Dead Echo

  Chapter 40: History Lesson

  Lorca stood in the tomb-silence of the dark house. Every blind pulled, every light off. That, save for the plethora of candles arranged seemingly helter skelter around the room. He’d cleared the floor of furniture that afternoon, pushed everything back to the walls and rolled the rug up and tossed it into a corner. The chalked pentagram glowed white in the flickering light. He had the books open to various pages here and there in the darkness, the lines on the paper like thin, glowing spider legs.

  The visions were coming together in his head.

  Things lost in the jumbled mess of years slowly coalescing into coherence here in this black space. He’d shucked his clothes earlier in the bathroom, preparing for this encounter in the pale innocence of the flesh. His skin rippled along his arms, his dick standing straight out in the excitement of the budding moment. His face one of an apprentice’s, ecstatic with the keys to the Kingdom.

  He rubbed his hands together and the texture of the scar drew his eyes down. He held the hand closer to his face, running the forefinger of his other hand along the ridges, tracing the grooves. He realized now it was a brand, a reminder of an unfinished job.

  And now he would finish it.

  His earliest days at Leszno’s Farm circled around him. Sometimes he could see pictures in the air, voices whispering just beneath the buzz of the air conditioner. He thought often of Eduardo, Meeta, the Old Man. Less of the girl. In fact, he could not recall her name. They had not been siblings by birth, only circumstance, and, of course, that had ended with the Fire. For years he’d believed his destiny had been set in California, with the cabal of Satanists, but he realized now he’d been wrong all along. The scar was proof. His destiny had always been here. At Leszno’s Farm. He would do what that worthless fuck, Eduardo, had failed. His lust had taken precedence over duty and for that he’d burned.

  Sacrifice.

  That was the key. He knew that now. He saw how his life had been a sacrifice, all the running, the deceptions, the little lessons coming in slowly over time. Hell, the lawyer had admitted as much those many years ago. No doubt Lorca had always been a ghost, but now the ghost had come home.

  He could feel the spirits moving in the air around him. He could feel them in the ground. Eager, hungry to start the Feeding. Of course, he’d been too young the first time, but this place had known for him. It had brought him home, too, in due course. It had paid him to come home. Some long ago wrangle by Eduardo, or maybe the Old Man, though Lorca didn’t think the latter had had any choice in the matter. Eduardo had killed him. Probably poison, maybe something else. In the end it hadn’t mattered. The Old Man had been dead and Meeta and the land had been his for the taking.

  It was only now, so many years distanced from the trigger of his life, that Lorca realized how close he had come to being that sacrifice. Because he knew now what Eduardo had intended to do to the girl and him. And he really couldn’t blame him; hell, in different circumstances…one never knew. But this place did. It made its own rules; it took what it wanted and used it whichever way suited its will. Eduardo had not known this and the flames had taken him down.

  Lorca paced over to the front window and looked out. His curtains were always open at night, and many times he stood just so, naked, surveying his domain. But no, he must stop such thoughts. He realized that had been the very fall of Eduardo and he’d have to be careful not to follow in those damned footsteps. It was difficult, though, with so much power at your fingertips. To have your brain playing with the thought, the inkling, that just maybe it was about you. No. He shook his head and looked around the room guiltily, as if someone might have read his mind. No.

  Sometimes he would leave the house and walk the neighborhood. So much like a ghost town populated by shadows. Except many of these shadows were flesh and blood. Their minds dulled by the Power that festered here, that had always festered here. The Power that was waiting to explode. Like a dead body, long in the ground, the Power was getting anxious to reveal itself.

  Lorca saw vast plagues in the future, open graveyards of the waiting dead. A great changing of the guard. It was almost the time for the spirits to walk the earth again and many were in great pains to begin. And the living would melt before them. All those years in the ground or floating in the empty spheres between, lusting for a life of flesh, of bone, and being forever unsatisfied. Ah, now those selfsame spirits were ravenous, bellowing from their caves and hovels for release, and that was just what Lorca intended to give them.

  His reward would be great.

  He knew the foolishness of Eduardo’s plan. It was like a picture in his mind, a photograph so long in the living room one took no notice of the details, but they were there. They always had been there.

  The problem had been Meeta. It all made sense now. Odd, really, that such pains would take place to set plans into action, and then be foiled by one woman’s infertility. But that was the truth. Of course, Eduardo had tried to skirt the issue by bringing in the children but they’d not been born of the blood of the land. Lorca had been an outsider then, and only after years of experience, of learning, had he been allowed back to finish this thing.

