Sacrifice (21 page)

“Olivia?” Katy said. “You want to hear some real crap Jeff’s about to pull?”

Chapter Forty-Six

Bob and Paul arrived at Paul’s house. His bedroom looked about how Bob had imagined it. Jock trophies on the dresser. Farrah Fawcett poster on the wall. Sports equipment piled in corners. A picture of his father in an NYPD uniform hung over the dresser beside a small crucifix. A twin bed sat against the far wall, and a tattered lounge chair filled out the room’s list of furnishings.

Bob dropped into the lounge chair. Paul flopped onto the bed and kicked off his sneakers.

“So, honey,” Paul said in a falsetto. “How was your day at work?”

“Bite me sideways. Whose idea was this anyhow?”

“We gotta do it,” Paul said. “You know how real the son of a bitch can look.”

Bob did. He could not tell the real Mr. P from the fake, even now. Of course, how did he know this was the real Paul, come to think of it?

“What was the name of our third-grade teacher?” Bob asked.

“Mr. Crespo,” Paul said. “Why?’

“Just making sure you’re you,” Bob said. “The Woodsman might have been watching us and learned a few things, but he wouldn’t know that.”

Paul’s face turned concerned. “OK, then how do I know you’re
you
showing up at my front door?”

Bob scooped a catcher’s mitt up from the floor beside the chair and nailed Paul in the head. “Because I drove here in the fucking Duster, idiot. You think the Woodsman’s going to steal my car just to put one over on you?”

“No, I guess not,” Paul said. “Even the dead wouldn’t be caught in that heap.” He gave the catcher’s mitt a playful toss back at Bob.

Bob had to smile. It was the first time all day.

“We can really pull off this ritual?” Paul said.

“Piece of cake,” Bob said. “We break into the mill, shovel Silas out of the cellar and torch him. In the morning no one will even know we’ve been there.”

Paul gave a dubious look and opted to stare at the ceiling.

Bob looked around the room.

“No TV in here?”

“My brother and sister are downstairs watching a Disney movie on the Betamax if you’re interested, but we’re supposed to be studying.”

Bob sagged back into the chair. Sitting still wasn’t his strong suit, and a metabolism primed on caffeine and nicotine didn’t help matters at all. This was going to be a long night.

“We could actually study,” Paul offered.

“Three words,” Bob said. He extended a finger as he recited each one. “Bite…me…side—“

“Seriously, man,” Paul said. “It ain’t gonna hurt us.”

Bob took a long look at Paul. The guy who was willing to swim though jellyfish, the guy who had faced defensemen on the gridiron half again his size, the guy who once passed two cars
up the middle
of Route 347, was scared. But it wasn’t just the Woodsman, though that was cause enough. He was scared of finals. Bob didn’t give a shit about them. While Paul affected his usual easygoing pose towards their last exams, Paul was no Bob.

Bob didn’t worry because he’d pass out of school with something above an F and grab the last diploma he would ever see. But Paul needed at least a middle-of-the-pack GPA. He had ideas about a stint in the Air Force Search and Rescue or applying to the NY Police Academy. Both of those options needed halfway decent grades. A poor showing this week meant neither would happen.

“Fine,” Bob said. “Toss me your health book.” Smoking Bob hadn’t fared well in that class, and there were too many horror stories about senior year repeaters taking only that class.

Paul grabbed the health book from the stack at the foot of his bed and threw it to Bob. He picked up the American history book underneath it. He paged through a few sections.

“I just need to brush up on the end of this,” he said. “Everything after 1776.”

And for two hours they read. Bob learned about polio and measles. Paul learned about the Trail of Tears.

The bedroom door opened a crack and Paul’s mother stuck her head in. She looked suspicious and then surprised.

“Hey, Mrs. Hampton,” Bob said in his best Eddie Haskell impersonation. “Nice to see you.”

“You really are studying,” she said.

“First time for everything,” Paul said.

