Release

  You’re a good person, Adam. Don’t ever let them tell you you’re not.

  From Linus.

  He set his phone back down and drove on, not noticing until he parked at the church that the red rose he’d meant to give Linus was still sitting on the passenger seat.

  THE HOUSE UPON THE ROCK

  “That’s going to be too far apart,” Big Brian Thorn said. “We’ve got fifteen rows to fit in here.”

  “As a tall person, I can swear truthfully that these aren’t too far apart.”

  “You won’t be sitting here. You’re always up in the balcony. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

  “I’m not the tallest person in the entire congregation.”

  “On average, you’re well above. Fifteen rows.”

  The overflow room was on the left of the sanctuary. It was also the church’s main activity area and was used all week for a nursery in the mornings and AA meetings in the evenings, both bringing in rent that The House Upon The Rock didn’t like to admit it needed. Saturdays were for an early morning Men’s Bible Study that to Adam’s relief he was still technically too young to be forced to go to. Today, that had been followed by the teen choir practising the musical they were going to inflict on the church on Labor Day – Adam’s tunelessness being so pronounced even his dad didn’t encourage him to sing – followed by what was supposed to be his dad’s two main ushers helping him set up the space for services tomorrow. But one was having thyroid surgery and the other had fallen down a flight of stairs, probably (but not provably) drunk. So it was down to Adam to help his dad make the church ready. Fifteen rows of five long padded benches apiece to make up an overflow room that would, at best, end up a third full.

  “Why isn’t Marty helping?” Adam asked, hoisting his sixtieth bench into place.

  “I don’t want to talk about Marty right now,” his dad said, not looking his way.

  “But helping here could be penance.”

  He got a glance for that. “We’re not Catholics, Adam. We don’t do penance. We do forgiveness.”

  “If you’ve forgiven him, then he should definitely be here helping.”

  “I haven’t forgiven him.” Big Brian Thorn stopped where he was bringing in the cart full of hymnals that Adam would soon be setting out on the benches. “God help me, I haven’t forgiven him yet.”

  Adam couldn’t remember the last time that look on his father’s face had been caused by his brother and not by Adam straying from a path so narrow it was a wonder any Christian here could see it. The novelty was so great, he even found himself asking, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I do not,” Big Brian Thorn said, getting back to work. The overflow room was only the start. The cameras that broadcast the sermon to the web needed to be checked, the sound system tested – the teen choir had a history of not putting it back the way they found it – and, as it was that time of the quarter, the Jacuzzi behind the cross at the front of the sanctuary needed to be cleaned, filled and warmed for the baptisms taking place tomorrow. This would be Adam’s job, the last he needed to finish before he was free to help Angela with the pizzas for the “get-together”.

  They worked mostly in silence, for which Adam was grateful. He was even more grateful his dad trusted him to do it (mostly) and kept a good distance. Adam really didn’t know how strong the smell of Linus might be.

  “How long have you known?” his dad said, looking at two hymnals he was holding but not putting anywhere.

  Adam’s stomach fell. “Known what?”

  “About your brother.”

  Adam swallowed in relief. “This morning. He caught me at the end of my run.”

  “Why you first?”

  Adam was about to answer, but realized his dad was asking himself, not actually interested in Adam’s take. Adam answered anyway. “Probably just a warm-up. See how the words sounded when he said them out loud. See if they’d kill him or if they were just words.”

  “They were more than just words.”

  “There are positives,” Adam said. “You’ll be a grandfather.”

  “I’m forty-five. My hair isn’t even grey.”

  “It will be if Marty keeps the surprises coming.”

  His dad set down the hymnals. “Don’t be glib. The young are always glib. And look what happens.” He turned and left, heading back, Adam assumed, to his office. There was a sermon to write, after all. Adam wondered what topics it could possibly be covering.

  The Queen and the spirit who binds her wish to enter a prison.

  This is going to cause issues the faun doesn’t know if he can properly address. Breaking down the doors and walls will, of course, be no problem; his strength is that of any hundred of these fragile creatures with their busy, fuddled lives. But that would attract more attention. He would be seen by too many eyes, more than he could hope to control, and for a creature who depended on myth, too much fact could prove quite fatal.

  But the Queen is determined. There she goes, approaching the prison up a curved, fenced road intended only for the cars that guard it. It will be mere moments before one passes this way.

  “My lady, please,” he says, though he doesn’t know how much she hears now. He is watching the sun as it leans down its arc. It is a summer day, which is a fortune, but the afternoon will not last forever. There will be dusk. Then that same sun will set, spelling a doom the only comfort of which is that, if it comes, he will be gone before its full manifest.

  The inevitable police car pulls down around the curve, close enough so the faun can see the astonishment of the man behind the wheel as he comes upon first a dead woman in a drowned dress, then a seven-foot faun following at a respectful distance.

  It begins, thinks the faun, and he moves forward to start the long battle his Queen requires him to wage.

