Dead Souls (10 page)

Benjamin pulled the wand out of the fire; sparks flew up like a swarm of flies. Staring at the great black entity before him, he stated: "All-powerful Lord Osiris, who exists amongst the Gods in the astral plane, and governs the Realm of Resurrection and Everlasting Life, we have bestowed upon you the gifts of the earth so that Bryan Conroy may purely and honorably engage your powers of spiritual rebirth for the purpose of ancestral afterlife, with utmost earnestness and commitment."

The spirit stood motionless, then gently nodded, his moving face leaving shadowy trail that faded in seconds.

"Come, my family," Benjamin said. "Faith, Elizabeth, Daniel, join me in furnishing Bryan Conroy with the gift of the afterlife, so that we as a family unit may remain together for all of eternity…so that upon our deaths we may return to our bodies and advance together to the astral plane and exist together in the afterlife as venerated spirits. It is the judgment of Osiris that we
hand
our fates to."

As Benjamin called their names, each family member stepped into the circle and kneeled down before the bawling baby. They all had sallow faces, smoke-reddened eyes, and rings of soot around their lips. One by one, they grabbed onto the baby's limbs, Faith and Elizabeth holding Bryan's arms, Benjamin and Daniel his legs. The baby fidgeted hysterically beneath their commanding grips, bawling unrestrained, voice thick with phlegm, face green and contorted.
 

"It is now that I, Benjamin Conroy, conclude this life-long ritual by imparting upon Bryan Conroy the gift of everlasting life."

And then everything happened so fast…but to Benjamin it all seemed to unfold so slowly, like a movie running at quarter-speed. Daniel let go of Bryan, his arms falling away like lifeless tree limbs, slow and stiff. He yelled out, "
No!
" in a deep voice that was strangely not his, coughing thereafter in a series of uncontrollable fits. He turned his head and gagged up a hunk of ashy bile onto the wood, just beyond the perimeter of the magic circle.

My God, no!
Benjamin thought in the next segment of film, as Daniel then leapt back into his place and tried to tear the baby away from his family members. Benjamin jerked his head up and saw that amidst the sudden disruption, the spirit of Osiris had vanished, leaving behind a very mundane looking mirror.
No!
Using the same hand that still held the wand, Benjamin shoved Daniel aside in a fluster, then raised the fiery end of the wand over the baby…

And in the next segment of slow-moving film, with his arm raised, intent on bringing it down upon Bryan's exposed flesh, the baby, blood-reddened eyes already wide open, looked at his father, pinning him with a gaze that was not that of a naïve and innocent babe, but of a highly intelligent being fully conscious of the act being perpetrated upon him, and that gaze told Benjamin that there would be hell to pay for his transgression, that his beliefs were inane and wholly unfounded, and that he'd been wrong all these years about Osiris having anything to do with Jesus' rise from the grave; that he'd been wrong about Osiris's ability to grant what he coined as ancestral afterlife; that his discovery of the code in the New Testament was unfounded—that the narrative in the bible was mere folklore, handed down over centuries of believers seeking self-serving comfort and orthodoxy, and that how could he be so damn stupid for believing this?

He hesitated, staring through the smokescreen, into Bryan's eyes. His heart sank like a lead weight against his ribs; his mind seemed to melt away, lost of its primary foundation.

He could hear Daniel crying and choking and babbling, "No dad, d-don't hurt the baby…" The boy's eyes were wide and staring, filled with terror, looking not at his father, but
through
him.

Faith released her grip, and Elizabeth immediately followed, pale faces drawn with consternation, staring up at their head of household.

Benjamin loosened his grip on the wand; its glowing end had begun to fade, its heat breaking up into the early morning air.

He stared at the mirror, at its utter normalcy, and thought of the spirit that had shown itself.
Perform your deed
…

Benjamin Conroy took a deep lungful of searing hot air, coughed, then brought the fiery hot wand down upon the baby's exposed sternum.

