" Mike asked.

Office Meadows answered. "Not exactly. I spied your son slipping away from school. He lost me in the woods, but I followed the smell of burning paper and caught up to him. He's not lying about the tower, or the tree, or the symbols. It was weird."

"He's there," Jack blurted suddenly. "He knows what I did."

"You're safe here, son," Detective Cartwright said.

Jack shook his head. "You have to kill him."

Officer Meadows and Detective Cartwright looked at him uncomfortably. Officer Meadows offered, "We'll keep your family safe. Don't worry. We've already posted a couple of men on your street, watching your home."

Jack said bluntly, looking directly at Andrew Dowser, "He's a witch. You have to kill him, or . . ."

Andrew Dowser's mouth was a straight line. He prodded the notebook with his finger. "This is old. The pictures aren't pictures of kids you know, are they?"

"You have to kill him," Jack said again. Whining now. "You have to or . . ."

But he didn't say what would happen if they didn't. He sagged back in his chair, chewing on his lip. "Kill him," Jack said. "Please."

"We need to find these other children, Jack," Andrew Dowser said. His right hand lingered over a page written in rusty ink-that-was-not-ink. A picture of girl with a line of symbols stringing from her nose, the teeth in her open mouth dissolving into scratches and stripes. "They deserve justice just as much as you and your family."

"They want him dead," Jack said.

"I do too," Andrew Dowser answered. Tara thought he was going to say something else--he opened his mouth, and then closed it again. He gave Jack a thin smile, and closed the notebook.

"What do we do now?" Mike asked.

They went home.

Jack fell asleep almost as soon as he buckled himself in.

Mike and Tara held hands and spoke softly to each other of secrets, and little boys, and monsters. They cried together in the quiet, in their car.

Jack didn't wake up when they pulled into the driveway. His breathing was deep and steady when Mike pulled him out of the seat. It never wavered when they took him up the stairs and laid him out on the bed. His eyes fluttered open once when Tara took off his filthy t-shirt and jeans, but even then, it wasn't to wake. He moved just enough to allow her to manipulate his arms and legs out of his clothes, and then he collapsed on his pillow.

Beneath his left armpit was a wide, padded bandage. Tara hesitated, then moved his arm out of the way. She pried up the edge of the bandage to see the tiny, deep cut it hid. Jack's inkwell, she thought. His pain, his misery . . . his magic, if anything he said was true.

Magic and witches. Spells and enchantments, and tall towers, and danger, and madness.

How could such big things, such terrible things, fit into the heart of a boy?

She pulled a sheet over him and let him sleep.

When she turned to the hallway, Mike was there holding his cell phone. He mouthed, "They found him."

Tara dreamed of a storm again. And upon waking, she found it was true.

Lightning strobed. The wind tore at the trees in the front yard, making them creak and rattle. Jack stood at her bedroom window, looking out at the world. His shoulders were hunched forward, tight; one hand played over the window pane.

"Jack?" Tara said.

He started a little. "Mom. Thunder woke me up."

Mike stirred next to her, and sat up. "Everything ok, buddy?" he asked.

"Yeah," Jack said, shifting. "No. I don't know."

Tara knew how he felt. She patted the bed, and he came to sit on the edge of it. Still looking out the window. She draped an arm around him, and tugged him backwards, so he was lifted off his feet, rolling over her body to land in the center of the bed, between her and Mike. Mike scooped the blankets over him, over all three of them. In the storm's flash, Tara caught Jack's smile--his own dazzle, his own boy-sized lightning bolt--before the sheets drifted over his face.

"It's been a rough couple months," Tara said.

Jack didn't try to wriggle out of the blankets. Tara watched the covers rise and fall as he breathed.

"Rough," Jack echoed.

"They caught Greg Olsen," Mike said.

"I know," Jack said.

Neither of them asked how he knew. They put their hands over the blankets that covered him, joining fingers above his chest. Tara could feel his heart-beat through the comforter, the sheet, through his ribs and muscles, thumping quick and steady.

