Cautiously, Hannah walked across the floor and sat beside me on the hay. We held hands without talking for a minute, and all I could hear was my own breathing.
I looked out the open loft window at the perfect sky that hung over the trees, admiring the strength of the sight, the home I was fortunate enough to have been gifted.
“Well,” I said. “I’m going to tell Pa. And I’m going to tell him today, Hannah. There’s nothing else that can be done, and I reckon it’s been a long time coming, anyhow. I don’t believe it’s going to come as a significant surprise to nobody.”
“Are you pleased, Seth?”
I plucked a straw from a flat stack we were sitting on, and chewed the end. “Yes. I believe that I am pleased with this.”
And Hannah said, “Thank you.”
I put my palm flat on her belly and closed my eyes. “I do reckon I can sense him inside there, Hannah.”
“So can I.”
I kissed her face and brushed the soft hair away from the back of her neck with my fingers.
We made a bed by spreading all of our clothes out over the hay just inside the open hatch, where the breeze through the loft cooled our skin, and we lay together there, wrapped up in one another’s arms, sweating, completely naked and unashamed in the humid stillness of the afternoon.
I always knew what Hannah and I did together was wrong and sinful. I knew it from the first day we lay together by the river, but I had surrendered myself to that immorality. I knew that there was nothing I could do to erase my wickedness. So, that day in July, we lay on the bed of our union, atop our scattered garments in the dimness of the shaded barn, while Hannah twirled her fingers in my hair and I closed my eyes, listening to the birds in the afternoon light outside. I held her tightly and pulled myself against her again.
Then a shadow fell across us both.
Hearing the sounds we made to each other, Uncle Teddy had come up into the barn looking for us, booming and cursing his proclamations, denouncing our evil.
“Flesh of your own flesh! Brother and sister be damned! Abomination!” Uncle Teddy wailed. He held a broken rake handle aloft and struck it down fiercely across my shoulders. I howled in pain, raising myself up so I might cover Hannah from his attack.
“Incestuous heathen filth!” Again, he raised his stick, and this time swung it squarely into the back of my head.
Everything went black in a moment.
When my eyes opened, my hand was pressed against my skull. I could feel blood all down my face, drying in my hair, and sticking to the pale hay beneath me. I was still entirely unclothed, and couldn’t exactly remember what had happened to me. Then my thoughts began to clear when I heard Hannah crying and struggling beside me. Uncle Teddy had removed his belt and was thrashing her wildly across her legs and back with it.
I was so disgusted and enraged by what I saw the man doing to my Hannah that I forced myself onto my feet. Hannah turned her frightened eyes to me, but Uncle Teddy was only determined in having her submit to him. She tried to cover herself with our clothes, but every time she did, Uncle Teddy would slap her arm away and continue beating her bare skin. Her legs and arms were striped with bleeding welts.
“Whore! Whore!” he screamed.
I grabbed what was there—the handle of a hay hook—and when he raised his arm to strike her again, I swiped it at Uncle Teddy’s side. I can’t know that I intended to harm him, but the arrowed end of the hook went directly into his ribs, and I heard a sound like a spraying of gas and foam from his chest. I pulled him with the hook firmly swallowed inside his trunk, back, away from Hannah.
He straightened and dropped his belt over the side of the loft.
At first, Uncle Teddy didn’t seem to register the magnitude of his injury. He looked down, first at the hook, which hung beneath his arm, rising and lowering with his strained gasps, then at me, with an expression of alarm and confusion. He staggered back two steps, began plucking impotently at the steel barb with blood-flecked hands. All the while, a hissing, gurgling sound emitted from the injury as blood spurted in rhythmic waves, running down his trouser legs to the tops of his shoes.
He kept backing away from me with the most puzzled and ridiculous look on his face. Eventually, he fell over the side and landed directly in the bed of Pa’s buckboard, seated, with an attitude of resignation and defeat, like he was exhausted and waiting for a ride home. Both his hands clutched tightly around the hook, but he no longer pulled at it. His face had gone completely gray, and he looked up at me one more time, attempting to form words from lips that would allow no coherent sound to pass.
I dropped to Hannah’s side. “Are you hurt bad?”
“No.”
I would have flown down and killed him on the spot if she gave any other answer.
“We need to get help.”
“Oh,” she said. “Look at you, Seth.”
She lightly touched my head where I was cut.
“I’m good, Hannah. We need to get help for him.”
Hannah pulled her dress on over her head and soaked her undergarments in the pail of drinking water. Then she cleaned the blood away from me and kissed me.
“I’m so scared, Seth.”
Uncle Teddy just sat there with his head slumped down, whimpering softly. His blood had puddled all around the boards of the wagon where he’d been sitting, and in the fall, the pointed end of the hook had erupted directly out his back, like the horn on a devil. I never imagined any man could contain so much blood.
I kept my eyes on him while I put my clothes on, but by the time I’d gotten a foot into the first shoe, Uncle Teddy fell back, and stretched his legs straight out on the bed of Pa’s buckboard like he was taking a nap.
He died there, just like that, in our barn.