September 7th, 2005

1:48 PM

T
he rain continued to pound the windows of the bus, its speed now reduced to the interstate minimum of 45 miles per hour. Thoughts of his mother and father fired back into his mind like shotgun blasts, stirring all of his emotions into a frenzied mess. The environment, muddied from the rain and his tear-filled eyes, took on an unreal look, as transient as a backdrop in some fleeting dream. The bus cut into a passage between a channeled cliff. He stared at the non-descript rock-face and the metal mesh fencing closing out the falling debris, and thought:
bad memories may come and go, but what remains definite are the negative emotions that come with them. They stay with us like bad tattoos, and when you think of the events that trigger these emotions, you can see it all playing out frame-by-frame in your head as if they are permanently recorded in your brain
.

The butterflies in his stomach that had come along for the ride metamorphosed into writhing worms eating at the tender, acid-coated walls. Tears filled his eyes, and he had to shift his body so no one else in the bus would witness his pain.
It didn't have to be this way
, he thought.

Or did it? Yesterday I got a letter from a lawyer, and I called him and we spoke for a while. He promised me the fortune of a man whom I'd never heard of before, and when I mentioned this man's name to my mother, she turned ashy-white like flour and nearly passed out—and this time her response wasn't psychosomatic, curable by the pill-of-the-moment, it was for real, and now I'm standing on the edge of a crumbling world just waiting for it to take me down.

It was all beginning to take its toll on him; his heart surged and pulled against his chest; his eyelids struggled to stay open as he watched the muted landscape break apart around the bus. He peered down at his watch and saw that given the weather and the bus's sluggish pace, it would take another three hours to get to
Wellfield
. Didn't matter, in spite of the delay. He wasn't expected to meet with Andrew Judson until tomorrow morning.

He leaned his head against the rain-streaked glass of the window, closed his eyes and thought of his mother, lying there in her hospital bed, mind drifting toward those mysterious places she'd spent her whole life avoiding. He shivered, wondering if she'd come to assume that he'd in fact left Manhattan for the mystery that awaited in New England. He imagined her with her sallow face pressed down against the thin
Tempur-Pedic
pillow, eyes glued to the door, waiting for her husband and son to come waltzing in with smiles on their faces and flowers in their hands, revealing to her that it had all been some cruel dream and that everything was going to be all right. And as he drifted off to sleep, he prayed that this wasn't the case, because here in Johnny's world there were no definitive truth-telling dreams. There were only memories, and the dreadful certainty that Mary Petrie would soon be discharged from the hospital, never to see her son or husband again...

September 6th, 2005

9:53 PM

J
ohnny sat in the hospital waiting room, staring at the cover of the
Cosmopolitan
magazine in the hand of an attractive woman seated across from him; the teenage girl on the cover had the whitest teeth Johnny had ever seen. There were two other people in the
corral
of orange vinyl seats, both of them idling around with absolutely nothing to do: an unsmiling elderly man with a herd of pock-marks on his face, and a balding man of about forty reading a Preston and Childs paperback.

A young nurse with a red-striped uniform bustled by, and all those waiting abandoned their mundane pursuits to look up at her in hope that she would take them in to visit with their loved ones. She passed by without incident, and everyone at once went back to their waiting-room routines. Johnny sipped at the stale coffee he'd bought for fifty cents at the cafeteria upon arriving at St Michael's Presbyterian Hospital (despite his initial concerns about Mary's condition, he
did
get to ride in the ambulance, and that was pretty darn neat), and had killed nearly three hours here, waiting for some word on Mary, keeping his eyes peeled on the main entrance with hope that his father had arrived home to see the note he'd left for him on the kitchen table.

Eventually a nurse did approach the corral (but kept a safe distance, as though those in the waiting-room had also come down with some horrific communicable illness) and called Johnny's name out, "John Petrie?" Johnny stood and followed her as she immediately darted across the lobby without him, the eyes of his waiting-room comrades pinned to him as he disappeared though a pair of swinging doors adorned with big red letters that said
Inpatient
.

