Decatur (37 page)

Marilyn was gasping at the bloody writing.
Gar was coming for her, and he would keep on coming unless she could end it. She just had to get the soul’s tears now, feeling all the pieces of her lives come together. This had to be why Sophia, the long dead sister she had tended in the burial chamber of Our Lady of Consolation had - in miraculous foresight - instructed her bury the second pure amphora under the chapel of St. Francis. So it could be sent forward for her now. All the rainy afternoons of her childhood had been spent to prepare her just for this moment, when the past came into the present.

Using his remaining strength Gar slammed through Marilyn’s apartment door. He shoved the completely ambushed cop away from Marilyn in one lunge and then swung his fist at his head, a blow to the temple that landed so hard the patrolmen’s neck nearly snapped. He fell against the bloody writing with a satisfying thud, the police two-way radio spinning across the floor. Gar put one arm around the throat of the cop and began to squeeze as he put a finger from the other to his lips, warning Marilyn to be quiet. “I’ll take his soul right here and I don’t care if he’s dead or alive,” he whispered. “But
he
might.”

Duffy felt the piss running down his pant leg even as he tried to claw the fingers of the big perp off of him.
What was he saying to the woman? Save me
, he thought, as the second blow landed, shattering his jaw before he could even reach for his gun. As if reading his mind, the big man reached down and disarmed him.

Marilyn felt her whole body scream now but no sound came out. An invisible force seemed to have snatched her voice away and she could only rasp, “No.”
Just get the soul’s tears,
the thought came back again, but then something new occurred to her in that awful second
. J. J. knew she had the amphora all along and now like the dark master he was pulling them back together. That’s why he hadn’t taken it back from her when she was nine; he too was waiting for this moment, when the purest solution, the hungry warrior and she would once again be reunited. She and Gar were trapped in the whirling gyres of fate, turning and turning again.

“Don’t black out on me yet,” Gar said as he felt the man’s bones splinter under his fist.

Marilyn felt the danger crackle in the air.
She could unleash a storm of her own
objects but what if the precious bottle broke?
She felt like her brain was on fire, part of it desperately wanting to escape, another shadowy place burning with some harder desire, like embers from a dark blaze brought up from far below as she looked at Gar, in his own way just as trapped as she was

Rowley dragged Max up the front porch continuing to bark and growl.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it boy?” Max said reaching in his pocket for the gun Gretch had given him. Marilyn had been inside for only three minutes or so but it seemed like an eternity.

Gar heard Rowley on the porch and felt a quick rush of anger,
that damn dog
. He aimed with his right hand Duffy’s gun at the door, while grabbing ahold of Marilyn with his left arm.
He’d kill the mutt by the time it reached the top step
.

Duffy didn’t like how the big man looked. There was something deeply wrong inside those gold flecked eyes and he knew that his life was meaningless to this man. He just wanted to live.

Marilyn went very still in Gar’s grasp.
Not Rowley, not her good boy. He would come up to the apartment after her, and Gar was ready for him this time.

Duffy felt the warm wet of the urine in his pants. There was a charge between the perp and the woman. They had something going on. His police training wasn’t completely useless. Something deep, but his jaw hurt too badly and his head was throbbing and his neck was nearly broke, so it all seemed kind of beside the point.

Marilyn felt something icy cold come into her heart.
She was going to have to play Gar if she wanted Rowley to live. Fine.
“There’s a second amphora, a pure one,” she said simply.

Max turned the knob of the front door; it wouldn’t give. He yelled up frantically, “Marilyn,” as Rowley barked like he could get the door to open at his canine command.

Duffy was having a hard time, the room on a sickening tilt and the words coming out of the couple’s lips not making any sense to him with the sound of the dog barking in the background fading in and out.
What was an amphora?
He wondered in a slow motion way.

Gar couldn’t believe what he heard Marilyn say.
A second pure amphora.
Gar felt a thirst scrape raw in his throat, remembering the scouring taste of it even after all these years.
The convent had been closed centuries ago and he had never found another source of soul’s tears in all of his travels and now one last precious bottle existed.
He felt the anticipation build in his chest
.
A crazy hope made him smile at Marilyn.
Could he somehow have his cake and eat it too?
“Why didn’t you say so? You bring it to Papa and Rowley’s home free,” he said, suddenly relieved and grinning at her.
She was always magnificent but now even more so. A fitting consort
. He grabbed her hand in his own, her fingers laced into his, and he felt himself shudder with all his desires.

