Empty Heaven, page 7
“Whoa, go, KJ,” said a burly dude at the next table. Rita stood up and gestured at KJ, who got slowly to her feet, still holding the needle. The Kobayashi-Jenetopolous family walked as a group, with KJ in the center, toward the central table, next to the crumbs of the giant cake, where Birdie Plum and a number of town council people sat.
I stayed seated, staring. But I felt a visceral stab of anxiety as KJ got farther away from me. What the hell was this now? Was this… part of the Banquet, somehow? Hadn’t Birdie called it “the Banquet of the Needle”?
Then Birdie took the microphone.
“Fellow Apostles,” she said, her pretty voice piercing the night, “Good Arcturus has made His selection.” She took KJ’s hand—the one not holding the needle—in her own, raising their fists together in the air.“Our new Incorporation is—Kaherdin Jude Kobayashi! May He live joyously within them!”
At the table to my right, a bearded guy with a Red Sox sweatshirt peeking out from under his red robe whistled and clapped. Other people followed suit. The crowd broke out into riotous, deafening, ear-bending applause.
“KJ! KJ! KJ!”
A bunch of kids from the parochial school were cheering for her. I saw Hunter Warren, the guy KJ had been “kind of dating” during the first half of junior year, clapping wildly and grinning his handsome grin from over at his table.
People smashed their mead glasses on the ground. The musicians, who had taken a pause to eat the sacred cake, immediately reassembled near the heart of the green, and reedy music mixed in with the applause.
“Would you like to say something, my dear?” Birdie Plum asked. She sounded much nicer than when she’d been talking to Jasper.
KJ took the microphone hesitantly. She held up the needle—invisible from this distance, except that it caught and threw back one single spangle of light from the torches—and cleared her throat.
“I just gotta say that He has great taste,” KJ said. “It’s an honor!”
This simple declaration was met with uproarious laughter, like way more laughter than was appropriate for the occasion. The excitement of the crowd almost seemed… manic. Again anxiety jabbed at my brain, my lungs. I didn’t like what was happening.
“Now we will make our pilgrimage,” Birdie Plum said. “To His house!”
Everyone stood up, pushing their chairs backward. An old woman from the central table took KJ’s Soundgarden beanie off her head and replaced it with a crown of sunflowers. It ringed her dark hair like a halo.
I stood up. I looked over at Jasper, to confirm that I was following suit in the correct way, and saw him on his feet between his parents. Jasper’s face was bone white. His pale blue eyes were enormous. He looked like someone had just died in front of him. And the expression of horror on his face was so profound that it made my own unease gallop straight into fear.
What the fuck, I mouthed at him. But Jasper didn’t see me, didn’t look away from KJ.
“To Kaherdin Jude!” Birdie Plum said again, before she set the microphone down. “Our newest Incorporation!”
The mass of people paused. Like they were waiting for something. I tried to catch Jasper’s eye. What happens now? I thought.
Then Jasper’s frightened eyes moved away from KJ. Now he was looking past me. I turned, following the general direction of his gaze. My eyes drifted past the gazebo, toward the streets beyond. And then my breath caught in my throat. I forgot about KJ’s new status as the star of the party. I forgot about Jasper’s look of terror. For a second, I forgot about everything.
Dexter was there. Waiting for me. He was at the edge of the green, forever thirty years old, wrapped up against the cold in his retro jacket. Blood across his mouth. Standing right where the torchlight melted into darkness. He was entirely shadowed, except for the gleam of his glasses and the knife-white slice of his smile.
Kesuquosh was no longer a safe haven: Dexter was here now, too. He had invaded my last and greatest sanctuary during the Great Harvest Hallow.
One hand, dark with moss and livid with the discoloration of death, beckoned to me. His mouth moved.
I wasn’t close enough to hear what he was saying, but I knew that he was whispering something in the scratchy voice of the grave. If I got close to him, I would be able to hear him singing one of the songs he’d written for me. I couldn’t tell which. Maybe “Later, Adrian,” or “Oh Phantom Mine.” Those were the two that you could most often catch on the radio. “Please go away,” I said. My voice was lost in the sound of the crowd.