“Don’t look at him,” I whispered.
We climbed down from the haymow.
I tried to pull the steel hook out from his side, but it was almost like he refused to let me have it back. I struggled fiercely, but finally the hay hook came free.
I wiped it on Uncle Teddy’s shirtsleeve and tossed it back up to the loft above me.
When Davey and I left Napa City to go back to the Mansfield home on that raining December morning, I knew I was cursed. I chose my way in this world, though, and I chose to be with Hannah and give her my life. So the day I killed Uncle Teddy, I told Pa everything that was true about me and Hannah, and what happened in the barn. He listened to me talk, and he smoked a cigarette while I did. And I never begged him for his forgiveness, because I knew it was something no man could give me; but when I finished my story, Pa just put his hand on the top of my head and told me how much he loved me.
“Are you asleep?” I asked.
Nickie lay, so still, in my arms.
“No,” she said. “I love that, Jack. I love hearing your voice, being here with you. What happened to them?”
“Terrible things.”
“When you tell the story, I keep thinking to myself how it almost feels as though you were there.”
“I was.”
“How?”
“The boy is a ghost now. It’s hard to explain. But he kind of gave me his life, I think. I don’t know if I really understand it, myself.” I stared up at the ceiling. “I know. That sounds totally crazy.”
“I believe you, Jack.”
I sat up and looked at her in the gray light that came in from the open window. I wanted to see whether she really did think I was telling her the truth, or whether she thought Jack was nuts, just like I do most of the time.
But she believed me.
I got up from the bed. “I need to show you something.”
I kicked my feet around through the clothes we’d discarded on the floor at the foot of the bed until I found the jeans I’d been wearing. I picked them up, could still feel the shape and weight of the Marbury lens inside the pocket. I closed my hand around it and pulled the lens out, then I slid back into bed beside Nickie.
I held my clo
sed fist in front of her and said, “Look at this.”
Then I opened my hand.
I tried not to look, but immediately the room was washed in the pale, colorless light of Marbury. And it was suddenly like I was standing on the edge of the highest cliff imaginable, a hot, relentless wind pushing at my back, trying to force me down into the white abyss.
Don’t look, Jack.
Not yet.
A flash of Ben Miller getting down from his horse. I saw Conner and Freddie Horvath. Griffin lay, curled on his side, on the ground between them. I wanted to go in. Something was happening.
I gasped, jolted, like I was shocked.
You made it longer than most till we got to this part, Jack.
Turned my face away, squeezed my fingers tight onto the lens, and shoved my hand under the sheet, made it stop.
“Did you see that?” I said, panting, wondering if I was still really here sitting beside Nickie. “Did you fucking see that?”
I tried taking deep breaths, could still feel the pull of that goddamned lens in my hand between us.
“You’re shaking, Jack.”
Nickie’s hand, stroking my back.
Like Hannah when I was sitting in the cold tub on that first day.
“Did you see it?”
“You mean the glass?” Nickie said. “I saw the glass. Is that what you mean, Jack?”
I grabbed her shoulder with my empty hand, turned her face to mine. “You didn’t see anything else?”
“No. What is it?”
I exhaled, fell back onto the pillow, shaking, sweating. I rolled over onto my stomach, eyes closed.
I need you to roll onto your stomach now. Do that.
I dropped my hand down from the bed and tucked the lens back inside the pocket of Ander’s jeans.
Fuck you, Jack.
Nickie put her hands on my shoulders, began massaging me. “What are you so frightened of, Jack?”
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“Shhh…” Nickie pressed her lips between my shoulder blades and kissed me. “Don’t say that. Tell me what you saw, Jack.”
She kissed me again, lay her body down on top of mine so I could feel every feature of hers as she pressed against my skin.
This is real.
“Terrible things.”
Fifty-Two
I had to go back.
In the night, while we slept, Seth came.
Roll.
I woke first.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I whispered, “Seth?”
I looked over at Nickie. Her eyes were closed. Then she breathed, so quietly, “Did you say something?”
“Listen.” I whispered again, “Seth?”
Her eyes opened, met mine. I squeezed her hand and pressed it to my chest.
Roll.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
“It’s him. Can you hear it, Nickie?”
“It’s the horse, isn’t it?” she said.
And then we heard that hushed breath of his: “Seth.”
Sweat.
I’m shaking.
Nickie wipes her hand through the wetness down along my chest and says, “You’re trembling again. You’re sick.”
“You heard him.”
“Yes, Jack. I heard him.”
“So it is real.”
“It’s really happening.”
“I need to do something. Need you to help me, Nickie.”
She rubs the side of my face gently, says, “Jack, I’m scared.”
“I’m scared, too, Nickie. Don’t let me do anything bad.”
“Like what?”
I can’t answer. For the moment, the shaking is too intense. Everything is wet all around me in the bed, and Nickie sounds so far away, but she’s saying, “Jack? Jack, what’s happening?”
Roll.
Tap.
“Jack?”
“Stay next to me. Please.”
Tap.
She’s crying. “What does he want?”
“Don’t let me get lost.”
I find it. The lens is in my hand and I roll onto my back next to her.