"You are Mrs. Petrie's son?" she asked as he caught up with her. She was young and attractive, with shoulder-length blond hair and rather large breasts pushing out against her uniform. All his life, Mary had vehemently instilled upon Johnny the evils of sex, and how the strong arm of God would punish him should his mind stray from a life of wholesome decency, and he'd always done his damnedest to avoid lascivious thoughts such as this. But now…he felt unexpectedly liberated of his mother's authoritative command. Feeling attracted to a woman—a woman as pretty as this—seemed more natural than dirty, and unquestionably sanctioned by whatever higher authority might be looking down upon him at the moment.

Eyes still on her breasts (her name tag said "Melanie"), he nodded. "Yes, I am."

Melanie was holding a clipboard with a number of papers attached to it. She lifted the first sheet, and read aloud, "Your mother seems to be fine. All the preliminary exams have been completed, blood tests, MRI's, nothing wrong was detected. No heart-attack, no stroke. Off course she'll remain on
bedrest
for a few days, which will give us enough time to find out what actually happened to her."

Johnny didn't know what to make of the news. Had he caused his mother some odd mental breakdown? Or, was it something altogether physical that had been lingering at the threshold, waiting for something to kick down the door? They turned left and went down another hall lined with glossy wooden doors that opened up into a large reception area with about eight nurses and doctors milling about, shuffling papers and gazing at computer screens. Down the hall, inside one of the rooms, Johnny heard a woman sobbing lightly; the sound of a television emerged from another: someone was watching the Ten O'clock News. An ceaseless intermittent beeping filled the room.

"Your mother is in room 107. Down the hall on your left."

"Thank you," Johnny said, watching Melanie as she scooted away at the request of another nurse seeking assistance behind the reception area. He paced slowly down the hall, to room 107. He peeked inside and saw his mother's bare feet jutting out from behind a cloth partition. He entered the room, circled around the partition, and stood at the foot of the bed.

The first thought that entered his mind was how different she looked from just hours earlier upon her arrival home from work. She was asleep on her back with the sheets pulled aside, her exposed legs pale and trunk like, the hospital apron she wore gathered up around her unusually smooth thighs. Meandering veins, both purple and blue, raced across her skin where they narrowed out and disappeared like thinning roots at the knees; it became oddly apparent to Johnny at this moment that he'd never seen his mother's legs above the calves before. Her hands were upturned alongside her, an IV tube snaking out from the crook of her arm. Her face was pale with a peculiar, hive like blotch on her forehead. Her hair was all flattened out on one side.

As he gazed at her, Johnny began to feel his breath shorten. He'd never seen her in such a terrible state. Waves of guilt hit him hard, and when he moved to say something, he couldn't. His throat was parched.

At this moment, a doctor walked in. He was a heavy-set man with a full beard that made his face look even fatter. He wore glasses, which he immediately removed to reveal two juicy red spots on the bridge of his nose. He offered a hand to Johnny. "Hi, I'm Dr. Hanson."

"Johnny," his voice managed as he accepted the man's plump hand. "I'm Mary's son."

Doctor Hanson nodded, then slipped his glasses into his shirt pocket. "It's my understanding that your mother fell."

"Yes, that is correct."

"She has a small laceration on the back of her head, but it's been bandaged and should heal over in a week or so." Hanson hesitated, then asked, "You saw her fall?"

Johnny nodded gently. "Yes…we were talking, and she got angry about something, and I guess she just fainted, because next thing I knew, she was on the ground."

Hanson nodded. "Well, other than the cut on her scalp, we couldn't find anything wrong with her. All her MRI's have come back negative, blood tests normal, white blood count is fine."

"That's good news," Johnny said, taking a deep breath and feeling a bit relieved…and yet, at the same time, feeling a bit disappointed that she would not receive any considerable medical attention.
She needs some serious help, doc, and I need some time to get out of town
. "I was worried that she might've had a heart-attack."