Then there was a break in the noise. Dexter stopped singing and glanced over at the gazebo. His smile glinted again in the dark, and he looked straight at me, gesturing toward that dark and flowery space. Look, his hands said. Look at this new surprise.
Inside the darkness where the scarecrow had stood, braced to leap forward, there was a sound of rustling. Like something long asleep—something disguised as an effigy—was stirring, stretching. Waking.
I heard the creak of old branches in the wind without any wind. The shadows shifted in the torchlight. The thing inside the gazebo began to move.
CHAPTER SIX
Saturday, October 28, 2000
It was moving.
The faceless scarecrow, enormous and swathed in faded leathery fabric, walked down the steps of the gazebo. Or—it didn’t have feet, exactly, and I couldn’t see how it was moving. Slithering. Gliding.
Someone is carrying that thing, I thought. There are people lifting it and carrying it and it’s just that I can’t see it because I’m at a weird angle and I—
The gazebo was cutting off part of my view of the scarecrow. Yes, it seemed to move on its own, but it was definitely being carried. There was no way it wasn’t being carried.
The whole crowd had been very still for a moment. And then the cheering redoubled. People were screaming, shrieking. A lady in L.L.Bean overalls twisted the edge of her cloak between two hands with a rapturous expression, an enormous smile distorting her face.
Good Arcturus—and whatever hidden people had to be carrying him—melted into the darkness at the far end of the green. I whipped my head back to where Dexter had been, and he was gone. Vanished.
“Come, my dear ones!” Birdie said. She, the other adults she’d been sitting with, and the whole Kobayashi family all started to follow after Good Arcturus. KJ was in the center of them, easy to spot with her golden crown of sunflowers. She looked like a coin that was being pushed along by a bloodred river. There was something small and… helpless-seeming about the way she moved in the throng. Then everyone was walking in the same direction. The crowd headed to the far end of the green. Senovak had mentioned this part. I figured that this was the mile-long parade that led past the crumbling church foundation and out to a big bonfire. But none of the rest of this… choosing someone stuff had been discussed. Nothing about seeing someone crowned as some kind of shield or Incorporation, which I was still unclear on the meaning of. Nothing about a needle. Or a banquet. Not even a single word about a sacred cake.
Because this is Great Harvest Hallow, I thought. And it’s not the same. They’ve been telling you that all night.
“Jasper?” I said as the Plum family passed close by me. “Did you see—”
I was going to ask Did you see the scarecrow move? but Jasper cut me off.
“I’ll take care of this,” he said. His face was drawn and pale. “You go home. I’ll come get you later.”
“Wait, Jas,” I said, and tried to grab his sleeve, but Mrs. Plum turned and gave me a look that made me drop my hand.
“Go home, child,” Mrs. Plum said. Her hooded face looked hollow and ancient, like a recently unburied skull.
There was absolutely no way I was going to go home. I was too frightened by the appearance of movement from the scarecrow, too worried about what exactly was happening to KJ. I waited until almost every last one of the villagers was in front of me, a great train of red-cloaked bodies moving into the shadows. Then I pulled out my cell phone, opened up my list of contacts, and scrolled down to Dan S. My finger hovered over the green Send button. I really, really wanted Senovak to be here to back me up. The sudden creepiness of everything was making me feel paranoid.
But I couldn’t think of what I would tell Senovak if I did call him. Can you come hang with me? I got scared because KJ ate the special cake piece. Or, better yet, I’m exactly as drunk as you told me not to be and I think I saw the scarecrow move by itself and it freaked me out!
I couldn’t tell him about seeing Dexter. I thought Senovak might be the only one who suspected the truth of what had happened with Dexter, and I didn’t want him asking a lot of prying questions about why I was haunted by Dexter’s ghost.
I kept my phone out with Senovak’s number pulled up, and followed the crowd, trying not to think about Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery, and what happened to the person in that small town who was lucky enough to “win.”
