The Heavens Rise (11 page)

Invisible hammer. Invisible hammer.
These were the two words he couldn’t get out of his head; he thought if he kept thinking them over and over again they would bring him to a logical, earthbound explanation for what he was witnessing.
No, it’s not an invisible hammer that did in these poor little critters, you silly fool, it was actually a . . .
But his mind wasn’t filling in the blank, and there was blood over his clothes and
hands, and the smell was worse here, much worse than it had been on the other side of the yard.

He was on his feet suddenly, because now the only thing that mattered was getting the bloody mud off his hands. Not just off his hands. Off his
flesh.
He spun around and knocked into the glass door at the top of the steps. Inside there would be water. Inside there would be a sink and soap and paper towels and maybe some of that new white tea–scented soap that always put him in a good mood because it reminded him of the redhead in Biloxi who’d kept it in her bathroom, one of the only decent one-night stands he’d ever had in his life.

He closed one gore-smeared hand around the doorknob.

Marshall Ferriot stared back at him from the other side of the glass. The kid was sitting upright in a motorized wheelchair. And he was smiling at him, and the smile was growing, his chapped lips curling into a leer that seemed to take up his entire emaciated face.

Hello, there.

He had mouthed the words so clearly Shire could read his lips. Then he cocked his head to one side and his leer softened into a smile that was less eager, and more self-satisfied.

Shire was still wondering how the doorknob had managed to dissolve in his grip when suddenly the entire world was wiped away as if with one quick swipe of a giant hand.

CHAMBERLAND ISLAND

T
he darkness gained texture. Fading sunlight glinted off the floorboards between his bloody sneakers and the foot of the bed across the room. For a few delirious seconds, Allen Shire thought it possible that the animal slaughterhouse and the stallion from hell had been the components of some terrible dream, and that he was really back in the Renaissance Concourse Hotel, watching flights to Paris, Los Angeles and—
oh, please, God, yes!
—New Orleans take to the air outside his window.

The blood on your sneakers is plenty real, jackass.

Nylon rope secured his legs to a dining table chair that was all cherrywood slats, but for some reason his hands were free. The chair wasn’t that heavy. He could probably make a run for it if he hoisted the thing up onto his back and pumped his legs with all his might. But he wasn’t alone. There was a woman sitting on the floor nearby, and she wasn’t moving.

His eyes were still adjusting to the darkness, and he knew that if he looked away he would spare himself some soul-searing, unforgettable sight. But he couldn’t. In the corner of the room, Elizabeth Ferriot leaned against the wall, legs splayed, head rolled forward on her neck so that her dirty blond tresses looked like frozen icicles framing her downturned face. The bloody meat cleaver she’d apparently gutted herself with rested precariously in one lifeless hand, and on the white wall above her head, part of a word had been smeared in blood—
her blood, her blood, her blood,
a shrill voice screamed inside Shire’s head—across the wall: E L Y S

Every profanity he’d ever learned came hissing out of him in a wild rush of desperate whispers.

Across the room, a single paper trembled slightly in Marshall Ferriot’s slender hand as he set it down on the tray table in front of him. The tray table was attached to his wheelchair, and his wheelchair was the high-backed kind designed to accommodate a patient capable of almost no upper body movement. The kid was fully conscious but barely capable of getting around on his own. So how in the name of God had Shire’s file end up on his tray table?

“You’ve read this?” Marshall asked, holding up one page of the file in his trembling fingers. Shire nodded. “Fascinating,” Marshall whispered. His voice was still raspy from years of disuse. “Do you believe what you read? You really think I was trying to kill myself that night?”

“I d-don’t know . . . Really. I—”

“I mean, there are far easier ways to kill yourself, aren’t there?”

“I guess . . . yeah . . .”

“I didn’t, Mr. Shire. I didn’t try to kill myself that night. What happened was something else altogether. The same thing that’s happening to you.”

“I don’t under—”

“The bank sent you? Daniel J. Stevens—he’s the trustee?”

