Dead Souls (6 page)

But now, all that was beginning to change. He could see it,
feel
it. His parents had trusted him, were wholly confident that their thirteen-year-old son had seen no other means of existence other than the Conroy way. They entrusted him enough to allow him out of the house for short walks to
D'Agostino's
Drug Store on Main Street to buy diapers for Bryan, or Menthol rub for mother's arthritis.

Go directly to the store. Buy only the things on this list. Do not speak to anyone on the way there, or on the way back
.

As always, his mother and father were always busy with the crucial undertaking of
something
, whether it be preparing Father's weekly sermon, or deciding which tea to brew for dinner. There were the fields of corn and wheat than ran east of the house for a quarter mile, and the barn out back where bales of hay were prepared for sale to the locals. They worked endlessly, running crops back and forth, handing out chores to Daniel and Elizabeth who toiled together under Benjamin's strict guidance.

Just recently, Daniel had seen some of the other children from town, on the playground at the public school on King Street. His mother had taken him into town to purchase spices for a new recipe of corn chowder (the Conroy's were committed vegetarians, and Faith Conroy experimented with a variety of newfangled herbs in an effort to 'spice up' their dinners; Daniel thought the chowder she made had tasted much like mud despite its yellow appearance). They'd walked past the
Wellfield
Public School, and he'd asked his mother about all the other children who were racing about playing kickball and jumping rope and climbing on jungle gyms, and he was told that these were the Devil's children, saturated with immorality and foul influence, and should be ignored at all costs.

"
This is why your father and I tutor you every night at home, so that you won't be influenced by such evils
."

"
But mother, I recognize some of these children from Church. They attend father's masses
."

"It is because they seek salvation from their sins. We must remain sin free, for we…we have a special purpose, one more divine than the birth of Jesus Christ himself."

"
What is it, mother? What is our purpose?
"

"
In due time, my son, you shall find out
."

He'd continually wondered about the special purpose of the Conroy Family, wondering as to what could possibly be more divine that the birth of Jesus Christ. His father had told him that the most sacred event in all of mankind was Jesus' rise from the dead. The prayers father had taught him referred to ancestral afterlife. Did their purpose have something to do with either of these things?

There was a noise outside his room, something other than the incessant bells that were starting to cause Daniel quite the headache. He immediately felt an odd disquiet, a sensation he hadn't once felt during their dry-runs, and the sharp reality of the moment came into sudden play: this was no dress rehearsal. Whatever his father's intentions were…well, the ritual would either happen to his satisfaction, or it wouldn't. And regardless of the outcome, Daniel had a dreadful notion that something terrible would occur in the end.

The floors in the hallway creaked, and then there came a clicking sound: the doorknob to his room being turned. A sudden disquiet festered in him, not unlike the time he'd gone swimming at
Capson's
Lake and the bottom fell out from beneath his feet. The warm water had swallowed him up and dragged him down where it was as cold as ice. When he finally made it back to the surface, and then to dry land, he vomited lake water and shivered uncontrollably, gripping his pained chest as though he'd been stabbed through the heart. This was how he felt now: terrified, with no control of the situation, feeling as though he'd been slashed with an icy-cold knife.

There came a muted padding of footsteps. He closed his eyes, not allowing his family to see that he had not kept to the ritual. He placed his hands upon his knees and fluttered his lips, feigning prayer. Like a blanket of hot air, he felt the heat of his family—father, mother, and Elizabeth—encircle him.

His heart rose in his chest. It now beat in his throat, making it difficult to breathe. He heard the bells toll, and then his father's voice as he commenced with the sigil of Osiris. As the ritual resumed at the tolling of the next bell, Daniel adhered to every last complexity as he'd been taught, imagining that he were running the entire performance himself.

September 6th, 2005

5:11 PM

J
ohnny Petrie's bitter-sweet feelings of jubilation upon speaking to Andrew Judson, and coming to the sobering conclusion that this inheritance was indeed
for real
, now faded into dull thin air as he considered his next move. His mind waned in circles, thoughts running amok and making no logical judgments other than to supersede his jubilant feelings with worry and ill-defined fear.

After hanging up the phone, he marched into the bathroom and again gazed at himself in the mirror. His face, although still pale and
zitty
and drawn, bore an unfamiliar expression he'd never observed before; an expression that was focused and alert and wholly prepared for the earth-trembling events that lay ahead.

The conversation between Judson and Johnny went on to detail the initial course of action he would need to take. Judson had explained that Johnny's silence would be of the utmost importance, and he strongly requested that Johnny not mention the letter or their conversation with anyone, including his parents. When Johnny had asked why, Judson informed him that everything would be made clear upon his arrival in
Wellfield
. Johnny had argued that he couldn't just pull some sort of vanishing act, that his parents would have his face broadcasted on the five o'clock news if he didn't show up for dinner. But he did promise that in a few days he'd travel up to Maine to meet with the lawyer, once he was able to gather some things, and perhaps a bit of cash.

My God, am I really going to do this?

Johnny returned into the kitchen, folding and unfolding the letter, reading it again and again in his mind, sometimes in Judson's voice, and then in his own voice. Despite Judson's reassurances, the whole scenario still seemed too good to be true, and Johnny burrowed through his common sense for some skeptical insight. But he also told himself that the regrets of not investigating the circumstances would fill a list a mile long, would never reveal any truths as to who Benjamin Conroy was, and why this so-called relative that he'd never heard of had left him a fortune.