  It had taken the right woman. That was another thing Eduardo had not realized. Everything started with women. It was man’s greatest delusion that this was not so. The womb was the seat of creation, the singularity of good and evil and the only thing men could do was view it from a distance. And tend it like a garden.

  That’s how he’d known she was the one. Her or one like her. Strong-willed, but lost, eager for a man’s companionship. Incomplete without it. He saw it on her face that very first day and she’d known it too. Of course, it had terrified her, and why not? One liked to believe a soul was built on love and compassion, but men, especially men like him, knew the opposite.

  That’s why he’d known he’d have her. And what better way than through love, compassion. The love of a child; the need to have that child at any cost. This is what he’d known early as the plan slowly formed in his mind. And now it was upon him.

  He smiled in the darkness and rubbed his hands in anticipation. He moved to the front door, opened it, and stepped outside. It was cooler than normal and Lorca felt his skin ripple in the faint breeze. He stood on the porch, hands on bare hips, and looked out over the dying neighborhood.

  It was so much better than California. Here, he bore the mark of the Reaper, that figure of fantasy, that great taker of life. He went where he wanted, when he wanted, and there was not a finger lifted to dissuade him. It was marvelous, like a ghost in the flesh. But a ghost with a voice, with inclination, with Power.

  People no longer locked their doors, some because they couldn’t, others because they dared not, like some hideous version of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. On his nocturnal walks he visited these houses, many of them tombs now. He would set out walking and go where his nose led him. It satisfied his voyeur’s nature.

  In the last several weeks he’d discovered all manner of obscenity. People dead of pills, gunshot wounds, slit wrists in the bathtub. And still no one came. On hot days the corruption carried on the wind with full sails, and yet no one came. It was amazing, the variety. Many clutching notes, a loved one’s relic in their stiffening hands. Figures bent over couches, stretched out in recliners, some clothed, others not. Lorca wandered these places like a museum curator, straightening a picture here, turning upright a spilled vase. The smell didn’t bother him. The dead bore no prejudice; he was just as likely to find a body in a bedroom as a kitchen; the laundry room as a study. And yet this was not the most bizarre. These were the houses where the living and dead co-existed, many times the murderer going on with their business as if nothing amiss had transpired. Lorca had walked, naked (again they didn’t see him if he wished it; if he did they did, but nothing changed with their routine), in rooms where the remnant of whatever family had lived there went about their business as usual. A family of four, reduced now by the moldering corpse slump
ed over the kitchen table, laughing over a sitcom as they ate from TV trays. People sleeping in beds with the dead, perhaps with one of those yard masks over their faces to staunch the smell. Grass grown up around bodies lying in back yards. Sometimes they would look up as he entered, nod in his direction, even offer him a drink. See to his needs before they dismissed him and headed off to whatever hell they inhabited. He knew of a man who got up every morning and went to work (a certain number had to for the sake of propriety, after all) as he had every day for the past fourteen years; his wife lying in pieces in the guest bathroom, bags of lye piled high in the tub. Women would wave to him as he passed on the street, women busy tending withering gardens under the moon, women who’d murdered their children and buried them with the very spades they worked the ground with now. Some of these houses were now infested with rats, mice, roaches the size of oak leaves. One man limped about his house amid a scree of squirrels, his flesh bitten and raw, just beginning to show the first signs of rabies infection. Sometimes he found people crying, others praying. But no one left, not for good. The ones who went to work returned, the dead continued lying in their places, the living to tend their nonsense routines. Sometimes he’d have to turn off untended water faucets, the people inside slogging through inch deep water throughout the house, as oblivious somnambulists shuffling through their daydreams. He’d taken steak knives out of the hands of infants, smoothed the hair of sobbing adults. A caretaker really. A gardener.

  He snapped back from his revelries and looked down, his dick a soldier at attention. He smiled and went back inside. The shadows were gathering in the darkness, pulling their substance from it, pushing the air back to the walls. He stared across the floor to the pentagram, pulsing rhythmically white as the time approached. He stepped to the lowest point, held his hands out from his side, and began a low, guttural mumbling that soon morphed into the staccato pace of a chant.

  The air began to swirl in the room and he stepped within the figure.