The eastern side of Good Earth Way turned into Deep River Road, and from there the pavement and the houses gave way to an old cobblestone street that led deeper into the woods, heavy with moss. The moss-covered road crumbled into a dirt track (which had once been Church Street, presumably so long ago that it was before the religion of Good Arcturus had come to Kesuquosh). I and the few stragglers behind me passed the church that had been “torn to the foundations” in the story the old councilman told: the place that the locals—or at least Jasper, KJ, and Alex—called Empty Heaven.
A nickname that had made me profoundly uncomfortable the first time I’d heard it. Now I was somewhat inured. At least I didn’t flinch when they said it anymore.
Of course they would come up with that nickname because of the song “Empty Heaven,” which was pretty popular, maybe his third biggest single, at least if you were into alternative rock or regularly tuned in to college radio. And of course all three of them liked him. They couldn’t all agree on Ian Curtis or Kurt Cobain, but they could agree on him.
I tried to pull my thoughts away from Dexter. I almost expected to see him sitting inside the crumbling foundation of the church as we passed it. But of course there was nothing.
All that remained of that former house of worship was, as I said, the old stone rectangle… and one perfectly preserved doorframe. The door still hung within it. It was a deep green, or once had been, before time had cracked and peeled the paint. There was really no reason for the door to still be a door when the rest of the building had long ago succumbed to ruin. And yet… it was preserved in a way that suggested that somehow it was younger than the rest of the ruins, as if the door hovered there in stasis while the bulk of the church had been subjected to time.
We passed the green door that swung outward forever—or inward forever, depending on your perspective—toward a church which was no longer there, and headed deeper into the woods. There was a downslope, a brief and dark stretch of true forest, enormous pines and younger deciduous trees, and a path that crunched with dead leaves under every step. Normally I felt a level of peace in these woods that I couldn’t feel in the city ever. But tonight I felt lonely and watched, although I was surrounded by other people. Smiling, happy people who should not have made me feel so nervous. But they were all strangers, or vague faces I’d seen around town, and I was dressed differently from all of them, sans cloak. And the rest of the Kobayashi family were so far ahead that I’d lost sight of them.
Where the fuck was KJ? I couldn’t see her. Where is she, I wondered, and what’s happening to her?
I didn’t know if it was reasonable to feel scared for her like I did. But I wished I could just get a glimpse of her. It would make me feel better about literally everything that was going on.
I kept my eye on Jasper’s distant back and the occasional glimpse of his purple hair in the light of someone’s flashlight or the flicker of one of the many torches that people carried.
Then, after what seemed like an eternally long time, we came to a place where the line of trees was abruptly cut off, and the path moved directly into one of the many sunflower fields that surrounded the town of Kesuquosh.
I could see a guy maybe twenty feet in front of me holding a torch. Because the sunflowers were so tall—even though a great deal of them were dead or dying in this late part of the year—the guy carrying the torch had to hoist it up well over his head, holding it near the very bottom to keep it from catching the dried-out field on fire.
The torchlight falling down from above and the flashlights cutting through the darkness of the field below made an odd interplay of light and darkness, like one of those fun houses at a carnival where the entire point is to disorient you.
One by one, the people ahead of me as well as the few people behind me stopped singing and talking and laughing. I didn’t even notice them falling silent at first. It just seemed like the night sounds overtook the sounds of human voices until all at once there was nothing except for the wind and the bodies moving through the sunflowers.
It was in this quiet that I started to feel a creeping certainty that I and all the townies and everyone in the Great Harvest Hallow parade were being watched by something deep within the sunflowers.
I imagined countless eyes following the progression of this long ribbon of human beings as it wound through the October fields. Flat eyes, like doll’s eyes (or nocturnal animal eyes, like Dexter’s eyes) gazing out from deep within the darkness afforded to them by the sunflowers.
