The Heavens Rise (3 page)

Even better, he was one of the first people to see this place in its current incarnation. The house had been finished only a few weeks before, and the contractors had filled the pool just a day or two ago. There was some kind of party planned in the next few weeks, probably a housewarming, but she got fuzzy on the details as soon as she brought it up, probably because she wasn’t ready to invite him. He’d floated some details about the shitty fund-raiser at the Plimsoll Club
that his parents were forcing him to attend in a week, just enough to see if she wanted to be his date, but she’d gotten vague and distant then too.

But none of that mattered in this moment. He was here! Elysium!

She dropped the icy milk carton onto a lounger he could barely make out in the darkness. They were standing on flagstones now.

“Let me get some cups, turn some lights on,” she said, already turning for the house.

He took her gently by the arm and held her in place.

“Don’t leave me . . .” he gently whined.

Her laughter was more breath than anything else, and he couldn’t see her face, just that she had bowed her head slightly to keep their mouths from meeting. Lights meant more chatter, more feelings and more bullshit. The dark promised him the taste of her neck, the heft of her breasts and the heat between her slender thighs.

“It’s too dark,” she whispered.

“What are you afraid of? Snakes?”

“Seriously. Don’t even . . .”

But in her rush to make this point emphatic, she’d lifted her lips to within inches of his, and he seized the moment. Their connection was instant, moist, her mouth yielding, her body going limp as he curved his arms around her back. She was as hungry for this as he was. At least it seemed that way for about three minutes, and then she started to stiffen. He needed to make another move, and fast.

He lightened up on the kissing, allowed her to breathe for a second or two, but he kept his arms wrapped around her as he walked them closer to the pool’s dark edge.

“You don’t have to be afraid of anything,” he whispered. “I’ll protect you from all of it.”

Then he hurled them into the pool.

The water was so cold it hit them with the force of an anvil, and only then did Marshall remember what she’d said about its being fed by
some kind of artesian well. But he kept her locked in his embrace, even as she coughed and cursed him and sputtered.

“I’ve got you . . . I’ve got you . . .” he said over and over again, and after trying to pull away from him, she finally relented. When she held to him with fresh childlike desperation, he realized it was her total fear of their dark, rippling surroundings that had sealed her body against his. She would rather cling to him in the freezing cold than dog-paddle a few feet through water she couldn’t see the bottom of.

And so he went back to work, with more force now, attacking her neck, peeling her soaked shirt up above her stomach, palming her breasts and then kneading them, and the whole time he kept waiting for her bone-rattling shivers to come to an end, for the warmth of desire to fill her as it was filling him. But she kept shivering in his arms, no matter what he did to her. And when he went to lift her shirt up over her bra, when her arms became caught halfway overhead inside her soaked sleeves, he realized she wasn’t helping, she was resisting, trying to pull her arms free while kicking herself away from him at the same time.

“Hey,” she said, and her voice was as cool as ice, without a trace of desire in it, and just this simple word told him she was feeling none of what he had just felt. None of the desire, no loss of control.

There was a deep, resounding thud against the stone nearby. Marshall felt it in his chest, then he felt it in his outstretched arms, and realized he’d been the cause of it. In the darkness, he could just make out the white’s of Nikki’s eyes. He had taken her by both shoulders and slammed her head into the side of the pool.

“Marshall,” she said quietly. But there was a trembling edge to her words that sounded like both a question and a challenge. Just by saying his name she was asking him how much further he was going to go.
That Nikki Delongpre, nothing gets to her. Not even concrete.
But he had gotten to her, all right. She was terrified. Paralyzed, hardly hysterical, but terrified nonetheless. And for a moment he thought about doing something to her, something really bad, something he’d never done before.
But she wouldn’t keep it a secret, not like the other skanks he liked to play with. And if she wouldn’t keep it a secret, that meant whatever he did would have to be . . . final.

“Marshall, I’m going to get out of the water now.” Soft, gentle and condescending, like she was talking to a man with a gun. And wasn’t she, in a way? After all, he was taking stock of certain things, like the fact that she’d kept everything between them such a secret. Had she even told anyone she was out there with him? How far away was the nearest neighbor? A ten-minute boat ride?