  The sheer, solid fact of the car is a surprise to her, though it shouldn’t be. It stops short, its brakes squealing as it rocks forward. The door opens. The man’s hand is already on his gun, his face a picture of confusion.

  Hostile confusion.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?” he asks, in a tone convinced that no, she isn’t and no, he might not be either.

  But then…

  An astonished recognition. For them both.

  “Oh, it is fate,” she says. “It is fate that has brought this.”

  “I know you,” the man says, hand still on his gun. “But you must be her sister.”

  “You found me,” says the Queen. “In the lake, you found me.”

  “You don’t belong on this road,” he answers. “Neither of you, and sir, I’m placing you under arrest immediately for indecent exposure–”

  “‘Sir’?” she says, but the policeman is suddenly on his back, his eyes unseeing, laid out almost delicately next to his still-running car. She moves to him, hovers over him, not understanding what’s happened.

  “You found me,” she tells him, needs to tell him. “You pulled me from the shallows. You tried to revive me hours after anything would have helped. I felt your hands on my chest. The muscle of my heart contracted under your weight.” She leans down to the man’s face, her dead hands touching his temples. “You arrested my killer. You put him here.” She looks up the road. The prison can’t be seen, but it’s just beyond the rise. “This was meant to be. There are greater powers at work.”

  She rises. She leaves the man behind, more certain than ever of where she’s going.

  The faun removes the man’s memories of the Queen, having laid him on the ground. He knows bullets will not work on him, but in her current shape, he cannot be sure of the same for the Queen.

  There is no time to move the car or the man. They will have to remain and cause further chaos, further trouble.

  “There are greater powers at work,” the Queen says.

  He wonders, as he hurries after her, does she mean herself? Or him? Or is something else, something terrible pushing them relentlessly on?

  Adam had been an unquestio
ning churchgoer for most of his life, until all of a sudden he wasn’t. And then he was again. And then not. And then again, when he deleted all his porn and questionable apps in a righteous frenzy after rededicating his life to Jesus in a handwritten letter to his parents, saying he was frightened at how the world was heading, that the Antichrist must surely come soon, and that he was pledging himself to God and to the church. There had been tears from everyone.

  He was thirteen, and by the next day, he was sorely regretting both letter and deletions. He’d been trying to regain the cache of porn ever since, and every time he acted up too badly, his mother or father would produce the letter and ask where this tender-hearted Adam had gone.

  “The Prodigal Son was the most beloved,” they said, more than once.

  Where does that leave Marty? he never asked.

  The blind faith boomerang had stopped with Enzo.

  “What do you do with that?” he’d asked Angela. “Here’s this thing, this love, that should be proof of God, and they’re telling you it’s the opposite.”

  “I’ve never understood your parents,” she said.

  “I guess I really haven’t either.”

  “My church isn’t anything like that. We just had a wedding for probably the two oldest lesbians in the state. Can you imagine being in your eighties and still wanting to try something new?”

  “That story is why I’m not allowed to come with you on Sundays.”

  She shrugged. “We don’t go that often anyway. And even then, it’s only so Mom can see friends.”

  “I used to think this was how everyone’s life was. That everyone sat around the dinner table talking about the End Times.”

  “We do. We just mean another Republican presidency.”

  He smiled to himself in the sound booth at the church, resetting the levels where, yep, the teen choir had ludicrously amped up the bass and the treble, leaving the middle feeds all but silent. If Big Brian Thorn – a basso profundo by temperament and training – tried bellowing into a microphone set to that, he’d both shatter glass and be completely incomprehensible.

  Adam took out his phone. Dad’s actually not being too insane about Marty. Hurt, but not insane.

  Not yet anyway, Angela texted back. How was Linus?

  None of your business.

  Did you sex him?

  None of your business.

  Did you sex him up real good?

  NOYB. I’ve still got a couple hours here. Pizza place at 7?

  I’ll be here.

  For now.

  Don’t start.

  He paused, then he typed, I love you more than probably any other person on this planet. Including myself.

  She texted a tearful emoji and Don’t make me cry at work!

  “Are you done in here?” frowned his dad, leaning into the tiny sound room. It had literally been converted from a bathroom beside the balcony sometime before Adam was born. It could only fit one person at a time, and even then, Adam’s elbows bumped either wall.

  “Almost,” Adam said.

  “You’d be past almost if you weren’t wasting time on the phone.”

  “I’m meeting Angela after this. I was arranging it.”

  His dad softened. Even in his worst moods, Angela’s racial difference gave him a chance to feel magnanimous. Big Brian Thorn liked to feel magnanimous. “She’s welcome to come to the Labor Day musical, you know. She’s always welcome here.”

  “Yeah, but do you know what pizza places are like on Labor Day? Everyone in the world is having one last summer party. It’s basically their Black Friday.”

  To Adam’s surprise, Brian Thorn almost smiled.

  “I saw the craziest thing today,” his dad said. “Driving here.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A man dressed up as a goat.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I know, that’s what I thought. Proper costume, too, movie quality. Not just something you’d slip on but like someone had glued actual hair all over him.”