The wind screamed. The three of them listened to it, listened to their own breathing. Listened to the house all around them. All these hidden noises, I know them, I've learned them again. I know them all.

For now.

She heard Tommy's door open, and heard him pad down the hallway. A moment later, he stood in their room. "Mom?" he asked softly. "Is Jack . . .?"

"He's here," Tara said.

"Ok," Tommy said. "Good. He wasn't in his bunk, so . . ."

The storm beat at the house, covering Tommy's voice. He shifted at the doorway, half in their room, half out. They didn't tease him about being afraid of the storm; they welcomed him into the bed with them. To no one's surprise, a moment after he was settled, Zandy started squalling.

"She's going to drool and snore," Tommy said when Mike went to get her.

"It's a good thing we have a king-sized mattress," Tara said.

There was a lot of wiggling and a few complaints about being squished. But in the end, Tara and Mike stretched their arms across their children, joining fingers in the middle. Tara named them in her mind as the wind drove the night on--Jonathan Lorenzo, Alessandra Teresa, Thomas Michael and Michael Gray.

Jack, Zandy, Tommy, Mike.

Tara
, Jack, Zandy, Tommy, Mike.

Over and over again, a litany. A chant. A prayer, my prayer, the truest one I've ever prayed, because what are these children, this family, if not the sum of my deepest thoughts, my beliefs, all my hopes? All of everything I wish, dream, and fear, wrapped in these bodies.

She felt Mike's hand loosen its grip on hers. Tommy's breathing slowed, and his long limbs relaxed. Zandy began to snore. All of them asleep, except her, and Jack--she could feel the tenseness in his body against her own.

The wind roared. Lightning flared. Thunder cracked.

"It's him," Jack said. "They didn't kill him, and now he's here, and I can't do anything. I used up all my blood against his tower, and why didn't they kill him, why isn't he dead . . ."

He took a breath, and let it out in a long whine. Tara knew the sound, now. She let it curl in her ears, didn't try to hush him. Didn't try to silence him. She stroked his hair in the darkness and let him push out his terror.

She wanted to tell him that things would be all right. That this was just a storm. That nothing was out there in the wide, dark world except wind and rain. But after seeing those symbols crawling over paper, after watching Jack's blood stretch and scratch against the scraps he'd made to protect his brother and sister . . . She had no faith in the illusion of a sane world, now.

She had faith in Jack. And in Mike, and Zandy, and Tommy. And herself.

Jack gathered another deep, mournful breath. Tara touched his lips, lightly. His wide eyes found her.

"There are always going to be storms, Jack," she said. "Darkness, lightning, thunder, wind, rain. And fear. And maybe witches. Maybe every terrible thing you can imagine is really real, somewhere, lurking out there in the world."

"Ma, mommy, mommy," he moaned. His eyes skittered to the window, toward the bursting storm, the clattering trees.

She pushed her own fear away. "Those horrible things don't fill the world. There are shadows, but storms pass. Nights turn into dawns."

A hundred platitudes tripped on the back of her throat. You can do hard things. The right thing isn't always the easy thing. What doesn't kill you can only make you stronger. Tara gathered Jack in her arms, squeezing him close to her, and uttered none of them. "Jack, Jack. My little middle."

An old, family joke. The storm rattled the windows, but Jack's eyes lost a splinter of their fear. Because this--this was Tara's tower. This room, this home. And her symbols? Spread out on the bed before her. Let the old witch have his notebooks of whirling fractals, his dancing runes. None of them could stretch limbs like Tommy, or sing like Zandy. None of them could protect as fiercely as Jack.

The witch, and poor Jack, they thought to find power in pain and blood. Holding her son to her, listening to her family breathing, sleeping around her, Tara found better magic. She'd poured her knowledge, her love, her
everything
into this home, into these warm, living people.