A Density of Souls (34 page)

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Authors: Christopher Rice

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Gay, #Bildungsromans, #Psychological, #Murder, #Psychological Fiction, #Psychology, #Young Adults, #New Orleans (La.), #High School Students, #Suspense, #Friendship

BOOK: A Density of Souls
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It took him three seconds to make sense of it.

It was the back of Monica’s dress.

He dove off the porch. His head surfaced and he saw Monica floating facedown, almost close enough to touch, entwined in a crepe myrtle branch that shed its soaked purple blossoms around her.

Something materialized behind her. The downed transformer was lodged on the spokes of the gate, the power line strung behind it, dancing a mad gavotte over the intersection, up to the pole across the street. The only thing keeping the transformer from dislodging itself from the gate was the erratic tension of the wind, tautly pulling on the power line.

He called out Monica’s name as he dog-paddled toward her. Water the taste of raw tobacco filled his mouth, burning as he swallowed. He gripped her shoulder and gave it a good yank, wrenching her from the branch. She rolled onto her stomach. He was kicking to stay afloat, the soles of his bare feet churning the soft cushion of submerged fern leaves.

Jordan finally encircled his arms around her and hoisted her onto 252

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his chest, which forced him under the surface, beneath her. Something brushed his leg as he struggled up. He shut his eyes and locked his arm under her back, kicking as the sensation repeated itself down his thighs, across his calves. Jordan shut his eyes and kicked madly, disrupting the swarm of rats migrating beneath the surface.

Monica glided against the porch’s top step. Jordan jabbed his right foot down, finding one of the bottom steps. He hauled her onto the porch and climbed after her, scooping Monica in both arms like a bride about to cross the threshold. By the time the transformer toppled into the intersection of Chestnut and Third, he had thrown Monica onto the bottom steps of the staircase. He turned to see a maelstrom of electricity ignite the front yard; beneath the surface at least fifty rats were silhouetted like bacteria suddenly illuminated under a micro-scope slide. The howling wind covered the sound of the transformer’s explosion. The flash ended quickly. The bodies of the electrocuted rats floated and bobbed, then they were swept through the spokes of the gate by the current toward the Mississippi blocks away.

Jordan lifted Monica’s lolling head from the third step. Water oozed from her mouth. She was out cold. He shook her. More water bubbled from her lips.

Jordan didn’t know CPR, but he did know he must lay her flat.

But this seemed wrong. Fighting panic and working fast, he bent her forward, driving a knee into her stomach. He felt a warm wash on his foot. He rammed his knee deeper into her stomach and Monica’s whole body rebelled against him, muscles tightening against the torque of his leg.

A flash of lightning caught her face, contorted into the squint-eyed mask of a newborn. He put his lips to hers and exhaled. Half of the breath escaped down her cheek, but suddenly her lips twitched inside his mouth. One of her hands pawed his right shoulder. He brought his mouth away.

She was trying to speak.

“Monica!” Jordan shook her again, rattling her head against the step.

Her eyes wouldn’t open. Jordan placed one hand on her forehead and carefully forced her eyelids up, revealing glazed whites before her pu-pils slid into place.

“Stephen!”

Breath returned to her as her mouth opened around that first ragged word.

“He took Stephen!” she gasped.

5

“S
tevie?”

The wind had changed. It was no longer the incessant roar that had lulled him to sleep against Jordan’s chest. The sound was deeper, hollowed-out.

“Time to see God, Stevie!”

He jerked at the voice, feeling where the metal fishing line carved into his wrists. He was holding something. He knew he was no longer in his bedroom. He groped for memory—remembering the sudden blow to his temple, thinking the bedroom window had blown in before darkness had enveloped him, bringing him to this familiar voice.

A single slatted window blew inward in a hail of splintered wood. A shadow next to Stephen pitched forward in response. What was under him?

Stephen squirmed. As his chest grazed cold metal, he realized in horror where he was.

He was thirty feet above the ground, bound to one of the bells in the Bishop Polk bell tower. Around him was the racket of the tiled roof, shaken by the howling wind, and the motionless bell.

Stevie. No one had called him Stevie in years.

Brandon backed away from the bell’s flank, to which he had bound Stephen with the spool of wire. He looped it around Stephen’s legs, which circled around the entire width of the bell, using the last of it to secure Stephen’s wrists to the bell’s lug nut.

