Decatur (25 page)

“Ya, we’re going to the lake, that’s where papa’s goodies come out,” Gar said in silly old country accent flipping open the fishing basket lid and flashing the package of crackers, tinned sardines, and Red Delicious apple at her as he twirled the candy strips laughing.

Marilyn had the oddest sensation that she was looking through a kaleidoscope with Gar’s image on the background changing and coming back together. It was a split second but she thought she saw him in front of red barn doors, and then bamboo stalks, an azure sea and cliff, and now twirling the candy strips with the graves behind him. She shook her head feeling suddenly nauseous. Her sessions in the Map Room were playing tricks on her.

“You okay?” Gar said. Shit, her sight was working, he was sure: she looked white and shaken with the dark clouds behind her.

She nodded, hoping she didn’t vomit, concentrating on keeping from retching.
Some date she was. Why couldn’t anything be easy?

Rowley looked quickly from one to the other. He had been playing along, being a “good dog” but it was animal cunning, a perfect disguise. He was getting ready to make his move, feeling the blood and fang instincts awaken in his bones, teeth, and muscle. “
Go for the neck
,” the instincts whispered from the wolves imbedded in his ancestry, “
plunge deep and don’t let go
.”

“But before we get papa’s goodies, we go exploring,” Gar said and grabbed the rope leash out of her hand with a quick lunge. With deliberate and cruel speed he was running Rowley towards the hedge tunnel that lead to the decrepit tomb. Marilyn would have no choice but to follow them.

Gar pulled the dog along, enjoying choking him. Rowley’s feet were not quite touching the ground as he yanked him hard up the muddy pathway with the dark hedges on either side. The black green leaves of the hedges winked and became rough hewn walls and the muddy path turned to a dark river of cobblestones in his mind. He flashed onto the original path, the one he had taken so long ago with the horse under him as he thundered up the stone paving to the famously cursed nunnery of the Castello Aragonese. . He felt an intense pulsating pleasure as he held both now and the time before in his mind. The nothingness would become a memory and he would emerge restored and even greater, with the source captured inside him. He would be refreshed over the coming centuries, as by a secret purifying potion that only he could drink from.

Rowley was trying to catch his breath; the rope noose burned into his hide as he was run up the hill towards the tomb. Marilyn was behind them calling, “Wait!” as she followed them. Gar wasn’t waiting, Rowley knew. He smelled the noxious odor in the hand that held the rope. It was stronger than ever. Gar was going to try to kill them both but he didn’t know that Rowley was ready too and didn’t mind dying protecting Marilyn. Rowley knew he had a wonderful life with his mistress from the moment she had found him in that alley and that their love would survive his death. It was a noble way to go, he thought, as he willed the fang and blood instincts to stop him from choking.

Marilyn was cold all over as she climbed after them in the hedge tunnel leading to the big medieval-style tomb with broken windows and the stone blind angels. Gar was pulling on Rowley too hard but the cry to stop died in her throat as silver white spots of light burst around her head. For some, ‘seeing stars’ was a sign of faintness but for Marilyn it had always served as a warning, as clear as spoken words, it meant she was in danger, physical danger. From the time she was three and nearly drowned in the bathtub, or when she was nine and things had gone bad with J. J., or at sixteen when a cretin had followed her home, when the bursts of light circled her head she knew to be on high alert. Her life depended on it. The miniscule firecrackers showered around her as she ran after Gar and she thought back to all of Gretch Wendell’s and Max’s warnings.

Gar was kneeling by Rowley, wrapping the rope around the hedge, his big hand pulling it snug. The rope in his hand made Marilyn think of another time, a time where she had been looking at a man in an outer coat holding an ox as she watched him out the window, but it wasn’t her and it was her, her being in another body. Marilyn transported herself back to the second session in the Map Room, where she had been looking out the second floor window to the barn with the stranger holding the axe and oxen cart. As the Shaker Sister Ellen she had wanted the man who had come into their community to look up and confirm the spirit warning: that she had met his evil before in another life.
Look up
, Marilyn mentally willed Gar, feeling the other woman in her at the same time, older and just as desperately attracted and afraid of the man at the same time.