  “What kind of costume is a goat?”

  “Well, he was standing up, I guess. Not a goat on all fours.”

  “So … a faun? Or, what do you call them? A satyr?”

  His dad frowned, obviously disliking the move from animal into pagan. “Maybe they’re filming something around here. Some HBO thing.”

  “The Satyr Housewives of Frome, Washington.”

  “I don’t even begin to understand that joke.”

  “At least you understood it was a joke. That’s a start.”

  His dad almost smiled again. Maybe, Adam thought, as Big Brian Thorn left for the lower level to test the microphones, maybe this is what Marty felt like all the time. Marty had gone unexpectedly Prodigal, which left Adam the son closer to home, the one to be allied with, the one not quite so lost, free, for a moment, from the Yoke.

  Interesting, Adam thought.

  The shouting begins before they even fully crest the hill.

  “Get down!”

  “Hands where I can see them!”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “I said, GET DOWN!”

  The faun raises his hands – an accidental show of surrender that probably stops them from firing – and all three guards fall to the ground, unconscious. His only recourse is to remove this entire day from their memories. A blunt solution, but the only one available in the time they have left.

  The Queen stops at what seems to be the entrance, a surprisingly unobtrusive one for a building so secure. She reaches for the handle, but he knows, of course, that it will not simply open, it is a prison. He moves to help her–

  The door flies off its hinges, the metal of it warping as if punched by a giant hand. The faun has to step out of the way as it clangs down the drive, probably bouncing all the way to the car they stopped on the way up.

  “My lady?” says the faun.

  The door comes open in her hand, more than open, she merely has to brush it with the intention of it not being there and it is destroyed, flung from her sight.

  It is unexpected and yet feels right. I have power, she thinks, power older than civilization. She tests it again, waving her fingers at the woman who approaches holding a gun. The woman drops to the floor, a threat no longer.

  I lit a fire with my hands, she thinks. I moved through the air by thought alone.

  She remembers these things. And has always known them.

  I am two. I am the spirit and the second spirit that binds me. We are growing closer. We are blurring into one.

  “You are the Queen,” says a voice behind her.

  She does not look back, merely answers, “Yes, I am the Queen,” and tears another door from its hinges.

  No one looked at the Jacuzzi between the baptisms, and even with the cushioned lid on top, there was always a layer of dust inside as well as – this time – one, two, three dead mice that Adam picked out with rubber gloves. Once, in a mystery still unsolved, he’d found an open box for a diaphragm, but try as he might, there wasn’t a single person in the church he could imagine having left it there.

  He’d been baptized himself at eight years old in this very spot. Big Brian Thorn scoffed at the notion that full-body immersion was going out of fashion – it was, but scoffing brought in the people who still wanted it – and had baptized Adam himself, praying over him, asking him the questions (“Do you dedicate your life to Jesus Christ as your Personal Lord and Saviour?” “I do”), and had dunked him. He had been so small that the congregation couldn’t actually see him, and – once dunked – his dad had lifted him entirely out of the water, over the lip of the doors behind the choir and said, “Can you all see my boy?”

  The congregation had laughed, heartily.

  “Not at you,” his mother had said at his bedside that night.

  “Yes, they were,” Adam sniffled.

  “Honestly, Adam, do you really think the world revolves around you? Do you think all those people, friends of your father, would sit the
re in a worshipful place and laugh at you?”

  Adam knew the answer was supposed to be no, so he only said “yes” in his head.

  For a moment, as he scrubbed the dust that had been baked in by a surprisingly hot summer, he wondered how his parents saw him, what he seemed like to them on a day-to-day basis. Up until today, Marty had been such a perfect son – blond, well-behaved, boring, yes, but safely so – what must they have thought when Adam came along? He, too, was blond, and well-behaved for that matter, never in trouble at school, no run-ins with the police, hardly ever even tardy.

  “But there’s something different about the boy,” he’d overheard his father say, a few years before even the baptism. He’d been eavesdropping from upstairs, his bedhead hair sticking through the railings, thrilled and a little sick at the risk of being out of bed, listening to his parents’ secret conversations.

  “He’s too little to say that about, isn’t he?” his mother had answered. They were sitting in front of the fireplace, his mom with a Christian romance novel, his dad with one, too, a secret vice neither of them would admit. But the way his mom had answered left the question open, not as if she was disagreeing, but as if she was curious at how his dad might convince her.

  “He’s … dreamy,” his dad said. “Off in his own little world.”

  “You do that. You disappear.”

  “You know what I mean, Lydia. His eyes are so smart. Like there’s all these little calculations going on in there that you’ll never know about.”

  Adam liked the sound of this.

  “Like he’s judging you,” his mother said.

  Adam liked the sound of this less, because though he didn’t understand what she meant exactly, her tone clearly suggested it wasn’t anything desirable.

  “I don’t say ‘judging’,” his father said. “I wouldn’t say that. He’s obviously bright, and that should be encouraged. It’s more … you watch him at the church and he’s looking at the other little ones and you can see him, wondering.”