Shire felt his lips moving, but there was nothing coming out. No
sound, no breath. Marshall looked up from the papers in front of him, and maybe it was just a trick of the fading sunlight, but he looked surprisingly calm and patient for a man who had just returned to the world after eight years of darkness.

Shire nodded; it was the best he could do.

“And he sent you after us because she took me out of some place called Lenox Hill?”

Shire nodded again. His Adam’s apple felt like a cue ball inside his throat.

“Why?” Marshall Ferriot asked.

“Wh-whad d’y do . . . you . . .”

“Why did she take me out of Lenox Hill, Mr. Shire?” he asked with what sounded like strained patience.

“One of the nurses, she tr-tried to k-kill you.” This earned the young man’s undivided, wide-eyed attention. “She thought you could . . . they th-thought you could m-
make
people do things.”

“Smart girl.”

“How—how long have you been . . . ?”

“Awake?” Marshall asked. “Is that really what you want to know?”

“I don’t kn-know what you . . .”

“You want to know if it was an accident. Like the others. The nurse. You want to know if what I did to
her
”—he jerked his head in the direction of his sister’s corpse—“is like what I did to them?”

“I don’t know what—”

“Yes, you do, Mr. Shire. You know. They all told you. It’s right here in your file. And
now,
you’d like to know if I was awake when I forced my sister to use the knife on herself and start painting.”

Shire only realized he had started to cry when his image of Marshall Ferriot wobbled and split behind a fresh sheen of tears. Snot filled his nostrils, and several sharp intakes of breath weren’t enough to clear them. And he longed desperately to be back on that sunlit bench in Freedom Park with Arthelle Williams. Or maybe walking
along the shore with that father he’d ridden over with on the ferry, smiling contentedly as they watched the man’s two small children blow the sand off seashells and speculate wildly about what might be swimming just offshore. Because now it felt like that same man’s brusque nod of farewell had contained some sense of foreboding, some vague sense that horrors were waiting for Allen Shire just up the central trail of Chamberland Island. And he felt like a fool, a fool for having walked up here alone, all this way. But how could he have known? How could he have known that voodoo was real and that animals can explode before your eyes from blows struck by invisible hammers?

“To answer the question you are too afraid to ask, sir. I don’t remember what happened to my sister, or the nurse.”

“Tammy Keene,” Shire said, so forcefully he startled himself. It felt as if some trapped bubble of determination and self-will had worked its way free and to the surface of his being. His captor might be a monster, but the nurse had a name, goddammit, before some phenomenon Shire couldn’t understand had stolen it from her. “Tammy Keene. That was her name.”

The young man in the wheelchair dismissed this with a distracted nod.

Outside the glass door were three metal trash cans Shire hadn’t noticed before. He hadn’t noticed them because they hadn’t been there. And now they were lined up at the foot of the back steps, lids askew atop the animal carcasses stuffed inside. It started pouring all of a sudden, and the clouds of flies around each trash can departed like apparitions.

“Thank you for your help in the yard, Allen.”

Shire screwed his eyes shut, as if he could will himself away from this dark bedroom with the same baffling, supernatural skill Marshall Ferriot had used to make him clean up all the carnage in the backyard.

“The animals are different, you see. They can’t go for very long is
the problem. Their little skulls, they just . . .
give way
. No better word for it. But with people . . . With people, everything is different. And now that
you’re
here, I can find out how.”

•   •   •

Shire was outside. He was holding a muddy shovel in his hands, his arms burning from exertion he couldn’t remember.

The rain had soaked him from head to toe.

“Katrina, Shire.”

He was standing in a five-foot-deep hole he couldn’t remember digging. Marshall was parked in the open back door. He felt the same sense of lost time as when he’d come to after his wisdom teeth surgery.

“
Who
is Katrina? She’s in your notes. It says, ‘Marshall relocated before Katrina.’ ”

“We got hit,” Shire answered. His lungs felt like they were seizing up as they struggled to perform deep, much-needed breaths he apparently hadn’t been capable of while Marshall forced him to dig the hole. The trash cans towered over him. The rain had stopped, so the flies were back, and occasionally several of them would land on Marshall’s blanket-draped legs.