Gar looked up with a strange half smile, half grimace and that’s when she knew. He was the same man; he was the one who pursued her. She had been hiding it from herself, fixated on wanting to feel the way he made her feel again despite the danger. The tunnel seemed to widen then and she felt it not as a hedge but as carved stone. Another glimpse of a life where she had been with Gar? This one not explored by her and Max. But now the truth was before her, she was drawn like a moth to light to the one that would take her own soul from her. Why hadn’t she listened to the warnings? The mirror breaking, Max, the migraine, it was now plain to see. She was repeating the pattern of the young monk Khandar and the Shaker Sister Ellen. She had become entranced with the one that hunted her. The sessions in the Map Room flooded back as her ballerina flats slip-slid on the muddy path now strewn with the candy strips fallen from around Gar’s neck.

He doesn’t know I know unless I signal it, she thought. He’ll kill Rowley now if he thinks I know. Rowley had intuited that Gar was the creature that Max and Gretch Wendell had learned of in ancient texts when she and Father W wanted to pretend it was all in the professor’s overworked imagination. Gar was a soul hunting vampire on the hunt for her as he had been those times before in Attayhuya and Hancock Shaker Village -
and Ischia
where it all began
. Her heart constricted like the rope around Rowley’s neck was tied around it as well. In her skin, a thousand layers deep she felt some quivering wild abandon of desire, the fossil-like memory of a girl leaning out to her love, like a flower to the sun. Then she flashed on rows upon rows of ancient glass vials lining a rock wall then, and then another vial, this one full and in her hand
. The vision she had when coming through the beaded curtain at the fortune tellers.

The clouds had massed over the tomb that seemed like a medieval castle now as she neared the top of the tunnel. The eyes on the broken winged angels were wide and staring witnesses. I have to make him think I don’t know who he is, she thought. She ran forward to him and threw her arm carelessly around his neck and leaned in to kiss him, feeling the dark pull of his mouth as he gathered her into himself, kneeling on the pathway.

The smell of her cinnamon candy breath couldn’t mask the perfume of the source’s essence and its headiness almost knocked him over. She didn’t know; her sight had failed her, and now she was his. Her red lips and tongue were breaking into the cavern of his emptiness and he had to suppress the urge to plunge all the way into her and lift out the silvery skein of her innermost being woven around her like incandescent chain mail. He was drunk with desire, desire about to be fulfilled. Her tongue in his mouth would be too much and he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from taking her right there. He would take her in the tomb where it would be most like the Castello. It would be in the end as it should have been in the beginning. He buried his face in her shimmery essence as he knelt, darkly adoring.

Rowley couldn’t get a bark out, the rope was so tight around his neck. Marilyn was kissing Gar’s closed lips but she was holding herself away from him; in a subtle secretive way she wasn’t really letting herself go but pretending to. But you’d have to love her the way Rowley did to notice. Then there was her left hand; her right arm was slung around the unnatural man called Gar but her left hand was feeling behind her where Gar had knotted the rope. She moved her body adroitly like she was cuddling him but what she was really doing was untying the rope that held Rowley prisoner. The noose loosened around his neck but she looked at him and Rowley knew not to move. Her beautiful dark eyes told him to stay still and wait for the right moment. They were going to run at the first opportunity. She knew who Gar was now. Rowley felt an invisible bond flowing between them. He wouldn’t let her die.

Gar lifted Marilyn up in his arms in a sweeping motion and ran with her towards the tomb, feeling the air pressure change and the temperature drop. He looked up and, not able to help himself, he howled at the dark clouds now whirling above them. “Storm!” he cried. “Let’s get inside.” He set her down lightly on the stone plaza in front of the mausoleum littered with broken beer bottles, a condom, and cigarette butts. The doors to the tomb were black iron with angels and skeletons carved into them. Perfect, thought Gar, as he pulled on the rusty chain that locked them remembering the massive gates to the Castello. Gar rarely physically exerted himself. He knew from experience that it could startle people so he just didn’t show off his prowess. But he had the source now and there was no way she could escape him here, so he allowed himself to break the chain with one yank; its links burst and he pulled the black doors open with a monstrous heave. The blind angels with their broken wings felt all the cracks in their foundations, with their own bitter memories of men pissing on them and cigarettes put out in their eyes, all they had endured up until this moment, until a man arrived with some knowledge of how the fall from light had its own mesmerizing descent into the dark. Now the abandoned angels knew they would get some of their own back. A new dark angel was rising to take the proper revenge on the humans who had created them.

