Empty Heaven, page 10
Alex looked over at me. Senovak braked on Good Earth Way.
“I didn’t know they even still lived here,” Senovak said mildly. But his glance in the rearview was penetrating. “Considering the fact that you never speak to them anymore.”
“It’s going to be great,” I repeated. I swung myself out of the car after Alex, who was up and trying to walk away quickly. “Home by midnight, I promise!”
“Be careful,” Senovak told me. “Make good choices. You have your cell phone on you?”
“I will, I will, I do,” I said. “Just like, so excited to see them, you know?”
“Right,” Senovak said.
I slammed the door. Senovak did not look convinced. He kept the car idling until he saw me catch up with Alex.
“What gives?” I asked, almost running to keep pace with him. “I thought you wouldn’t want to be separated. After everything that happened.”
Alex shook his head, not looking at me. He was holding his backpack in two hands in front of him, with his half-finished SoBe in his back pocket.
“Seriously, Al.” I got in front of him so that he was forced to stop power-walking down the road. “You already walked away from me once. Don’t you care? I thought we were in it together.”
Alex’s set expression kind of faltered. “I love you, Dare,” he said. “But I can’t, like… I can’t involve you in this.”
“In what?” I asked. I was already as involved as it was possible to be, and he knew it.
Alex looked around: at the flower-filled window boxes and planters. At the bustling street with the bikes and the cars and the pedestrians all moving in harmony. Nobody had recognized him yet, but it was only a matter of time. The village was not a huge place.
“In this,” Alex said, and opened his bag between our bodies.
Just for a second. But it was long enough for me to see the gun.
“What are you doing?” I asked, glancing left and right as Alex closed the bag back up. “Why the fuck do you have that?! What the HELL, Alex—”
“Because,” Alex said, and started walking down the street again. Straight toward the town hall building.
“Because?” I asked, jogging next to him to keep up.
Alex looked down at me. His eyes were tired, but calm. His mouth was set in a straight line.
“Because I’m going to kill her,” he said.
PART TWO
THE FROST AND THE FALLS
CHAPTER EIGHT
Saturday, October 28 & Sunday, October 29, 2000
After KJ was consumed by the thing the villagers called Good Arcturus, adrenaline made me run from the black house in a blind panic. I was crying as I fled the clearing and ran through the dying sunflowers, soundlessly crying, and it wasn’t long until I couldn’t sustain a sprint. I would jog for a few minutes and then run for a few more. Spiderwebs broke across my face and body but I hardly felt them. I wiped my hands on my red sweatshirt over and over again, trying to get rid of the horrible cold feeling from where the red threads had touched me.
I was only thinking about KJ and escape, KJ and escape. Those two things alternated in my head like flashing lights.
But then I thought about Jasper and Alex. I pictured Alex’s blank expression of acceptance, his undisturbed happiness. I didn’t know if I could persuade him to leave… or if he even thought that anything bad had happened at all.
But Jasper knew. Jasper had been dragged away into the field by Lake and Thomas and Hunter Warren. Jasper could be in danger. I slowed down, wondering if I could get back to him. Get to him and get him to leave with me. He doesn’t belong here. He doesn’t belong here and I don’t belong here, oh god, I never belonged here, I thought. I’d never really known anything about Kesuquosh, despite Jasper’s warnings.
I kept moving, walking on semi-autopilot. In my mind images played on a loop: KJ shoving me away with her shoulder in a last effort to keep me from harm as the red strings mummified her, KJ standing in front of me when we walked up the stairs of the gazebo, Birdie Plum’s expression of fascination as she watched that thing inhabit KJ, and the body.
The dry corpse of a little girl being immolated.
Your aunt Blanche died when your mother was just a small child, my dad had told me.
In 1965. At the last Great Harvest Hallow.
I started to laugh as I walked, and covered my face with one hand, giggling helplessly and breathlessly. They fed one person to the scarecrow every thirty-five years? Is that what was happening here? And every time that someone was all respectful because I “was a Sabine,” they were just honoring the tiny victim of this monster?