“Hit . . .” Marshall said, with a furrowed brow and a searching, almost pleading look in his eyes.

“A hurricane,” Shire answered, and it came out like a seagull’s squawk. He struggled to get his breath back lest he risk the kid’s impatience. “A big one. Almost as big as Camille. The eye, it hit Bay St. Louis, but the way it was moving, it drove water up all over the levees and into the city. Mid-City. Lakeview. Chalmette. St. Bernard . . . The Lower Ninth Ward. There was water all through ’em. People got trapped on their roofs, died in their attics. For days it went on. Days and days.”

He was astonished to find that reciting the cold, clinical details of this cataclysm, which had shaped every nightmare he’d suffered since the summer of 2005, brought about a strange kind of stillness inside
him, as if the only thing that could distract him from his present agony was the memory of a different, more distant, pain.

The kid’s stare was vacant all of a sudden, dreamy almost, and it was impossible to tell how this news was affecting him. Shire couldn’t even guess how the enormity of such a revelation about someone’s hometown would have affected a normal person who had been asleep for almost a decade, let alone a sadistic fuck like Marshall Ferriot.

“But it’s still there, right? New Orleans. It’s still there, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s . . . different. But it’s still there.”

“Good. Then they’ll still be there too, probably. Both of them.”

Who was the kid talking about? Surely not his parents; their deaths were referenced in his file multiple times. Other family members? There were hardly any left except some second and third cousins who’d never been involved with the family business. The kid had no life waiting for him back in New Orleans. None that Shire had seen any evidence of. But there was no chance in hell Shire was going to point this out to him now.

“I’m so glad you’re here, Mr. Shire. See, it’s going to take me awhile to walk again, and I’ll need plenty of help.”

The smell. A wave of the awful smell hit him from the trash cans, and it occurred to him that he was digging a repository for all the animal carcasses he’d been forced to collect, and he was digging the thing just a few feet away from the back door of the house.
Marshall
was making him dig the thing just a few feet from the back of the house. And if that was the case, that meant this thing he had, this
power
he was using, it had range. And if it had range, then maybe he could make a run for—

He held the last tendrils of this thought to him as the darkness closed in around him with silent speed.

•   •   •

He was staring down into the pit now and the trash cans were empty, their contents emptied into the grave’s muddy bottom in a tangle of stiff legs and blood-matted fur and desiccated scales. And because it truly
was like lost time, the thought he’d gone under with was still right there with him, a whisper in his ear through the rain.
Range
, he thought. And in a flash of insight, it turned into another word.
Run!

“Now let’s—”

But before Marshall could finish the sentence, Shire hurled the shovel at him and took off running.

He heard the blade strike something with a metallic
thwang,
but he didn’t look back. Just kept running like hell.

Then his right foot seemed to sink into open air and he pitched forward, and when the palmetto leaves didn’t slap him in the face, he knew he had failed and his sob of despair was swallowed by a darkness without time or substance or even the comforting finality of death.

•   •   •

Now he couldn’t move. The house towered over him and his entire body was wrapped in a cold, wet embrace. When he coughed, his chin struck mud.

The grave was closed and he was in it, buried up to his neck. Marshall hadn’t moved an inch. His wheelchair was still parked in the open back door, and the shovel lay across his lap. If Shire had managed to strike him with it, there was no evidence of the blow on Marshall’s face and neck. And there was no evidence of anger in the young man’s contented expression.

“I’m so glad you came, Allen Shire. You see? I have so much to learn, and I’m going to learn it all from
you.
”

NEW ORLEANS

MAY 2013

W
hat the hell are you doing?” Marissa Hopewell shouted. Her voice sounded rain muffled through the iPhone’s tiny speaker, and for a moment, Ben considered hanging up on her and blaming it on a lost connection.

He should have known better than to answer a call from his employer after what he’d just done. But it was instinct, and ever since Marissa had been promoted to editor in chief of
Kingfisher
a few months before, he had been determined not to take advantage of their long personal history. Still, he had no interest in involving her in the text message he’d received a few minutes earlier.