And then just as the thoughts of eyes and watchers were becoming too persistent for me to dismiss any longer, the sunflowers fell away, and we walked out into a massive clearing. The packed dirt of the ground was strewn with hay, like a farmer’s fallow field. But in the center of that explicable clearing, nonsensical as a nightmare, stood a house.
In no way was it a regular farmhouse. Sitting as it did, old-fashioned and dark, on a perfectly round patch of grass, it looked like it had been plucked straight out of an illustrated Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It was such a bizarre sight in the middle of a field that for a second I thought it was a mirage, or a hallucination.
The house was clearly older than anything else in Kesuquosh, older even than the remains of the church that we’d passed by not long before. Intermittent flashlights and flickering torchlight glanced off the exterior, tracing peaked grooves and wooden siding, revealing it to be painted black. Narrow and many-paned windows caught the light and threw it back.
And hunched over, because his great height did not allow for him to stand fully upright inside the short doorframe of the old house, was the scarecrow.
Now that I could see Good Arcturus fully and in slightly better light, it was obvious that it had been carried there. I felt like a moron—an idiot who had been caught up in the frightening imagery of the evening—for thinking that the thing had ever moved on its own. It didn’t even have feet. Its body terminated somewhere under the tattered folds of the cloak it wore, and I guessed that the bottom of the scarecrow was made out of a single wooden pole. It probably had movable limbs—the arms certainly seemed to have been rearranged for it to stand in this doorway instead of the gazebo—and was not a real scarecrow for a field at all. The likeliest explanation was that it was a prop that the citizens of Kesuquosh dragged out once every thirty-five years to make their Great Harvest Hallow really immersive.
Not that it made me feel any less uncomfortable with this whole display, or any more inclined to move my finger away from where it hovered over the green Send button, should I need to call Senovak.
Beyond the mass of villagers, who were beginning to gather around the antique house, was KJ. She was standing very straight, and was encircled by Birdie Plum and the other people from Birdie’s table back at the green. She looked luminous in her golden crown of flowers. And as solemn as I had ever seen her.
Then Rita moved through the circle of people around KJ to hug her daughter tightly. She paused for a second a few feet away, talking to Birdie, their heads close together, before she rejoined the rest of the Kobayashi-Jenetopolous clan.
I hovered on the periphery of the clearing, watching as the same kids who had been pouring mead and water earlier assembled a bonfire from kindling and logs, under the direction of some older teenagers.
I don’t like the look of that, I thought. Not at all.
I had a terrible vision of KJ, lashed to a pyre in the middle of a blazing bonfire, about to be burned alive like a modern-day Joan of Arc. KJ meeting death with her lovely narrow face turned up toward the moon.
You’re being ridiculous, I told myself. There’s no need for you to be ruining what should be a bit of spooky fun on a vacation that you begged to have by deciding that everything is some kind of horror story.
“Darian, come over and stand with us,” Rita said, and I turned toward the spot where the Kobayashi family now gathered in a loose knot.
“Rita? What’s going on?” I asked.
“You don’t need to look so scared, honey,” Rita said. “I know our beliefs are unfamiliar to people who grew up outside Kesuquosh. But I promise you that everything is okay. You don’t have to stay for the ceremony if you don’t want to. Nobody will mind. It should be a straight walk back through the fields.”
Rita’s honest attempt to comfort me made me feel kind of stupid. For quite a while, I had been torn between fear and the feeling I was blowing something rather innocent out of proportion. I leaned back toward I’m blowing something out of proportion now.
Still. “But what is the ceremony?” I asked. I couldn’t relax until someone gave me a clear answer.
“Well, Kahie will present the needle to Good Arcturus,” Rita said. “She puts it in his eye. And then she becomes His new Incorporation. And then we all go drink beer and eat pumpkin soup and apple bread at Holly Garland’s farmstand. She has it all decked out for the party.”
“That… doesn’t sound so bad,” I admitted.
“It’s not bad,” Rita said. “It’s lovely. There’s nothing better than being part of a community, how we all work our magic together, you know? I wish your mom could be here, too. She would think you were such a great person. I think you’re a great person.”