My little aunt. Just a kid. It wore her skin like a jacket, I thought. That made me laugh harder, even though it wasn’t funny at all. My head felt like it was wayyyyy above my body. Unreality washed over me. It was how I’d felt after Dexter died… like nothing existed. Like I didn’t exist.
Then the field ended, spitting me out onto the remains of Church Street, which led past the ruins of the old church and toward town. There were no villagers on the path—they were all still partying out in the secret clearing by the black house.
I thought of Rita cheerfully telling me that after the ceremony was over everyone was going to go have pumpkin soup and apple bread at the Garlands’ farmstand, and I felt a wave of nausea sweep over me. I gagged, and then started laughing again.
“You don’t need to run. They’re not coming after us.” The speaker was to my left, and I spun to the side, ready to sprint again. But it was Jasper. He looked pale, and had a smudge of dirt over his left eyebrow, but he seemed otherwise unscathed.
“Oh god, Jasper,” I said, and laughed harder. “I—what—what was that?”
“The Great Harvest Hallow,” Jasper said. He turned his face up toward the crescent moon for a second, looking exhausted, and I saw tear tracks on his cheeks. He’d been crying. “I didn’t want you to come, Darian. You didn’t deserve to see all that shit. Fuck. I—she wasn’t supposed to get picked. That was completely fucking wrong, that fucking asshole lied to me—”
“We need to go get Dan,” I said. “You can come with me. He’ll listen to me. We can get away and call the cops.” I held out my phone. “I can’t hear—I keep hearing other voices when I dial it—but you can call them—”
“The only pigs in Kesuquosh are the Sumners, and they’re out in the field right now with all the other zombies,” Jasper said.
It was true. And the Sumners were only constables, a father-and-son team that felt like they belonged in Twin Peaks. There was no crime in Kesuquosh, except when tourists got up to petty shit.
“But we could call the cops in Rabbitville, or Amherst,” I said.
“We could,” Jasper said. “I called them a bunch when I was a kid, after I had my accident and realized that everyone else in town was fucking brainwashed. I called CPS. When I started to put shit together I even reported your aunt as a missing person once, thinking that might actually make them investigate something.” He started walking down the path toward town, and gestured at me to keep pace with him. “Do you know what happened?”
“What?” I asked, dreading his answer. My scalp prickled.
“Abso-fucking-lutely nothing,” Jasper said. “Good Arcturus doesn’t let anything happen. Nobody will believe you, even if you stuff the proof right down their fucking throats. They’ll forget. It will disappear. Did you ever believe it?”
“No. But Dan will believe us. Or he’ll at least listen.”
Jasper thought about this for a second. “Maybe. I don’t know. This wasn’t the plan. Not KJ. It was supposed to be me. We had the PDA ready and everything.”
“What do you mean? You wanted to have it… possess you or something? I—I don’t even know what happened,” I said.
“Uh. I don’t actually know where to start.” Jasper lit a Djarum with a pack of Citgo matches.
“You could start by telling me what Good Arcturus is,” I said. I wiped off my hands on my sweatshirt again.
“It’s a parasite,” Jasper said. “I think.”
He looked sideways at me—his blue eyes shadowed in the darkness, clove held tilted inward between his thumb and three bent fingers like a private eye in an old movie—and in his face I saw the thing that made us kindred spirits since the first time we’d met, back when we were barely even teenagers yet.
I had never understood what it was. Why, as different as we were, we were somehow the same. But now I could finally see it.
Jasper carried Good Arcturus around with him the way I carried Dexter. He was alone with the monster in a world full of people who didn’t understand.
Like me.
Jasper was never big on touching—but then, when he looked at me so lost and vulnerable and unable to find the words to describe the prison he’d been living in—I reached for him and put my hand on his shoulder. And he let me do it.
“I get why it’s hard to talk about. And how alone you’ve been,” I said.
