Empty Heaven, page 33
“Stay with me,” he said.
“No!” I screamed, and twisted my head until I felt hair tearing from my scalp. I smacked Dexter in the chest with both hands, pushing him impossibly hard, and the leaded windowpanes behind him shattered like strands in a spiderweb.
We fell backward into the snowy night.
I laughed as we fell, giddy with the stomach-dropping feeling of it.
“My hair is short and blonde!” I said, keeping my hands on the lapels of Dexter’s coat as the wind made a void around us. “I’m going to be an adult in December! And I’m not alone! I’m free!”
“Darian,” Dexter said. He reached for me one last time as the earth rushed up to meet us.
“No more,” I said.
Dexter’s face cracked. Cracked, like a china doll dropped from a great height. His glasses cracked, too. Each lens fragmented to shards.
I saw his face twist in hatred for a single second—my hands were still on his jacket—and the next moment he was disintegrating into atoms. His ghost became one with the snowflakes. I landed gently on the cold ground.
KJ was there. She was looking down at me as I sat, unmoving, in my shock. She seemed completely fine.
“D,” she said, and sat down next to me when I didn’t immediately get up.
“Hey,” she said. “D. You in there?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “I think I just—”
“Had a WWE SmackDown with your own post-traumatic stress disorder?” KJ asked.
“Oh my god, fuck off,” I said. “I think I just saved everyone’s ass at the cost of my own sanity, you fucking hick.”
“Snob, such a huge snob,” KJ said. “Such a snob that even your abuser won a Grammy.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I missed her so much.
“I must look like a complete psycho,” I said. “I made him kill himself. I…”
“Sincerely? It was the most badass thing I have ever seen in my entire life,” KJ said. She leaned against me for a second. Never asking for too much. Not even in my head.
“Put your arms around me,” I said.
KJ shuffled over a little more and wrapped her arms around my shoulders. That was when I really started crying again.
“I wish you were actually here,” I said, brushing snowflakes away as they settled on her hair. “Oh shit. I wish it so bad.”
“Uh, D,” KJ said. “I am actually here.”
“I mean alive,” I said.
“I mean alive, too,” KJ said. “But we’ll have to go back and find out for sure.”
“Let’s just sit like this for a little while,” I said.
“No way. You don’t get to do all that work and then just stay in the dark,” KJ said.
She got up. In the streetlights, in the snow, she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. But she would have been that beautiful anywhere.
She offered me her hand, and I took it.
“Brilliantly executed spell,” KJ said. “Now let’s go back and defeat my mom.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Thursday, September 13, 2001
I opened my eyes and my hand was on fire.
I screamed, dropped my burning crystal, and looked around at the suddenly quiet village. All of the threads of Good Arcturus had retracted. He stood against the black dollhouse with his head bowed and his face covered, like he’d never intervened to begin with.
Senovak was getting up from the far side of the clearing. His face was still wounded, but it wasn’t gushing blood, and he seemed like he was moving okay. One of his eyes was rapidly puffing shut.
Against the treeline, Jasper opened his eyes. They were normal. He stood up unsteadily, holding on to a tree trunk.
“Dan!” I said. “Jasper!”
I went to run to them—but I was stopped. In front of me was the town common, and on the common was Rita, splayed across the square of grass like she was asleep. Her hair covered her face almost entirely. Her clawed hands and feet were covered in flesh-colored moss. I saw shapes like eyes growing in the moss that spread up one of her wrists. Her skin moved even as she lay still.
I turned right and circled around the head of the common, running past Good Arcturus, dodging around two perfectly still Incorporations.
On the ground in front of me Alex climbed to his feet, looking dazed.
“Come on, kids,” Senovak said. “We need to go!”
It was too late, though. As the four of us reached each other, I heard a gentle noise. Rita sitting up, standing up. Walking along the tiny version of Good Earth Way in her bare feet.
“Wait,” Rita said. Her voice—the shuddering voice of Kesuquosh—sounded like the insidious promise of the voice I had heard in my mind-meld last year. An undercurrent of sharpness. Cruelty.
