Ghosts of Eden (8 page)

“I’m just a kid: this has to be a dream. It can’t be real. It’s hot. I’m sweating. The room like a sauna, like a fever in summer. What are those slurping sounds? It strikes, like a snake. I can’t believe it. I shriek, but it’s already pulling me towards the maw of the open closet and that hot breath and…”

Stomping footsteps coming down the hall. The doorknob rattled—he’d locked it from the inside; there was no way in or out. His stepfather pounded on the door. “Garty! I know you’re in there. Open this door!”

“I’m in a jittery panic. I flip onto my stomach, clawing at the sheets, catching the headboard, but only for a second, and I’m pulled away. Its grip on my ankle is absolute. This has to be a dream! I struggle to wake from the nightmare, to force myself up and away from this irrational horror. Wake up. Please. It’s time to wake up…”

“Garty, you son of a bitch. Open this door! I’m counting to three, then, God damn you, I’m breaking the door down!”

A jagged break in the glass pulled that strange curling smile hideously wide on the portrait of his great uncle, leaning on the floor against the wall, as if in the throes of horrible mocking laughter.

A violent thud shook the walls of the room; something cracked and splintered over the floor. When he looked, the door bulged into the room, held, but only just. Garty couldn’t remember his stepfather ever counting. A pause. And then the door bent again as his stepfather threw his massive bulk against it. Another crack, but, again, the door held.

If his stepfather broke in, he’d beat the living pulp out of him—he was sure to disapprove of Garty’s living arrangements with his grandmother.

Another rattling thud—but still, the door remained intact.

The room became suddenly very warm, moist and heavy—the breath of the beast. The closet door shuttered open. Inside: black, oily—a midnight jungle.
Oh shit
, Garty thought.
Oh shit. Oh shit.

Someone was laughing, a raspy, choking sound, muffled through the glass of the picture frame: his great uncle continued to mock him.

He stared into that darkness. There was something moving in there, something terrible and wet.

His stepfather continued to pound the door, but he ignored the bellowing and the sound of crunching wood—it seemed distant now, far away.

“Brace yourself…”

A thin, whistling sound began to fill the room, a pressure shift in the air. A sudden gust of wind sucked the hair from Garty’s face. A box tumbled from the highest reaches of the pile, spraying photographs the color of teeth across the floor, then another box, sliding and tumbling; the beds rolled towards the closet opening, the photographs gone like leaves into a vacuum, pulled into the darkness.

“What the hell is going on in there?” his stepfather said, bellowing through the door, pounding with his fists now, pounding and pounding against the impenetrable door.

Newspapers and paper clips flew across the floor as if caught in a thunderstorm. Out of another box, the picked-clean-white of anthropological animal bones blurred passed end over end. He saw a stapler, a bottle of whiteout, a letter opener like a miniature sword. His feet were pulled out from under him, the air knocked from his lungs as he hit the floor. He slid towards the opening.

The painting of his great uncle flipped, spun, and disappeared into the blackness with a gleeful grin. Garty’s stepfather was pounding and pounding at the door, screaming obscenities. The entire pile of boxes crashed to the floor and something heavy struck Garty in the head.

“I am pulled from the bed, dragged over the floor. I am swallowed in hot breathing darkness…”

* * *

“Hey! Wake up! Worthless piece of shit.”

Someone was shaking him, but he resisted consciousness; the emptiness was too peaceful, too much of a relief. He wanted to sleep, to sleep without dreaming.

“What were you doing in there? You made a mess of everything.”

Slowly, he opened his eyes to slits. The red and puffy face of his stepfather filled his vision, so close he could see the man’s irritated pores, as if he’d just finished scrubbing his face. “After all I’ve done for you…”

Garty groaned.

“Get up.” His stepfather gripped him under his arms and lifted him to one of the beds.

“What the—”

“Shut up and tell me what you’re doing in grandma’s house.”

Garty’s head throbbed, the world felt as if it were revolving around him. When he didn’t speak right away, his stepfather continued.

“How long did you think you could get away with this? Eating Grandma’s food, making her clean up after you. It’s disgusting.
You’re
disgusting.”

Garty blinked, slowly. The words came out before he could think, his tongue dredging up the old, familiar conflict. “She’s not
your
grandma. What do you care?”

His stepfather’s face bristled. “Garty, you son of a bitch. I raised you, remember? Even after your mom died I took you in, not that you ever appreciated it. I sent you to college.”

“Yeah, with
my
mom’s money!”

His stepfather’s face twitched, muscles knotting. “I could have thrown you out. I could have…” His fists clenched at his sides, standing over Garty. He looked ready to throw a punch.

Garty glanced around. It seemed that the spare bedroom at the end of the hall had been hit by some sort of storm: boxes and their random contents thrown every which way, the beds at irrational angles in the center of the room, the door shattered open and hanging by a single hinge, splinters of wood littering the floor. He seemed okay. What had really happened? The closet door, when he glanced at it, was firmly shut, looked, in fact, as if it hadn’t been opened in years.

“I’m sending you to your uncle’s,” his stepfather said, his voice tight and restrained, and Garty could feel the spittle from his stepfather’s angry words striking his face.

“What?”

“If it were up to me, I’d kick you to the curb, see how you like the streets, but your uncle volunteered to house you, for the summer anyway.”

“Which uncle?”

“One you’ve probably never met. His name is Xander, William M. Xander.” He seemed proud to say the name, as if it pleased him.

“Xander? If he’s my uncle, how come I’ve never heard of him?”

His stepfather shrugged. “Your mother used to write him regularly. You leave tomorrow, or you’re on your own.”