She shook her head, withdrew and closed the door behind her.

It was pushing midnight when the boys killed the lights to sleep. Bob opted for the lounge chair over the floor. Paul’s mother had returned with blankets, a pillow and a plate of pizza rolls earlier in the evening, still astounded at their studying. The lights were out but neither of the boys was asleep. Without visions of VD and world pandemics to occupy his mind, Bob’s thoughts returned to the Woodsman, and that was the opposite of counting sheep.

“You think we can do it?” Paul said in the inky darkness.

Bob didn’t need to ask for clarification. What else would they both be thinking about?

“Yeah, we can kill the son of a bitch. Madame Calabria was sure of it.” So maybe “sure” wasn’t the right word…

Minutes of silence passed.

“You ever wonder if we’re going to be screwed up for life?” Paul said. “Growing up without fathers?”

Bob wondered where that question came from. The Half Dozen were tight, but they never talked about shit like that. Personal, emotional shit.

But there was something about the darkness, about the threat of the Woodsman, about impending finals and the end of school. Like there was some clock ticking down. Somehow it now seemed right to talk about that shit.

“Happens all the time,” Bob said. “Lots of people end up with one parent.”

“But aren’t you afraid we’re missing something?”

Bob thought about the brief interlude with his stepfather, the summer from hell that sent him and his mother running back to Sagebrook with little more than what they could pack in the trunk of the Duster. Alcohol, abuse, anxiety. He shivered when he thought of the last night he spent in that house when he woke up with a rat on his chest.

“I’m not missing anything,” he said. “But you probably are. Your dad was a good guy, a hero cop.”

“Yeah, he was.”

In the silence, Bob understood Paul for the first time.

“If he’d seen what you’ve done,” Bob said, “varsity football, lifeguard, he’d have been proud.”

“Yeah?”

“Shit, yeah. Wait ‘til you kill a ghost.”

“Thanks, man.”

A light snore a few minutes later signaled that Paul had drifted off to sleep. Bob sat in the darkness. He shifted his weight to stop a spring from the old chair from boring into a kidney. He wished he felt as confident about the future as he tried to sound. The whole ghost-killing idea sounded iffy from the start, and it wasn’t selling itself the more he thought about it. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He pulled the blanket up over his head.

He finally fell asleep and dreamed his father had never left them.

Chapter Forty-Seven

It was after ten p.m. and most of the textbooks in Ken’s bedroom remained untouched. He and Jeff both had a physics textbook open.

Ken’s rested against his flexed legs as he lay on his back on his bed. He read without comprehension.

Jeff sat at Ken’s desk, feet propped up on the desktop. He’d been staring at the page on Newtonian physics for an hour, but hadn’t considered once what it meant.

Model fighter planes hung from Ken’s ceiling, the remnants of several years fascinated by hearing his grandfather’s exploits in World War II. A poster of the band Boston hung over his bed.

“You know,” Ken said as he closed his physics book. “If we don’t know it by now…” He pulled out the page of the Prayer of St. Severinus.

“You don’t have to memorize it do you?” Jeff said. “You can read it.”

“But what if I can’t? What if it’s too dark? What if I lose the paper?”

“You understand what the prayer says?”

“Six years of Latin,” Ken said. “Yeah I know what it says. It beseeches God and all the saints to open the gates of the afterlife and guide this lost soul through them.”

“Like an exorcism?”

“No, it doesn’t assume the spirit is evil. It also doesn’t specify whether the sprit goes to heaven or hell.”

“I’m guessing the Woodsman heads south.” Jeff turned to face Ken. “How is it you can memorize so much so quickly?”

Ken shrugged. “I don’t know. I can just look at things and later there is this picture in my head of whatever it was. And it’s there for a long time. I can remember stuff that’s ten years old like I saw it yesterday.”

“That’s going to help freshman year,” Jeff said. “Man, I wish we were all going to college together.”