“Fuck you, Rita, you fucking bitch!” Jasper shouted. “I trusted you! Fuck you! The biggest fuck you to you in the whole fucking universe!”
Even if we were completely screwed, I couldn’t ever express to you the relief I felt when I heard Jasper say fuck.
“That’s great, honey,” Rita said. “Now everybody stop moving.”
I guess her power wasn’t in a wand or a piece of chalk or rock, but in her voice. Her words had always been able to convince me. Maybe every witch was different that way.
We stopped. For the second time, I was held still by the power of her voice. We all were.
“Daniel,” Rita said. “You’ve killed people during active duty, haven’t you?” She turned around us, her mouth hanging open and showing only darkness within, skin wriggling like maggots. Did a delicate little spin on her clawed toes, sending a few dead leaves scattering, light-footed as a cat. She moved like she had all the time in the world.
Senovak watched her approach with his eyes only. With his one good eye. The other one had swollen fully shut above the slashes on his face. I saw the cords of muscle in his neck standing out as he tried to fight off the stillness she’d imposed on us.
“I think you know I’ve always loved children,” Rita said. “Even your child. Or, I should say, your employer’s child. She’s been so dear to me.”
Rita stroked one hand through my hair as she walked around me, her clawed fingers grazing my scalp almost hard enough to draw blood. One mossy arm touched my cheek. I could feel things moving in the moss, opening like lidded eyes. I tried to moan, to cringe away in revulsion. But I was held utterly still.
“Didn’t do a very good job looking out for her, though, did you?” Rita said. Then she leaned right toward me, her soft breath against my cheek. Her eyes had perfect moons of white light in their center. Inhuman eyes.
“It was very smart, what you did,” she said. “For someone who isn’t a natural witch. But it didn’t work, honey. I’m so sorry.”
Then she turned away from me. “Daniel,” she said, almost conversationally. “There’s a straight razor in Jasper’s pocket—I gave it to him in case this little conflict went terribly awry, which of course it has. It’s my husband’s. A previous husband. It’s so sad when I outlive them. And this is a hand-me-down. I want you to kill Darian and Jasper with it. Then yourself. Okay?”
Then she stepped away from us, and took Alex’s face between her clawed hands. His eyes were wide and horrified. One tear ran out of the corner of his eye and dripped off his chin.
“You I can still fix,” Rita said. “My baby.”
“You can move now, Daniel,” she said, still looking at Alex.
Senovak took a breath. His hand extended, shaking. He reached into Jasper’s pocket.
No, please don’t make him do this, I thought. No, please, no, please.
Senovak pulled the straight razor out and unfolded it. It was old, but the blade glinted, perfectly sharp. He turned it slowly in his hand. I could see him shuddering with effort, trying to turn the blade back on himself. Kill himself before he had to hurt us.
Then I smelled ozone.
Heard the vibrations start, like a generator powering up.
whump whump whump whump WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP
Rita whirled around, and in that one moment of broken concentration, Senovak threw the razor across the clearing so hard that it smacked against a tree trunk and brought down a little fall of bark.
“What was that?” Rita said, and then Good Arcturus stepped over the black dollhouse on his many sinews.
He was massive.
It had worked. My spell had broken Rita’s hold for long enough. Freed him. It had worked. He was waking up.
“No!” Rita said. “Return to your rest! You must stop—”
NO, said a voice that I could hear only in my head.
I found that I could move again, and took one staggering step, almost falling against the shuddering of the ground. I caught Alex’s elbow with my arm and Dan’s shoulder bumped mine, and Jasper tumbled back into us, all four of us leaning against a clutch of dollhouses in a knot, trying to stay on our feet.
Rita stood beneath Good Arcturus, screaming at him.
“You will return to your rest!” she commanded, raising both arms.
But the sinews of Good Arcturus batted them down.
She shrieked in rage, and ran at him, raising her arms again. But she was cut off by a wall of moving red string.
Good Arcturus bent in half, his sinew arms working, and pulled the swath of skin away from his body like he was taking a dress off over his head. Then he set it down on the tiled ground. Carefully. Gently.
