Empty Heaven, page 8
Rita seemed like she was around my mom’s age. Maybe a bit younger. And she’d always spoken to me about Blake’s quiet sweetness, her gentle approach to interpersonal relationships, her beauty. I didn’t think it meant that they’d been particularly close—Rita was nice like that about everyone. But it was always meaningful to me when she brought up my mom specifically. And she always acted like the fact of my mom’s goodness somehow reflected on me. I knew that people who died young were always described as the kind of person who lit up a room after they were dead. But I believed that my mom had actually been an angel. Maybe a doormat, to marry Ed, but an angel nonetheless. Nothing like me. I felt like I was all broken edges, no matter how sweet Rita thought I was.
“Thanks, Rita,” I said, not knowing how to respond to so much affection at once. Rita’s love always felt like something I didn’t deserve. “It means a lot to me.”
“Of course. Are you still feeling nervous?”
I was just feeling stupid. I hoped that this thing could wrap up pretty soon so I could be hanging out with Alex and Jasper and KJ and eating apple bread and forgetting my horrible paranoia. Maybe KJ and I could finish our interrupted conversation.
“I’m fine,” I said, “but thank you. For looking out for me. I’m not trying to be a baby or… or anything.”
“I don’t think you’re being a baby, honey,” Rita said. She ruffled my hair and pulled me into a side-hug that left us both still able to see KJ clearly.
Okay, I knew that I was far too old to be so completely taken in by ruffled hair, that it was embarrassing how much I wanted to let Rita reassure me. But I… I closed my eyes for a minute anyway, and leaned my head against her shoulder, imagining that Rita was my mom.
Finally it seemed like everyone was there. A thousand people filled the space, making the massive clearing feel small. In the flickering light, I didn’t have a good view of everybody—except for KJ, who was obviously the star of this odd spectacle. I couldn’t see Jasper, or any member of the Plum family besides Birdie.
The bonfire was lit. The flashlights were turned off. The torches—the ones that still burned—were stuck into the dusty ground. All of the townspeople began to hum. I couldn’t hear Jasper’s distinctive voice rising above the others. Maybe he wasn’t singing.
The Kesuquoshians clasped each other by the shoulders, swaying. They sang with such sweetness, and with such happiness, that for the second time that night I thought of the Whos in Whoville from that old cartoon.
Whenever Good Arcturus comes to town,
Because his current shield is wearing thin
We sweep our streets with cider and with smoke
From frost to falls, to rid our hearts of sin
I wondered when the hell they’d learned all these songs. Were these, like, the nursery rhymes that they were taught? The songs that rocked them to sleep as babies?
“It is time for the new Incorporation to present the needle to the Lord of the Field,” Birdie Plum said. “Kaherdin Jude, Apostle of Good Arcturus, do you accept your destiny with open arms, an open mind, and a heart full of gladness?”
“It’s, uh, KJ,” KJ said. “And yeah, I do.” She paused and squinted at the assembled crowd when her response drew a round of laughter and cheers. Then she looked back at Birdie. “Uh… ma’am?” KJ asked, in what was clearly supposed to be a whisper but came out a bit loud and awkward. “What do I… do now?”
Another round of laughter from the crowd, and even Birdie Plum cracked a smile. “It’s simple enough, KJ,” she said, and touched one hand to KJ’s shoulder. She gestured with her other hand toward the doorway directly behind them.
“You’ll approach our Lord, and press the needle into His face,” Birdie said, “through the shroud around him, and directly into one of his eyes. It doesn’t matter which eye.”
“Okayyyyy,” KJ said, “but… um… He doesn’t have eyes?”
“Just try to approximate it,” Birdie said.
“Yeah. Okay. No problem,” KJ said, nodding. Then she turned, with one hand wrapped around the needle that had been in her cake, and marched across the old slate walkway that led to the house, putting one foot after the other with a level of deliberation I’d never seen from her before.
The musicians were playing again, haunting music in a melodic minor key that echoed the strange hymns they’d sung on their walk out here. Between that sound and the crack of the flames from the bonfire, it took me a minute to hear the murmuring of the people around me. It was a low and barely audible buzz, at first. But after a minute I realized that they were all whispering in unison.
You are safe, my child. You are loved, my child. You are one with the good earth.
KJ made it up to the faceless scarecrow. It leaned down over her from the doorway of the secret house, making her seem quite small, for once.
The needle glinted in her hand, and just as she was about to stab it up into one of Good Arcturus’s empty sockets, a voice cut through the sound of the music and the chanting and the crackle of the flames.
“Wait! WAIT! Stop—don’t do this!”
It was Jasper, and he was screaming. He fought his way through the crowd, circled the bonfire, and shouldered past his aunt, running along the slate path until he could touch KJ’s back.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said. “KJ. Remember my plan? It’s up to you now. Try to focus. We’re in the snow globe, right? You hate it, don’t you? Tell me one thing that isn’t true.”