“Say you love me, Nickie.”
She’s crying. “Jack. I’m afraid.”
I feel her face next to mine, her lips at my ear. She tells me, “I love you,” and the breath carrying her words feels like a ghost against my damp skin.
Tap.
It’s time, Jack.
Just a peek.
I open my hand and look.
They didn’t see us, had no idea what we were capable of doing. And in the rush to get moving, I’d made Ben leave everything behind at that place by the river. Everything but the guns.
And Griffin’s clothes.
We were going to get him back.
We’d left the horses a hundred yards from where we stopped. From there, we walked in, keeping a line of trees and scattered mounds of shale that had been washed down from the face of the mountains between us and them. Before we’d gotten too close, I pulled Ben’s shoulder around so he’d look at me, know I was serious.
I said, “Remember. Don’t kill that young one.”
Ben didn’t answer. He just glanced down at the .45s he held in each hand, as though he were saying it wasn’t up to him to make that kind of a promise.
When we worked our way up the rise above them, close enough that we could see through the trees, Ben put a hand out to stop me.
“Something’s going on,” he said. He leaned his face around the trunk of a ponderosa, and they were so close to us, I could smell them.
Then I heard the sounds of a struggle, someone was getting hit, thrown around.
“They’re fighting each other,” Ben whispered. “It looks like they’re fighting over Griff. Look.”
He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me around to where I had a clear view of what was happening.
Griffin was on the ground, lying on his side. His hands were bound behind his back, and a rope trailed from his ankle.
Freddie works the same way here.
But he was awake and alive. I could see his eyes moving from Freddie to Conner as they fought.
Conner didn’t match up well against Freddie Horvath. His face was bloodied; and I saw him reel back from a strike, grab one of the axes, and swing it wildly at Freddie.
They were trying to kill each other.
Ben raised the gun in his right hand, steadied it to aim.
“Wait.” I held Ben’s forearm.
When Conner missed with his swing, Freddie charged at him, arms forward, so the black spots down his side made him look more like a leopard than a man. Freddie threw himself into Conner, wrapping his arms around Conner’s hips and burying his face into his belly.
Conner screamed—a horrible sound—as the horns under Freddie’s jaw dug into his gut, goring him badly. It made me sick to watch. Freddie lifted Conner up over his shoulders and blood sprayed out, showering Freddie in coughing sprays of red. Conner kicked and cried, and Freddie looked like he was biting and tearing at Conner with his mouth. Then Freddie threw him down on the rocks where Griffin was lying.
I shook my head and looked away, my hand still held tightly on to Ben’s arm. I could feel him tense at the sight of what Freddie had been doing.
Conner lay on his back, painted with his own blood, eyes fixed upward, staring. His hands and feet were moving, but I knew he was not going to ever get up from that spot.
Freddie lifted up Griffin in a hug, began licking his face, smearing spit and blood all over him as the boy tried to shut his eyes and mouth and turn away. Griffin whimpered when Freddie grabbed him by his hair and turned the boy over in his grasp like he didn’t weigh anything at all. Then Freddie pushed Griffin’s face into the pooling blood on Conner’s belly and pried the boy’s mouth open with one of his black clawed fingers.
“Drink it! Drink it, you sorry little bitch!” Freddie said, grinding Griffin’s face into the wounds. I heard the boy ga
gging in the blood, struggling to breathe.
“Drink!”
I raised the rifle.
“Fuck this place.”
One shot. So fast, but I could see the spray and smoke come out through the other side of Freddie’s head.
Fuck you, Freddie.
You’re dead again.
He let go of Griffin’s hair, and dropped the boy on top of Conner. Freddie, startled, looked up to where I’d fired from, then sat down on the ground, leaned forward, and died.
Ben rushed through the trees as soon as I pulled the trigger, holding those .45s out, both of them pointed at Freddie.
Griffin spit and blew red cords of snot from his nose, trying to wipe Conner’s blood away from his face, onto his shoulders, struggling against the bindings on his wrists while he rolled away from the gore.
“Griffin!” Ben called.
“What the fuck did you wait so long for?” Griffin said, and spit again.
I followed Ben into the clearing. I didn’t say anything as I walked up to them. Ben worked at untying the ropes from Griffin’s wrists, and Griffin kept spitting and blowing out snot all over himself and Ben.
I stood over Conner. His eyes were wide-open, those soulless black-white polished stones, staring at me. He gurgled and moaned with shallow, quickened breaths. That mark, shaped like a fish, the scalp fastened around his genitals on a strand of dried gut that had been threaded through blackened and dried human fingers, a chain of adult molars, spattered pink and red with Conner’s own blood, dangling around his neck.
Fuck this place.
“Conner?” I said. I was looking straight into his eyes. “Conner Kirk?”
He blinked, and whispered, “Jack.”
Fuck you, Jack.
Hearing him say my name was like getting kicked in the balls. I stepped back, saw just the faintest image of Seth standing on the other side. He vanished, and once again Conner mouthed my name.
“Jack?”
“Jack?” Nickie says it again, shakes my shoulder.