And it wasn’t a shield at all, and it wasn’t a sheet of skin, and it wasn’t a straitjacket.
It was KJ. She was lying on the leaf-strewn ground, her face dirty and pale, wearing the tattered remnants of her Scary Scarecrow costume.
She had a bullet hole in her forehead, right between the eyes.
A thin stream of dried blood ran out of it.
POOR CHILD, said the voice in my head. One sinew reached out and touched KJ’s cheek.
“KJ!” I yelled. Alex and Jasper and I all tried to run to her, and we all skidded along the moving ground, unable to cross the clearing. Rita alone stayed on her feet, screaming. Behind her, the motionless Incorporations started to come back to life, jerking around like puppets on long strings.
Rita didn’t even look at KJ. She darted to the side, jumping onto the roof of one of the dollhouses in an elegant movement, and she ran straight across it toward Good Arcturus. Her hands tangled in the mass of his sinews, trying to drag him down, back toward his spot behind the black dollhouse.
She still had power, even if it was not power over Good Arcturus. When she pulled at his threads, her mouth open in a snarl of hatred, the whole giant glowing space of the false village pulled with her, flexing like a soap bubble. Tree branches rained down over us, hitting the ground and the houses. Jasper and I were the ones closest to the middle of the clearing, and we both threw our arms over our heads, trying to shield ourselves.
“You are mine to command! Mine! This place is mine!” Rita screamed. She made another pulling motion with her arms, and when she threw her hands to the side, the entire forest tilted. I felt like I had at Dexter’s apartment, all those years ago, when the pills started to take effect. Only this time the world was actually tilting.
The mossy ground cracked in a hundred places, one line directly under the spot where I’d fallen trying to get to KJ. I rolled away as a thin chasm opened up beneath me, scrabbling to an unbroken piece of earth. Dollhouses started to fall into the fresh fault lines, bits of them shearing away.
The house that I thought was Birdie Plum’s cracked in half and slid into a hole that had opened up along the common. A chasm devoured most of Good Earth Way.
The black veins that shot through the village flowed backward into the Incorporations like film played in reverse. And Rita stayed on her feet through it all, screaming at the scarecrow, trying to command him—
“You have to do as I say!”
And Good Arcturus, amid the silt and branches and crashing chaos of the crumbling world, leaned forward and down until he was eye level with the witch screaming up at him.
YOU HAVE KEPT ME FOR A WHILE IN YOUR SNARE, LITTLE JUNIE, came Good Arcturus’s voice in my thoughts. YOUR LUCK, PERHAPS, THAT I AM NOT A SEASONED TRAVELER.
I found that I couldn’t look directly at his bare face. Whenever I tried, my eyes seemed to move away from it, or else it was turned away from me.
Then, more elegantly than I could have imagined such a creature moving, he formed a bunch of sinews into the rough shape of a hand.
In the center of this makeshift hand lay a very large needle.
Rita’s mouth opened. Her face was white. Inhuman, with her crawling skin and her fleshy veins of moss and her shining eyes.
I BELIEVE THIS BELONGS TO YOU, Good Arcturus said.
He dropped the needle on the ground, and Rita bent to snatch it up.
MY FRIENDS, Good Arcturus said, and I could feel him focusing on us, even though I couldn’t look at his face.
Jasper was weaving his way toward KJ’s body, staggering every time a shock wave rolled through the model town.
I tried to get up again. This time I made it to my feet, following Jasper. A falling branch from one of the shaking trees almost knocked me to the ground, but I managed to dodge it.
Good Arcturus moved his sinews over KJ’s head.
For a second she was hidden. Then his threadlike appendages fell away from her face, revealing unscathed skin where the bullet hole had been.
KJ sat up. She was on the ground between Rita and Good Arcturus.
Jasper reached her first, grabbing her arms with his hands. He tried to pull her up and she ended up pulling him down. Behind them the black dollhouse split in half, spilling out red light like a bloody wound.