Maybe I do know someone named Benjamin Conroy. Somehow, I feel as though I do now. Think, think
…

So for the next half hour he paced about the apartment like a caged tiger, sweating away his tentativeness and building up a life's worth of courage to confront his parents and gather the truth of the situation. His skin rolled with
goosebumps
, his watery eyes swelled from their reddened sockets. He could feel his heart jack-hammering against his ribs. He clutched at his chest, feeling the clawing need to get this all out into the open, with no delay, and with no beating around the bush. He would have to catch his mother off-guard, as soon as she walked through the door, and before his father came home so she couldn't beseech his spineless support.

Eventually, after wearing out a path between the kitchen and his bedroom, Johnny sat at the kitchen table and stared at the St. Luke calendar on the door, restlessly waiting for his mother to return home.

Any minute now
, Johnny thought, heart pounding with anticipatory anxiety.

Jesus, this is going to be one
helluva
confrontation.

He remained quiet, listening to the ticking
of
the clock in the kitchen as it drove itself like a nail, deep into his head. He continually thought of the faceless man named Benjamin Conroy, wondering inquisitively as to who he was, what he might have looked like, how he died, why he left his fortune to Johnny. Then it occurred to him:
Judson waited until I turned eighteen to contact me. Is it possible that Benjamin Conroy died some time ago and had left instructions in his will to wait until I turned eighteen?

Or, did he just drop dead last week?

He clutched at the growing tightness in his chest again, mind drifting in endless streams only to return to drummed-up images of his newfound haunt Benjamin Conroy. And then, in between these meandering reflections, another haunt filtered back to him in blinding detail: the faraway childhood remembrance of what he called 'the golden pain'. He'd somehow retained this odd recollection as if it were a vivid vision from a nightmare, one that had remained with him for as long as his lifelong memories went back. And it all may have very well been a nightmare, but its lasting images were still so clear and so real, that somewhere deep in his subconscious (and conscious) mind, part of him believed that everything had actually occurred.

He could recall lying on his back, helpless as though drugged. There had been the sound of a bell tolling, and then a golden light that floated over him, and from out of that light emerged the indistinct figure of a person, head tilted, arms outstretched. The figure was flanked by a small group of faceless people he would years later describe as 'witnesses'. As the central figure emerged from the light and drew closer to him, the witnesses crowded around Johnny's body and latched on to his arms and legs. He could easily recall the pain of trying to struggle away from these dark people, his muscles stretching, the skin on his biceps and thighs burning beneath their determined grasps.

And that's where his memories ended; the proverbial blackout had taken effect, as if he had awakened from a nightmare moments before dying, only to find himself lying atop the damp sheets in a cold sweat. But the images had stayed with him, in his memories, and then again in his dreams, where at least once a month the dark, faceless man and his witnesses would visit him while he slept.

Once, after an extremely colorful recurrence of the event in his dreams, he'd drummed up the courage to discuss it all with Mary, but she acted as expected: with utter indifference, grinning incredulously and shooing it off as what she described at the time as some 'repressed
engram
in his subconscious'.
This is the exactly why we don't want you reading those trashy science-fiction novels…next thing you'll be telling us is that you were abducted by aliens!

But now…the name of one Benjamin Conroy was in his head, super-glued to his brain and functioning like a hypnotist's suggestion drawing out suppressed memories, or a password in a computer revealing a wealth of hidden information. Upon bringing back the memories of the golden pain into his head, new remembrances began flooding his mind—memories of the golden pain and the events that occurred
after
the witnesses grabbed his arms, after the blackout. It seemed to be a faultless combination: the recollection of the golden pain, plus the presence of the name Benjamin Conroy, now together in his mind for the very first time, working hand-in-hand and resulting in the reclamation of lost memories. He could see it all now, playing out on the walls of his mind as though a motion-picture projector had been turned on. And it made him realize that the dream of the golden pain was not a dream after all. It was an eye-opening affair, a life-moving revelation that was real.
It'd really happened!

He could see the ensuing events playing out in vivid color. He viewed them in the same first-person point-of-view: the central figure looming over him, features hidden in a veil of suffocating smoke. There was a moment's hesitation as a voice of protest filtered in from somewhere close by. Johnny saw the central figure kicking away one of the faceless witnesses, then kneel down before his prone body. There was a glow of golden light, sharp and concentrated, followed by a quick blow of hot searing agony upon his chest.

Johnny could feel the pain upon his chest now.

My God…it is real. It really happened
.

There were instances when Johnny himself had thought the incident too fanciful to be true, and he'd made a keen attempt to write it all off as a dream. But now, with the rest of the memories now present in his mind, he couldn't do that. As surreal and displeasing as it was, it carried an undeniable realism that couldn't be ignored—it could only be described as a
memory
.

Because, despite it seeming like some weird faraway dream, Johnny Petrie had unequivocal proof that the event had actually occurred—that at some point, years ago in his past, when he was just a baby, it really happened.

It was no dream.

He opened the collar of his shirt and placed a hand against his chest,

…it's a birthmark Johnny. It was there when you emerged from my womb…I should know, I'm your mother…

running his index finger against the loose flaps of skin making up the scar on his sternum.

Mother, if it's a birthmark, then why is it shaped like this? It's so…perfect.

The central figure leaned down over him and delivered a blow of hot searing agony upon his chest
…

His mother would grin away his queries, looking slightly concerned but maintaining her composure nonetheless, perhaps having known quite well that at some point growing up her son would ask about the strange scar on his chest…the wrinkled, purple blemish that was in the perfect shape of an ankh.