Jasper nodded slowly. “You do, don’t you,” he said, half to himself.
“Tell me about Good Arcturus,” I said. “You can tell me while we walk over to the cottage, okay?”
We passed the ruins of Empty Heaven, and the oddly preserved green door, and Jasper looked sideways at me again. “I guess I should start with my accident,” he said. “When I fell out of the attic.”
“Okay,” I said. The wind picked up, and clove smoke streamed past me in a banner and vanished into the blue-black night over our heads.
“I’ve never told anybody this,” Jasper said. “I remember what it was like to be one of those zombie fucks, because I was one of them. I was one of them until I was nine.”
“What happened when you were nine?” I asked.
“So in the attic at my parents’ house, there’s this old, like really old, bed with a brass frame, and all this antique clothing and shit. And we used to play up there. Me and Alex, especially, because we did everything together. You follow?”
“I follow,” I said.
“We’d hang out there and color in our coloring books, or play with my Matchbox cars, or Pogs. Or imagination games, with the old stuff as props. Sometimes we’d pretend to be married. I wanted to marry Alex when we grew up. I thought if we just acted like a married couple it would make it come true. So I’d cover his head in like a piece of lace and then we’d pretend we were having a wedding ceremony, like the ones they do out in the sunflower fields. Then one day I fell out of the trapdoor in the attic. It was just dumb shit, we were playing with a Nerf ball, and I slipped. I slipped and fell out eight feet into the third floor hallway, and I didn’t shield my head because I was a stupid fucking child.
“And then… they had to take me to the real hospital, not that little brick building in town that has a pediatrician and a family doctor and a tiny obstetrics office. I remember throwing up like eight times and the world being all blurry and far away. And in Amherst the doc said I had a concussion. I stayed overnight in the ICU. But then I came back home… and he was gone.”
We’d passed from Church Street to Deep River Road back out onto Good Earth Way. The town was completely empty and silent. Nothing moved on the green. The ruins of the Banquet gaped up at us from the disarrayed tables. Some of the houses up and down the sides of the town green had lit windows, but where before I had found the glowing light from within comforting and festive, it now felt flat and ominous. Empty eyes gazing into an empty place.
“He was gone? Good Arcturus?” I asked, when Jasper was quiet for a solid thirty seconds. He nodded, his eyes on the ground as he walked.
“Yeah. I got home and the voice didn’t come back. It shouldn’t have gone silent when we were only as far away as Amherst anyway, but I was a kid and I didn’t think of that. And then I was totally alone in my head. And like I know most people are alone in their heads, right, but I never had been since I was born. You are loved, my child. You are one with the good earth. We are as solid as the rocks around us. We are facing a star. We are together in the cosmos. Blah blah fucking blah. The words were meaningless, it was what they did to me that mattered. I was suddenly alone in this quiet world. And I thought I was gonna get in trouble, you know, for not being able to hear him. So I didn’t tell anyone and I just waited for it to come back.”
“But it didn’t come back,” I said.
“But it didn’t come back. And then I started noticing other things. How everyone had to give birth in town. How we didn’t do all these things I saw on TV or read about, like… like how we don’t celebrate any holidays except for birthdays and the Hallow, how nobody practices any religions. And alllllll these feelings I’d never felt before started to creep in.”
I tried, unsuccessfully, to imagine feeling an entire spectrum of emotions I’d never felt before. It was an alien thought, desolate and horrible. “Like what feelings?” I asked.
“When I got angry, it wouldn’t go right away like it always had. Ditto when I got scared, or sad, or jealous. And then I started fighting with my parents sometimes, about stuff I didn’t want to do, and they had, like, no idea what to do about that. I’d never been in trouble before, because I’d never been disobedient before.”
“I’ve never seen you be anything but disobedient,” I said.
“Yeah,” Jasper said, nodding, “and Alex…”
Jasper stopped talking again. He was quiet as we passed K-Family Pizza, where all the windows were dark and only the neon sign threw off light.