Too much work.

That’s what it came down to in the end.

He allowed her to slide free of his grip and hoist herself up onto the flagstones. As soon as her feet were on solid ground, she grabbed for the flashlight and wheeled on him. “You son of a—” but the words died in her mouth when she saw what the beam had landed on.

The pool was full of them.

At first he thought it must be some kind of plankton, or maybe even sawdust left over from the construction. But these things weren’t the color of wood, they were the color of skin, and they were everywhere, clustered together in beige clumps that looked like shredded human flesh. And they were drifting through the water with determination, driven by currents he couldn’t feel.

Then darkness descended over him as Nikki took off running, the bouncing beam marking her path toward to the driveway. He could hear the jangle of the keys she’d already pulled from her pocket, could see her furiously wiping her other arm across her shirt, too frightened of him to stop and see how many of the crawly little things from the pool were still clinging to her.

He was still hoisting himself out of the pool when the 4-Runner’s engine sputtered to life and the headlights swung out into the swamp’s darkness and disappeared.

He wiped his arms in the darkness for a few minutes. But he didn’t
care. And he didn’t care that she’d just abandoned him either. No, what mattered most to him, what would cling to his soul most forcefully about this night in the days to come, was the realization that he’d allowed her to escape, a realization that now felt as overpowering as discovering you had cancerous tumors all through your body.

I decided not to kill a woman because it sounded like too much work.

Finally he forgot about whatever the pool was full of and just stood there, letting the water run down his body and onto the flagstones. And what steadied his breaths, what chased away his memory of her flashlight beam bouncing off in the direction of her 4-Runner, was a new series of images that came to him unbidden.

Nikki Delongpre was staring up into his eyes as he held her to the mud a few feet away from where he stood now. One hand was around her throat, the other was drawing a paring knife up the length of her torso, slicing the flesh over her breastbone, drawing a red thread past the breasts she had refused to reveal to him. In this vision, Nikki did not scream or cry out or beg for him to stop. Rather, she gazed right into his eyes as a flowing, crimson seam opened in the center of her chest, her stunned, moist-eyed expression radiating a silent, awestruck recognition of his newfound power.

He was not a sick man. A sick man would have craved the sound of her screams, and those did not figure into this little fantasy of his. In fact, he was immensely proud of the cleanliness of this vision, of its lack of common violence, of his own ability to be perfectly content with just this focused display of pure physical dominance and its flowing, unstoppable result.

•   •   •

He tried to apologize, but she wouldn’t let him.

In the days that followed, before he made a decision that changed everything, she vanished wherever he appeared, out a side door in the locker room, into the warren of rooms behind the theater during lunch.
The injustice of this began to bore into him more deeply than her rejection of him out in the swamp. It was as if she’d sensed the bloody fantasy that had coursed through him as she’d run for her car and was determined to let him simmer in it. Not just simmer. Drown altogether.

He blamed her for the deep throbbing ache in his jaw that alerted him to the fact that he’d been gritting his teeth for an hour. He blamed her for the sickness that had come over him later that night, even though he knew those disgusting little crawly things in the pool were probably to blame. (The chills and the nausea had gripped him while he was still in the car on the way home with his father. Of course, his dad hadn’t pressed for an explanation; he lived in such terror that his only son would turn out to be a bone smoker, Marshall could talk his way out of anything with even the vaguest story implying he’d been alone with a member of the opposite sex.)

And then came the final and most crushing blow.

They were back together. Nikki and Anthem, Cannon’s most perfect couple. After all the work Marshall had done, trust had been restored. How was it even possible? As he lay awake at night, seething with rage, those footsteps up the oyster-shell driveway toward Elysium’s darkened pool seemed like the last few seconds before an Olympic diver hit the water at a contorted angle, the chance of a medal rippling out away from him as he plunged under the surface. But the moment he couldn’t wash from his mind was the last words Nikki had said to him before fear had gripped her entirely.