“It’s here,” she whispered. The colored water in the bottles crammed on her bookshelf with the toys and the poetry books began to quiver in their thick glass containers.

Duffy saw through a haze Marilyn holding her hand outstretched as an old bottle no more than five inches high, it could have been perfume, somehow came through the air to her. That scared him most of all because he realized he had forever left the Decatur, Illinois he knew and was now on the shores of an ocean mysterious. So he made hardly a sound when the big man knelt down and took his throat in both his hands. He was concentrating on
biting the bullet
like his dad used to say, somewhere a thousand miles from this place where he was splayed out on the floor. Duffy felt the death rattle come up in his throat and his legs kicked, but only when the man put his face close and rolled his tongue did Duffy want to yell, but it was too late. Something he had forgotten he had came up from his heart and through his mouth and was sucked down by what was surely a monster and then, like he had been split open by lightning and carved out, he fell into the howling.

Gar felt the cop’s essence light him up like Adele’s garage for a second. “Papa’s thirsty,” he said to Marilyn who was standing holding the amphora after all this time in her hand.

Max looked left and right and then he fired into the front door of Marilyn’s apartment, one, two shots, and heard the wooden splintering and leaned his shoulder on the door, pushing on it.

“Gar, I want you to listen to me,” Marilyn said, feeling hot and nearly dizzy, hearing the shots coming from outside like fire-cracker pops. “The hidden celebrant who made you the way you are
-
he’s here and he wants this.” She held the vial up, feeling its power in her hand, remembering her own swallow from it. “I think we have to bring it to him. He’s waiting for us in the big house, the one I took you to. It was always meant to be this way. There’s to be another ceremony, another renewal, and… and, a turning.” Marilyn didn’t know how she knew but she suddenly she knew like the vial was transmitting thoughts to her:
That was what he had meant at the restaurant. J.J. was there on the third floor waiting for them, for her to bring the hungry warrior and the purest solution. And there they would go, but not to his will, not to his, there was another will, a will that was born in the bottle, and now rising in her. She would be her own Instrument and end this karmic dance across the centuries once and for all.

Gar looked at her then, his face full of desire, his eyes glistening with tears, shining with fear and hope. He was falling back in time to the night at the temple on Ischia where he had been initiated as a hunter and had begun his long journey. How he had felt his soul ripped out and accepted his frightening new master. The curse he had to endure because Isabella had mixed her own bodily fluids into the soul’s tears, and now on the cusp of his renewal the celebrant was back
. Of course he was. This is what he had been waiting for all these years during the source’s other lifetimes. It was time to begin again.

Gar held her tightly to him, taking her down the front steps and through Harry’s fly infested place, even as Rowley kept up the barking. He restrained from firing bullets through the duplex’s front door, because she loved the dog and now it didn’t matter, he had her. The outer door was buckling under Max’s weight, pulling from its hinges and he didn’t care as he spirited her away into Harry’s
. She was his.
Marilyn almost retched from the stench of Harry’s body as Gar pulled her through the mess of the kitchen and down the basement steps.

He had to work hard as they got down into the dark cellar not to stop and simply take her and drink the soul’s tears there and in his destroying renewal not just claim her but make her like himself, another hunter yes, but a companion too- but some darker vision of his master stopped him. “Come on,” he whispered, “You have to keep moving or I can’t promise
-
” He broke off, nearly stumbling as she reached up and gently touched his cheek, right where she had cut him, as if she was saying sorry.

Then they were up through the root cellar doors and out into scrappy backyard, Gar keeping a tight hold on her, forcing her down and through the hedges towards the big house and grounds of Charlesworth Place.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Decatur’s First Psychic Fair

Father Weston walked onto the grounds of Charlesworth Place with a sense of dread and wonder, leaving the snarled traffic and blaring fire truck and police sirens behind. Dozens of college kids in wide legged jeans and t-shirts, shaggy haired with headbands and backpacks, were wandering up the circular gravel drive towards the white student activity tents scattered on the lawn draped with long scarves courtesy of the girls in the History of Psychology 300 Independent Study Group. A white van with Keep On Truckin’ mud flats and both back doors open was parked incongruously right in front of the Victorian mansion with the words ‘Groovy Times’ painted in rainbow colors on each side. A plump redhead in a patched jean skirt handed him a flier with astrological signs around the edges that welcomed him to the psychic fair featuring tarot cards, mediums and charts. Father Troy would have been right at home and no doubt would have scooped up some new guitar mass attendees if he hadn’t been locked in Ward Five E, Father W thought, as the pain and irony of it twisted his mouth. He was as startled as everyone else when a yellow cab darted through the stalled traffic in front of the grounds, horn honking, and gunned its way through the scattering kids to the where the van was parked.