“Alex,” I said, after a lengthy pause.
“Alex wasn’t Alex anymore,” Jasper said, in a rush that made it clear he’d been thinking about this for a long time, much, much longer than our conversation. “Or I wasn’t me. He wasn’t my best friend. My best friend and my… I thought we were like, soul mates, you know. I didn’t have the words as a little kid. But I had the idea.”
If I hadn’t already experienced so much shock that I was numb, this admittance by Jasper would’ve been the shock of all shocks. It went well beyond pretending to be married as a little kid… into an implication of how Jasper felt now.
I knew Jasper was gay, of course. Everyone knew Jasper was gay, and if you didn’t know, he’d quickly inform you in the most confrontational way possible.
But he’d never shown interest in any specific guy, except for once telling me that he “regularly jerked off to Fight Club,” and I’m (pretty) sure that was a joke.
And he’d definitely never shown interest in Alex. Not in front of me, anyway.
In fact, Jasper sometimes treated Alex with the same barely-concealed wrath that he showed to the adults of the village: like his parents, for example, or Birdie Plum. Not Rita, not for the most part, but she was a special case.
It had always bothered me. But I never said anything, because it never seemed to bother Alex. And because I assumed that KJ would have said something if her twin was really being persecuted.
I didn’t interrupt Jasper, though, and when he looked at me like he was waiting for a comment, I rolled my hand in a keep talking gesture.
“He still… we’ve, like, made out and stuff,” Jasper said. He kept his face turned away from me while he said it, and it sounded like it hurt him to force the words out. “I can’t have sex with him, though, you know? No matter what I want, or what he says he wants. It would be wrong, because… he isn’t really there. He can’t really understand love, you get what I mean? You can’t love if you’ll do whatever someone else says. They don’t give you Nineteen Eighty-Four at the fucking school in our town, but I gave it to him anyway. I thought he would get something out of it, maybe it would reach him or something. And he read it in like two days. But you know what he said after? You know what he fucking said?”
“I don’t know if I want to know,” I said.
“He said that weren’t we so lucky we didn’t live in a totalitarian state! The FUCKING MORON,” Jasper said, and his golden voice echoed through the empty street, “said that with a fucking mouth that the fucking Thought Police were speaking right through! That’s what he is, you know, Good Arcturus, he’s the Thought Police, and he’s so much better at it than anything else could be, because he’s inside you—”
He paused for a minute, shaking his head.
“I’m sorry, Jas,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”
“It’s not your fault,” Jasper said. “I was complicit. I hid it from you. On purpose. Like, until you showed up here today. Yesterday. Whatever the fuck time it is.” He avoided my gaze, turning his face away. Shame all over him, making him seem more vulnerable than he ever had. “You had no idea, Darian. And I wanted… I wanted you to keep coming back. To stay ignorant. You’re my best friend and I didn’t want you to run away. You weren’t in any danger, so I figured—why try to tell you?”
I was thinking about all of the odd things I had never thought too deeply about. Senovak had never mentioned the myriad oddities of Kesuquosh either, and he noticed everything. “Even if you had told me I’m betting I wouldn’t have been able to take it seriously, right?”
“Right,” Jasper said.
“So stop punishing yourself, okay?”
“I should’ve still tried,” Jasper said. “Instead of being selfish.”
“I wouldn’t have run away,” I said, meaning it. “I could have tried to help you.”
“He won’t let anyone help me. There was nobody who could help me… except KJ. That’s why I thought we could beat him together. I had a plan.”
“KJ,” I said, and the pain and horror of what had happened to her rolled over me again, almost made my voice break when I said her name.
“I think I can still save her,” Jasper said.
“How?” I asked.
Jasper shook his head. “Not sure yet.”
We rounded the corner of the road and there was Number 19, with its back hanging out over the Styx-black river water.
“Why would KJ be able to help you if everyone in town is controlled by the Thought Police?” I asked.