“I told you to come with me,” Ken said. “Columbia has electrical engineering.”

“I can’t get into Columbia like you,” Jeff said. “None of us can. That amazing memory you take for granted is way beyond what we’ve got.”

After a moment, Jeff continued. “You think about it, all of us splitting up?”

“We’re not really splitting up,” Ken said. “We’ll be home for Christmas and Thanksgiving and Spring Break and all summer long. Bob’s not going to college, so he’ll get us up to speed on the neighborhood and the Dirty Half Dozen will be back in business. You and Katy will come back from SUNY Albany and probably be engaged.”

Jeff’s face got red and he smiled. “That would be cool.”

“We’ll marry you off first, and then the rest of us have someplace to hang out on the weekends.”

Jeff hit Ken in the chest with his physics book. “Like we’d let assholes like you into our house.”

“We just have two things to do,” Ken said. “Finish high school and then finish the Woodsman. Then everyone lives happily ever after.”

Chapter Forty-Eight

Marc sat in the corner of Albert’s room. The nightlight in the wall cast a weak, soft glow across the floor and onto Albert’s low bed. The boy lay wadded up in a pile of blankets. Even in the dead of summer the kid slept under two comforters. Just his mop of black hair stuck out onto his pillow.

Marc should have been studying but his brain was well past full. It might not be enough knowledge, but it was as much as he was going to have. As night fell, he couldn’t focus anymore anyway. Once his mother put Albert to bed, and his brother was alone, Marc started to worry. His mother was so overprotective that he wasn’t concerned about the Woodsman’s tricks when she was around. The Woodsman had gotten through her defenses once, when Marc was three. He’d never get that lucky again. But when Albert was alone, he could be vulnerable. Could the Woodsman wake him up or give him a nightmare or make him do something awful in his sleep? There were too many unanswered questions that kept Marc from sleeping well until his Uncle Tim got Albert out of the danger zone in the morning.

Marc’s mother cracked open the door to check on her youngest son. Her jaw dropped when she also saw her eldest. Marc raised a finger to his lips and shepherded her out into the hall.

“What are you doing?” his mother began.

“Ma, I walked by and he was making a noise,” Marc said. “Like he was having a bad dream or something. I sat there in case he woke up.”

“Is he all right?” His mother’s voice held a tinge of panic.

“Yeah, Ma,” Marc said. “But as I sat there I thought of him going to Grandma’s and that I’d miss him. So I just sat there with him.”

“Well, you go to bed yourself. You have a big day tomorrow.”

Marc almost laughed as his mother didn’t know the half of it.

“Yeah, Ma,” he said. “I’ll go soon.”

She left and climbed the stairs to the upstairs master bedroom. When he heard her door close, Marc slipped back into Albert’s room. He looked down at his brother. The little pile of covers rose and fell as he breathed.

“What happened to me,” he said, “won’t happen to you. Not tonight. And after tomorrow, not ever.”

Albert made a contented murmuring sound.

“I promise,” Marc said.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Friday’s final exams were scheduled in blocks at Whitman to standardize the time period to complete the test. This process overjoyed all involved. The students hated the longer tests. The teachers hated the break in routine.

The Half Dozen rolled into the exams with a burden the rest of the senior class did not share. How do you focus on calculus when that night you knew you would have to stare death in the eye and not blink?

At the lunch break, Jeff caught up with Katy in the cafeteria. He’d looked for her between exams to no avail. Part of him was relieved to put off seeing her for a few more hours. She wasn’t going to like what he had to say.

Katy sat at one end of a crowded cafeteria table, across from Olivia. Olivia had a full tray of the cafeteria’s finest fare. Katy had nothing before her. Olivia saw Jeff first. Her demeanor went frosty and Jeff lip-read her telling Katy, “He’s here.”

Katy gave Jeff a withering stare. As he approached he felt like he was walking into machine-gun fire.

“Hey, Katy.” His smile provided no defense. “Can we talk in the hall?”