The cab driver tucked the extra twenty in his pocket and decided as Gretch Wendell climbed out that it was time to call it a day. They had come close to being pulled over by the cops and he couldn’t face any more points on his license so, extra tip or not, the lame professor was on her own from here on out.

Father W blinked as he saw Gretch Wendell get out of the cab that was now carefully backing down the drive. In one way he was glad to see her and in another he knew it meant things were not good.

It was then he noticed that there was a skinny kid with long lank hair and wild eyes leaning out of the doors of the van, which was crammed full of neatly stacked psychedelic t-shirts, rows of hanging dream-catchers, and racks of little brown bottles of massage oil.

“Help me,” the kid whispered as the green grass roared at him. The priest before him glittered.

“What’s the matter with you?” Father W asked, feeling scared and inadequate; he didn’t spend time with anyone that looked like this.

The priest’s teeth were sharp, his eyes were black marbles, he didn’t feel friendly; he was made of broken glass.
Joey from the head shop in Champaign-Urbana just wanted the lawn to stop bellowing as it waved in front of the big house, the big house that floated up to the big puffy clouded sky. “Look,” he pointed up to the sky and there was a black razor thin cloud cutting through all that white puff,
like a knife in heaven. It was a sign.
“The demon’s inside, the demon’s inside, the demon’s inside and he’s come to eat all the light,” Joey gasped.

“Gretch, get over here!” Father W yelled as the kid’s eyes rolled back in his head.

And Gretch was there. She came right up to the boy and took the kid’s face ever so gently in her soft wrinkled hand. “Look at me, what’s your name? I’m Gretch Wendell and I’m going to help you,” she said in a voice that reminded Joey of eating fig newtons.

“Joey,” but when he heard his voice it sounded all wrong and the feeling that the funny little woman gave him faded and the grass was back at him again.

“Okay, Joey, just keep looking at me. Did you take something? It’s okay if you did.” Gretch had the boy’s right hand in hers now and she was massaging it.

“It was supposed to be window pane,” Joey felt his voice was flying away as he spoke, and he saw the big mansion wink at him like it knew he was fucked on some bad acid and might not ever come back into himself again.

Gretch looked at Weston then and the grounds with all the kids and the silly scarf-draped tents and saw that they were in a precarious situation with a bunch of kids on J. J.’s home turf, “Why don’t you sprinkle some of the holy water I know you’re carrying around, Father W? I bet Joey wouldn’t mind the blessing,” she instructed gently.

Father W couldn’t help but think that Father Troy would have been so much better in his stead but he opened the sacrament case and took out his holy water shaker. “Blessed be---,” he stopped, not knowing what to say, but Gretch’s eyes were boring into his so he improvised, “this white van,” he said and sprinkled a few drops of water on the van. Joey felt himself exhale and the priest turned back into looking something like a priest should.

“See? You’re going to be all right, look at me, Joey, don’t look at the big house, you’re going to be okay,” Gretch said, leading him around like one might a six year old child to the front of the van. “The van’s a safe place now, it’s been blessed,” she said as he handed her the keys with a sense of growing wonder and she opened the passenger’s side door for him. “Climb in; this is going to be your safe place.”

Joey the kid from the head shop never took acid again in his life but nor did he ever forget what happened next: the tiny old woman leaned into the van and breathed on him, and something glistening came out of her heart and up through her mouth and landed on him like the lace of the first frost and it melted into his skin and down into all his cells where it spread a deep cooling relief and he felt himself relax and he leaned back on the beige vinyl seat ready to ride out the trip.

Carol was all alone in the History of Mediums tent, which she had to admit was her idea and now looked just plain boring. All they had was a poster-board that had a time line on spiritualism in the United States – pretty lame, truth be told. Sure, there was a copy of their ten-page paper that she had carefully tabbed with a table of contents and a bibliography trying to disguise how thin it really was. So when the big form of Madam Josie in a flowing muu-muu filled the entryway, she felt a little thrill of vindication.
An expert was interested, that said something.

“Madam Josie, I’m so honored,” Carol said. “I’m sure you know all there is to know about your field’s history…”

“Come with me. Your friends-,” Madam Josie said in a voice that didn’t sound like a medium or palm reader at all to Carol, but the voice of a scared middle-aged woman with a lisp and a faint foreign accent, “-I don’t like the young ones messing with this, I never did. You are too sensitive. Come quickly, you have to talk sense to them. I don’t know what that Ham or Tina are up to, but
now
. Go now.”