Brandon watched in fascination as wind sucked out the first floor boards through the window. He stepped back before the boards shifted, revealing a glimpse of the thirty-foot drop into the dark shaft.

“Listen to the wind you’ve brought,” he cried.

Stephen opened his mouth to scream, but found himself tasting the 254

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bell’s flank. He could see Brandon’s shirtless shadow in the flickering storm light as he approached the bell. “Brandon . . .” he managed, feeling blood sticky on his lips. He could hear the sound of two more floorboards sucked out the window, the scrape of ceramic tiles peeling from the portico.

“Snake,” Brandon said into the wind.

Stephen fumbled for some response and found rage instead. Not the frustrated anger of the unrequited lover, the survivor shredded by grief. This feeling was untapped; it had gone unused during each overheard whisper, each slur against him; it had failed him when a brand was slapped on his back for the rest of his life. It had been wrenched out of him when Greg Darby lured him to the same spot five years earlier and raped him unconscious. This rage washed the heavy sludge of self-pity from his soul.

“If I don’t die here, Brandon, I’m going to kill you.”

Brandon slammed the empty coil against the bell. It sang. “This is where you’re going to see God!” Brandon screamed, with a child’s fury. “This is where you killed Greg . . .”

The wind gnawed at the frayed edges of the window before the timbers above it suddenly split. It sounded like the pop of a giant knuckle.

The wind’s whistle increased in pitch.

“I didn’t kill him,” Stephen said through clenched teeth, clearly, so the storm would carry it.

“Liar!”

“He killed himself.”

“You were waiting the whole time. You had a snake in you, Stephen! You had a fucking snake in you and you wanted it to bite us both, didn’t you? You were fucking waiting for him and you know it!”

Stephen felt Brandon’s hand on his neck, suddenly pulling him off the bell, etching the metal wire deeper into his flesh. Stephen wailed.

Brandon brought his mouth close to Stephen’s ear. “Wanna know what God does, Stevie? God owns the devil. And when he made the world, he took a big fucking handful of evil and threw it on the earth.

It’s everywhere, only it tries to bury itself. In people. It’s in you, Stevie.

I’ve known that all my life, and you know it, too. You’re a monster and you need food. Greg was a fucking meal to you!”

Brandon clutched Stephen’s head six inches from the bell. Stephen’s face grimaced. The twine dug into the back of Stephen’s neck, blood dribbling across Brandon’s fingers.

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“The-the real m-monsters . . .” Stephen coughed and spat a thin bolus of blood across Brandon’s cheek. “. . . the real monsters are the ones who think they see God . . .”

“Snakes around the columns . . .” Brandon retorted.

Four more floorboards danced out the window. The hole revealed the bottom end of the metal scaffolding that held the three bells in place.

“. . . of the temples of salvation . . .”

“You be-better leave now, Brandon . . .”

Outside the wind had stripped the last of the ceramic tiles from the portico’s roof, exposing the pliable timbers. The six-foot cross was ripped free from the portico’s crown overhead.

“I remove you from the earth. I cleanse the earth . . .”

Rain lashed down on them, funneled from a patch of open sky where the cross had been ripped free. A weak gray light illuminated their faces, inches apart. Their eyes met. Stephen’s mouth contorted into a leering smile.

“Fear cannot touch me,” Stephen shouted.

He saw the shadow before Brandon did.

Brandon heard the first line of the rhyme and punched Stephen’s head into the bell. Stephen felt a shudder of pain in his forehead, but it didn’t matter. “It can only taunt me . . .” he cried through clenched teeth.

Then Brandon saw the shadow. He sank to his knees beside the bell.

He stared into the darkness at the top of the ladder.

Stephen knew what Brandon beheld: Greg was taking shape.

Several floorboards clattered through the air. The rain swirled down from the opening overhead. The wind buffeted the window’s frame.

But none of it touched Greg as he climbed into the portico.

“It cannot take me,” a voice answered.

The voice was not Greg’s.

Meredith Ducote rammed a floorboard into Brandon’s left shoulder.

Its nail pierced Brandon’s skin, nicking the bone beneath before she retracted it. Stephen saw her form, then watched Brandon crawling across the splintering floorboards.

“Just tell me where to go!” she cried.