IT IS TIME FOR AN END TO YOUR DOMINION OVER THIS PLACE, Good Arcturus’s voice said.
“No!” Rita screamed. “No! I won’t have you destroy everything I have made—”
Her arms reached for him. She stretched out over KJ, paying her no mind. Her face roiled, caving in on itself. Her skin was more moss than skin, and I saw dark fissures underneath the moss. Something inside her threatening to come out. And she spread herself out like a spider, snatching at Good Arcturus, trying to tangle her hands inside his threads, trying to pull his limbs away from everything they touched.
Underneath the crashing and smashing and vibration of forest collapsing in on itself, I could hear KJ’s voice, her real voice, not doubled:
“You didn’t make anything but a prison, Ma,” KJ said. “Stop fooling yourself.”
Then I reached KJ and Jasper, grabbed for her as she tried to get up and just slid back down onto her elbows. Working together, Jasper and I managed to pull her up.
“KJ, oh, oh my god, are you all right?” I asked, and she stumbled into my arms, folded herself around me. Hugged me tighter than she ever had. It was part unsteadiness and part emotion.
“You’re alive,” I said, arms clutching her shoulders. I felt like if I let go she would die again, or disappear. She was bent over like a willow tree, her face against my neck. “You’re alive, you’re alive—”
“I told you, D,” KJ said. She leaned back, smiled at me kind of woozily. “I told you in your freaky mind fortress. I… um… I w-w-wanted to help you in there but I—”
“You did help me,” I said. I had tears in my eyes. “You always help me. KJ. KJ. We all saw you die—”
“I think you helped yourself,” KJ said, and dropped her head into the crook of my shoulder, exhausted, her face drawn and still crusted in dried blood from her vanished bullet wound, lips barely touching my skin.
Then the ground shuddered again, moving under us like a raft on choppy seas, and she staggered. I wasn’t strong enough to hold her up myself. Jasper put his hands against both of us.
Senovak reached us, and helped steady KJ, the four of us struggling to stay upright on the shaking ground.
I CANNOT BRING MYSELF TO JUDGE YOU, Good Arcturus said to Rita. BUT I DO BELIEVE THEY HAVE THE RIGHT.
I turned around. Behind Rita, five of the six previous Incorporations were lined up in a semicircle.
AND I DO NOT THINK THAT THEY WILL JUDGE YOU KINDLY, Good Arcturus said.
“Wait,” Rita said. “No, no, wait—”
She backed away. Only then did she seem to remember that there were other people in the woods with her. Her gaze slid over me and Senovak, KJ and Jasper, and stopped on Alex.
The tallest of the burnt things—the one I thought was maybe the first one, the minister from the original story—reached out and touched her mossy shoulder. Rita screamed in agony, and stabbed the needle she held into the shoulder of the Incorporation, and pulled away from him.
“Alex!” she cried in her ancient and inhuman voice. “Baby! Please help me! Don’t let them do this to me!”
Alex, who had almost reached us, looked at his mom. His face showed real pain.
But then he took a breath. I couldn’t hear it, with the noise of the village breaking apart around us, but I saw it. The inhale, the resolve in his posture.
“Mom,” Alex said. “It’s one person’s life against the happiness and health of every single person in Kesuquosh.”
He was quoting her own words back to her. What she’d said to him last Halloween morning.
Rita’s eyes widened.
A huge oak tree limb broke off and hit the ground. A flying fragment grazed Rita’s shoulder, and she cried out. She stumbled forward, into the hands of the tallest Incorporation.
The thing dragged her into the waiting arms of the others.
I saw Senovak grab Alex’s shoulder and turn him away.
“Go now,” Senovak said. I saw his look. You don’t need to see this, it said.
He steered Alex and Jasper toward the treeline, sliding every time a tremor rocked the little town. He left them at the edge of the forest, then made his way back to us.
The miniature Kesuquosh was in a thousand pieces. Wind howled through the previously still world. Leaves and branches dropped like snow. I had to hold my arms over my head.
Senovak steadied KJ with both arms, and started guiding her out.
“Come on, Darian,” he said.