Rowley and Max were running as more sirens screamed in the background. In the horror of Marilyn’s empty apartment Max had dialed the number Tooley had given him last night with a sense that this just couldn’t be happening, but it was. In five awful minutes, Gar had taken Marilyn and the patrolman was dead in her hallway.

Rowley felt yesterday’s injuries as he moved through the streets with the leash pulling on his collar and didn’t care.
He had to get to Marilyn, she needed him.
Max seemed to know where he was going and he had to trust he would get this right with the smell of the freshly dead cop in his snout pushing his legs harder, making his blood roar.

Max and Rowley moved anxiously through the coeds wandering up the grounds where Marilyn walked her dog every night. Looking for Gretch, Max was scanning the large lawn taking in the flowering magnolia, big weeping pine tree, tents, and the closed up white head shop van parked in front of the house. That’s when he saw Lisa, a member of the independent study group, handing out fliers at the edge of the driveway, and there were Father W and Gretch talking to her in a little huddle. He and Rowley sprinted over.

“You’ve got to help us clear the grounds,” he heard Gretch say, as Lisa’s jaw set in her round freckled face.

“We’ve got permission, you and the Church can’t stop this, lady, it’s an approved activity,” Lisa’s voice was stubborn and she was looking scornfully at Father W.

“It’s no longer approved,” Max said in his deepest voice. “And I’m not sure it ever was, because I never signed for it, Lisa, and you’re in my study group.”

“Max, you’re here.” Gretch said and then in a worried voice looking at Rowley, “Where’s Marilyn?”

“What do you mean, ‘where’s Marilyn’? I mean, he’s got the dog. ” Father Weston asked feeling the oddness of Max having Rowley without Marilyn even as he said it.

Max shook his head, gritting his teeth. “Lisa, this fair is not at all a good idea, especially now, so you have to stop…”

“Professor! You can’t do that, we’ve planned this! I never thought you would cave to the Catholic Church!” Lisa couldn’t believe what adults were capable of.

Rowley then woofed impatiently and Father W, feeling utterly frustrated as another wail of an ambulance shrieked in the background, stamped his polished black oxford on the graveled pavement of the drive. “Young lady, if you have an ounce of sense you’ll immediately leave and tell every student entering to turn back around and spread the word to every other student to get away from here. Can’t you see what your liberal professors are trying to save you from? Those sirens signal the biggest drug bust Decatur’s ever seen and if you don’t want to be arrested…”

Lisa took approximately three seconds to process what the priest was saying and, as she only had one real rule she had lived by since she was sixteen
, don’t get arrested
, she dropped her fliers on the ground without another word. She began trotting down the gravel drive, stopping only to utter the words, “It’s a bust!” over and over to her fellow students, who turned this way and that, spreading the word, cutting over to the statue of Stephen Decatur or streaming down the driveway out from the mansion grounds.

Max then turned to his friends and explained how Marilyn had been ambushed in her house and taken by Gar, leaving a cop dead in her apartment.

Gar pulled apart the wrought iron spokes of the fence separating Charlesworth Place from the houses on the other side, feeling the strain in his shoulders.
He hated feeling weak; it scared him. Soon he would regain all his strength and more.
They were coming at the grounds sideways, through the backyard of a blond brick house that faced innocently onto West William Street. He pulled Marilyn protectively through the opening, making sure nothing scraped her beautiful skin. Before them lay the big koi pond of the mansion.

With a jolt, Marilyn saw it was full, a large round rippling surface of wet. She stopped, feeling the way the air moved around her, her senses all on high alert
. The
infernity had gotten strong, as J. J. said it would
. A boy, who couldn’t have been over nineteen with dark curly hair and geeky glasses, was standing on the other side of the pond staring down into it intently as Ham, the younger brother of Madam Josie, today in an odd morning coat and yellow gloves, stood whispering in his ear.

John, a refugee from the AV club, had wanted the psychic fair to serve as a kind of warning to the cool kids that geeks knew things, all sorts of things, but now he felt sick to his stomach, and full of doubt looking down into the blackness of the pond. The medium had followed him from the tent where he had told him an awful fortune: that John was not going to ever have a happy life, that things would always turn out badly for him, and that this life was a terrible misfortune, one to shit out and begin again. The man had coarse whiskers and his voice sounded foreign and the yellow gloves he wore just gave John the creeps as he imagined long wicked fingernails hidden underneath.