Meredith brought the board down into the small of Brandon’s back.

The nail lodged as his body reared up, his arms flailing in the air before he collapsed. She yanked the board from his back. A section 256

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of the portico’s shell tore free and a jet of wind roared through the interior.

Meredith rocked back onto her heels. As the wind knocked her several steps backward, Brandon righted himself and turned on her.

Stephen cried out in warning.

When Brandon saw Meredith, he froze.

“I can either follow . . .” Meredith hissed. “Or stay in my bed . . .”

She raised the board and brought it down like a hammer. Brandon’s arms went out to block the blow. The nail tore into his open palm.

Brandon growled like a rabid dog as he saw his hand was impaled on the floorboard, which was stuck to the timber shell of the portico wall above his head, trapping him there. Meredith grabbed his free hand.

“Say it with me . . .”

“Snake!” Brandon screamed.

“Finish it with me!” Meredith yelled. “I can hold on to the things that I know.”

“Snakesaroundthecolumnsofthetemplesofsalvation . . . Snakesaroundthe . . .” Brandon’s words were all mania.

“The dead stay dead. They cannot walk. The shadows are darkness . . .”

Stephen saw one of Brandon’s legs flex. “Meredith, watch out!” he screamed. Instantly, she swung one hand into Brandon’s crotch and closed her fist around his balls. His eyes widened, his body writhing against the trembling wall of the portico, blood dribbling from his impaled hand down his arm.

“And darkness can’t talk . . .”

Stephen’s screams were suddenly louder. Brandon’s eyes fell on hers with weary, defeat. “He murdered him . . . Stephen murdered Greg . . .” he tried, his voice careening with panic.

“You’re wrong,” Meredith said. The floor beneath them quaked, the wall behind Brandon was trembling like a sheet on a laundry line.

She backed away from him, steadying herself against the pummeling rain. His gaze followed her, eyes wide with shock. She turned, balancing on the remaining floorboard.

The crack above the window had opened all the way to the portico’s crown, scattering patches of gray light around her. Stephen knew there was no way for her to get him down in time. She looked at the vibrating floor underfoot and saw a thin metal bar running beneath the floorboards. Above her, the wind chipped away pieces of battered Heaven's Answer

257

wood, revealing the bell’s metal holdings set firmly within the concrete base of the shaft.

As Brandon howled in incoherent fury, Stephen felt Meredith’s hands inching up his arms to the twin strands of wire that bound his wrists to the lug nut. She looped her own wrists under the strands.

The twine bit into her wrists.

Brandon was prying at the board that pinned his palm to the wall when the portico cracked. He vanished.

The wind struck Stephen and Meredith with a force that twisted their bodies together. The bell began to sway as they found themselves beneath a sky studded with lightning and roaring with the angry promise of heaven.

Clinging to a lamppost, Jordan believed he was hallucinating as the portico’s shell split into two pieces and hovered fifty feet above the ground, before one half collapsed into the seemingly magnetic center they had held for several seconds. The two halves obliterated one another, dissolving into what looked like a mad flock of birds taking flight over the intersection.

Jordan tucked his head to his chest and prayed the debris wouldn’t hit him. The lamppost heaved under him and pitched forward, angled from its cement foundation. When his forearms touched the water’s surface, he realized the post had tilted almost forty-five degrees.

He looked up. A face stared back at him.

The post’s bulb had caved into the chest of a male body, stripped of its clothes by the wind. It took Jordan a moment to realize he was staring at his brother. “Brandon.” Jordan’s voice was inaudible even to himself.

Brandon couldn’t answer. The post keeled farther and Brandon’s dangling feet met the rushing surface. As he sank, Brandon stared back at Jordan, his face drowsy and placid.

The post stopped. Jordan watched as Brandon’s body slipped off the shattered lamp, the weight of wood pulling him down, his head loose on his shoulders. Jordan clutched to the post, pressing his forehead to the metal, as Brandon’s body drifted down Jackson Avenue in an eddy of flotsam.

Jordan lifted his head. The wind had died down. The water spiraled elegantly as it flowed past him. Bumpers of cars were revealed by the 258

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abrupt absence of swirling rain. One of Bishop Polk’s front doors had been torn from its hinges and sprawled there, looking worn out. And now, the bells were ringing.

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