Marilyn wanted to scream but she held it in. Steady, she thought. It’s your only hope. The stale air from the tomb rushed out into the ozone smell and created a death storm odor that nearly made her faint.
You’ve smelt worse
, the thought came to her unbidden from another life.

“Come my lady, your bower awaits,” said Gar as he pulled her into the crypt, propping the door open a crack with a sinister-looking iron pin created for that purpose in case the dead wanted out.

“Nice,” Marilyn whispered as she looked around the gloomy space with high broken windows and stone walls lined with iron doors housing the deceased. Family names were carved on the doors, Luces, Ogelsby,
Charlesworth
. Crumbling wreaths made of feathers, silk flowers, and wire were hung around the room, along with family crests and, in one case, what looked to be the antique saber worked in gold and copper with faded colors hung above the family grouping of the Charlesworths. All of them but J.J., Marilyn couldn’t help but think, with a shudder so deep her rib cage rattled. The place was full of pigeon droppings and rats scuttling in the corners. This was a place where any human memory of lightness and sweet earth had been abandoned and now only darkness and ruined thrived. She looked at Gar, he was feeling the pull of some other place too, she thought. Gar was not human and something they had done together had made that happen, the realization streaked like lightning into her brain.

Gar began to pace the four corners of the tomb blowing his breath out in short powerful bursts as the ancient incantation he had once said so long ago began to rise up in his heart like distant music. The source wasn’t acting frightened yet so she still didn’t know. He could take his time and savor what he had come so far for. “I want you here,” he said simply.

Rowley let the rope slip away from him as he crouched low to the ground, slithering his way towards the massive broken-windowed building that smelled like a stone dead thing. He was going to have to wedge his way through the doors as they were only open a crack but he wanted to come at Gar in a full throttled run. It would be tricky.

“Yes,” breathed Marilyn closing her eyes. She fastened her mind on the antique saber hanging above the interred Charlesworths. She had very rarely tried to direct her connections with supposedly inanimate objects before, largely they moved on her emotions but without her control but now she felt an energy flowing between her and the saber, an energy that was neither wicked or good just powerful and necessary at the same time.

“Lie down,” Gar said, “And let me take everything from you just as I was meant to.”

“This place seems familiar to me, does it to you?” she asked, trying to hold him off as she continued to concentrate on the saber hanging on the wall above him.

Inside steel are molecules of iron and when the world was first created all the minerals in the universe exploded into being and are now part of all creation’s makeup. Including traces of gold, iron, and copper in human bodies. Normally the saber’s energies were not more present than the energies of stones, but the breeze through the tomb door carried with it a dark invitation and between that and Marilyn’s insistence of their shared particulates, the saber found itself waking. Marilyn willed herself into the blade and the handle, letting the forces that they shared come together and co-mingle in the air between them. The co-mingled forces were like the wind, there and yet invisible. Marilyn poured herself into their shared molecules and felt the skin of the normal separation between the animate and inanimate peeling apart. “Like the wind,” she whispered in her mind to the sword, “I’m a part of you and everything and you are a part of me.”

Marilyn lowered herself to the cold stone floor, feeling the storm breeze coming through the crack in the tomb doors.
An ill wind
, the phrase never seemed so apt. She held herself in a half -seated position like the woman in the pink dress in the poster in her apartment. She didn’t want to open herself all the way up to Gar as she concentrated on the saber. It was beginning to vibrate with her will. “We hold molecules in common, there are trace minerals of gold, copper and iron in my body, we are one and I call for your help with all of my being’s fibers,” she implored, silently aware that she was now channeling a magic that was outside the governing rules of life, and that she was no longer an innocent in this battle.