Watch out for snakes.

•   •   •

The Delongpre residence was a two-story Greek Revival on Prytania Street, just a block from Lafayette Cemetery. The second-floor porch was big enough for a swing, and a high wrought-iron fence protected the front yard. But the driveway, an expanse of red brick, was open and exposed to the street, and that’s where the family’s hunter-green Ford
Explorer sat with its cargo door half open, the dome light sending a soft spill of light over its leather cream-colored seats.

Half a block away, Marshall sat behind the wheel of his father’s BMW, watching Millie and Nikki Delongpre load their overnight bags and groceries.

In the locker room at school, he had overheard talk of a party, a birthday party for Nikki’s mother. But it wouldn’t just be a celebration of Millie Delongpre’s forty-seventh. It was also the first social occasion Anthem and Nikki would be attending together following their reunion, their official coming-out-after-coming-apart party. So far, there had been no sign of the man of the hour, no glimpse of Anthem Landry’s cherry-red F-150 pickup truck. Maybe he was meeting them tomorrow. At almost nine o’clock, the Delongpres were certainly getting a late start.

The party would be held at Elysium the following evening, and when Marshall imagined the place with lanterns strung from its cypress branches, when he thought of well-dressed guests standing and chatting in the same spot where he hurled Nikki into the pool, he was filled with a silent, focusing rage that distracted him from the stapled-shut grocery bag shifting on the passenger-side floor of his father’s BMW.

If he waited in the car any longer, he would lose his opportunity.

He could still hear Nikki’s parents calling to each other inside the house when he lifted the Explorer’s cargo door by about two feet and set the grocery sack in between two Louis Vuitton satchels and a crate of Beaujolais. Then he took his car key and made three quick cuts in the side of the bag, each one large enough for the inhabitant to work its way through when it decided it was time to emerge.

By the time he was back to the BMW, he heard the back door to the Delongpre residence close with force, followed by the family’s excited laughter. Nikki was recounting some childhood story about how her father had once screwed up his fishing line and hooked a lump of her hair in the process.

Marshall slid behind the driver’s seat of his father’s BMW and waited. He waited until the Ford Explorer pulled out of the driveway and headed down Prytania Street. He waited until the red taillights turned the corner, leaving him alone with a steady, rasping sound. At first he thought it was coming from the grocery bag next to him—he had spent most of the day with the thing—but then he remembered that his gift had been delivered, that it had been tucked inside the SUV that had just driven past him into the night, leaving him with the desperate rattle of his own strained breaths.

ATLANTA

MAY 2013

A
rthelle was at the drink machine when she heard the screaming.

She’d know as soon as she rounded the corner up ahead if the commotion was coming from Ferriot’s new room.
Please, God. Let it be anything else. A rat or a mouse loose on the hall. Anything. Just let it be alive!

Things had been quiet for a week now, probably because Emily had steered clear of the boy, and there’d been no more strange animal deaths outside the center either. The only one to raise the subject of Ferriot at all had been Tammy Keene, and only to Arthelle. Tammy had two kids she had to support on her own, which meant no time to fill her head with stupid books about UFOs and doomsday prophecies; in other words, she was as eager to keep Emily in check as Arthelle was.

Emily was the one screaming, all right. She was standing outside the open door to Ferriot’s room, bent at the waist, hands to her mouth as she wailed. Other nurses had come running too. They also stumbled
in their tracks when they saw the bloody footprints Emily had made around the doorway.

Ferriot was in his wheelchair, just like he was every morning, staring into space with the same slack-jawed expression that made him look like he’d been trying to remember someone’s phone number for years.

Tammy Keene was on the floor, curled into a fetal position, back to the doorway, the blood flowing from her chest forming a dark curtain across the linoleum. Arthelle hit the floor on both knees, rolled the woman onto her back and saw her wide, staring eyes, radiating nothing but shock over the fact that the box cutter she always carried on her hip when she was doing gift distribution was embedded in her chest. The other nurses started pouring into the room, but not Emily. She was still screaming.