Garty’s mind throbbed. What were his options? Where could he go? He had twenty-two dollars stuffed in a wad in the pocket of his jeans. All of his friends were losers and junkies.

“You can stay here at grandma’s one more night, but only because I don’t want you stinking up my house, now that I’ve finally got it the way I want. And I’m staying too, to make sure you don’t do anything stupid.”

“I won’t do anything stupid.”

With contempt, “I’ve heard that before.” His stepfather stood and crossed the room. He turned, his bulk filling the doorway, and fixed Garty with his red and watery eyes. “I want this mess cleaned up before lunchtime.”

Garty waited until his stepfather’s footsteps had faded down the hall before he said, “You’re not my father. You can’t tell me what to do.”

* * *

He spent the afternoon wandering outside, staying out of his stepfather’s way. He could almost believe everything was going to be okay with the drugs he’d secretly swallowed beginning to mount in his brain. He wasn’t losing his mind. Living with his Uncle Xander might not be so bad. It might be nice, actually. At least he could get away from all this, from his stepfather and his grandmother’s creepy old house.

That evening—alone in the corner of the house where he’d been sleeping on an old couch, packing his stuff in a duffle bag for his trip tomorrow (the jar he’d acquired at the rave remained wrapped in an old shirt at the bottom, where it had lain since he’d moved to his grandmother’s house)—his stepfather had stomped over to him. “You’ll have to come to the kitchen,” his stepfather said. “She insisted on talking to you directly.” It took Garty a moment to realize his stepfather was talking about a phone call.

In the kitchen, with his stepfather watching him carefully, he’d picked up the phone and turned toward the wall. “Hello?”

“Garty?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Loretta Straffe, Hector’s mom.” Her voice was controlled, matter-of-fact, blanched of emotion.

Garty’s heart began to pound. “Yes?”

“I, um, don’t know how to say this. I guess you were his best friend. He left you a note. He…”

His hands were beginning to shake, blood thumped in his temples. “We weren’t really that close.”

“Yes, well. The note says…oh damn. Pardon me. I don’t know what happened.” Her voice was beginning to crack, the emotions were beginning to bubble through the surface of her well-rehearsed words. “He…he was such a good boy, growing up, he…” She cleared her throat, tried to continue. “He…” A heart-wrenching sob broke up her words.

Garty gaped. The phone felt glued to the side of his face. He didn’t know what to say. “What happened?” the words fell out of his mouth.

When Hector’s mom had regained enough control to speak, she said, “They found him in his car…it’d been several days…by the park…a gun in his lap…he could have called…he could have come home…he…” But she couldn’t continue, the sobs loud and ugly through the phone.

Garty waited, his heart pumping in his throat. He could hardly breathe.

“Why did he do it? Garty? You were his best friend. Why? What was happening to him? I know so little about what he was going through. He hardly spoke to his dad or me anymore. His note said you would understand what he was going to do. So tell me, Garty, why did he do it? Can you tell me that?”

“I…I don’t know.”

“The note said he’d shown you something—that you’d know. Please, Garty. I know you know. He’d just gotten out of rehab and he was looking so good. He was doing good. Why did he do it? What did he show you?”

Garty listened to Hector’s mom wailing into the phone. He tried to think what to say. “We just hung out.” His words were shaky. “He didn’t show me anything.”

On the other end of the line, the wailing had become broken and garbled.

“He didn’t show me anything,” Garty repeated, imagining how his friend’s face had looked when he’d seen the cat.

The phone line buzzed and went dead. Garty slumped in the chair.

* * *

The next day, Garty’s stepfather drove him two hours out of Albuquerque in silence, north on Interstate 25. They arrived in Los Alamos before noon.

Stepping out of the car before his uncle’s house, a shiver ran through him; to Garty, it felt unseasonably cold.  

“He has a lot of land,” Garty said while they waited for the gates to be buzzed open.

His stepfather chuckled. “I wouldn’t want to stay here.”

Before Garty could ask him why not, the gate made a shrieking sound and then began to piston inward. The car lurched forward.

Movement caught his eye and he turned his head as the car swung up the drive. His mouth dried and he began to shake. A little girl sat beneath a tree, playing with something that flashed red in the sun. Garty licked his lips nervously. The girl looked up and met his gaze with her own. Her eyes held a powerful and desperate emotion. Then the car swung around the corner and came to a stop before the house.

He’d seen that look before, in his dreams, in the eyes of the little girl, as they ran through the wheat field—the dark jungle closing in—as they ran from the beast.

INTERLUDE: LOS ALAMOS

Perched atop the Pajarito Plateau, between White Rock Canyon and the Valles Caldera, sits the small town of Los Alamos: “The Cottonwoods.” Known to most of the world as the birthplace of the Atomic Bomb—that missile of annihilation that was instrumental in bringing an end to World War II after it was dropped on Hiroshima—the plateau and the land surrounding it, before its takeover by the government, once held a ranch school for children with bronchitis and other lung ailments, it being easier to breathe in this remote region of sparkling pines and lush vibrant air. And before that, before the school (about which rumors of strange practices and rituals often circulate), it had been home to various Native American tribes and settlements, evidence of their cultures left scattered about the ground in places—shards of pottery; the occasional arrowhead—or carved into the very mountainside in the form of fire-blackened caves and hieroglyphics: dancing men and animals; white spirals in the reddish rock. It is a land that had once been celebrated for its natural beauty, that had once moved the minds of shamans, and poets, and storytellers alike, that had once been home to those who believed in greater things, that believed it was a sacred place, one at the center of the universe, a pivoting point, where the air seemed to waver and move, as if, under the proper conditions, one might draw it aside like a curtain, to reveal the radiant expanse of another world.