“I’ve had just about enough of you, little man,” Birdie said. “Thomas, Hunter, Lake, come here and hold him still and silent. Now.”
“No! No, you fucking zombies,” Jasper said, and he grabbed KJ’s arm, but she shook him off with one shrug, her hand still held aloft.
“I want to do this, boss,” KJ said.
“How can you want to do this? You don’t even know what you’re doing! Stop listening to whatever bullshit it tells you—”
Hunter and Thomas got Jasper by the shoulders. They were both much bigger than him, and held him pretty easily. Lake, the last and tallest of the boys, put one large hand over Jasper’s mouth and then quickly withdrew it, eyes wide.
“He bit me,” Lake said, shaking his hand.
“Oh, for the love of the world,” Birdie Plum said. “Jasper, I cannot tolerate—or, frankly, believe—this level of melodrama. Even from you. Since you will not be compliant while we try to complete our ceremonial rites, which are participated in willingly by all here, you are going to be escorted into the field for the duration. Hunter, Thomas, Lake. Please take Jasper away. I want him out of sight and out of earshot if possible.”
“KJ! THIS IS OUR ONLY CHANCE! Oh, you fucking shitholes, leave her alone!” Jasper shouted. He was fighting so hard that Thomas and Hunter had to actually carry him away from the firelight while his legs kicked out dangerously in the air. It would have been comical… if not for how utterly serious he was.
I didn’t look over to Rita for reassurance as they took Jasper into the sunflowers. I didn’t need to go for another round of people telling me how harmless everything that was happening was, or how much Jasper was overreacting. I listened to my gut. I pressed the green Send button on my cell phone, dialing Senovak.
KJ looked around one more time, gave the crowd a thumbs-up with her free hand (which provoked another round of cheering), and plunged the long needle into the place where—if he had eyes—Good Arcturus’s left eye would have been.
I brought the phone to my ear.
For a second I was afraid that out here I wouldn’t get service. There was generally pretty bad cell phone service around the Quabbin. But the phone was ringing. Static was crackling on the line, but it was ringing, and I listened to it ring with relief.
Up in the doorframe of the old black house with the peaked roofs and the crooked chimney, the needle sank through the leathery pink fabric that swathed Good Arcturus’s blank face and disappeared into the body beneath. KJ held up both her hands, triumphant. The crowd went absolutely wild now: cheering, screaming, chanting, yelling, bursting into snatches of song, musicians playing at full bore, people dancing, slapping each other on the back, hugging each other, kissing each other.
Then, as KJ turned, smiling, and started making her way back down toward the crowd along the walkway of paving stones, I doubted myself again. Even as the phone rang in my ear, I thought that maybe this was all there was to the ceremony. Now KJ would become the new… shield or Incorporation or whatever, until the next time they had this party. Maybe, just maybe, it really was harmless.
Someone picked up on the other end of the line.
“Hello?” I said.
I could hear something, maybe somebody talking, but it was difficult to pick out individual words over the cacophony that everyone was making. I turned my face away from the crowd and took two steps closer to the edge of the clearing. “Hello?” I said again, “Dan? It’s really loud, sorry—”
Then I heard the voice on the other end. There was a strong background crackle, like the caller was coming from very far away. And he was singing one of the songs he’d made just for me, the one that used an anagram of my name. Adrian for Darian.
Oh, Adrian, your hands brush mine
Oh, Adrian, oh, aren’t you sweet?
Oh, Adrian, my light divine
My southern cross, my empty street
I dropped the phone at the sound of Dexter’s voice. When I picked it back up, I could still hear him.
“Dariannn,” the thing in the static crooned. “Baby. Baby. You promised to come with meeee—”
I pressed the End button on my cell phone with shaking hands, and the call was terminated.
KJ had reached the bonfire. Her eyes looked out over the crowd. She was still smiling, her face bright and open under her crown of sunflowers, and her eyes found mine.
Not safe, I wanted to tell her. You’re not safe, KJ. There’s something wrong.
Then KJ broke our shared look. She glanced downward, in obvious puzzlement, at something invisible near her foot. She raised her feet one at a time, and shook them the way someone might if they had walked through a particularly large spiderweb and wanted to get the strands off their body.
The crowd was absolutely uncontained. Their volume, their overt partying, kept them from noticing exactly what was happening to KJ… except for Birdie Plum. I saw that Birdie was watching the scene avidly.
KJ moved her arm up and down as if something—again I thought of a spiderweb—had wrapped around her wrist. She waved her hand, looking confused, and then turned back toward the doorway where Good Arcturus waited.
And that, like a dam breaking, signaled a flood. But not of water. Thin, sinewy red strands—like hay, or thread, or very delicate veins—started to push their way out of the body of Good Arcturus.
Lines of red slithered out of the pale shroud he was wrapped in.
“What…?” I said out loud. But no one answered me.
Each one of the thin red threads moved through the air with an eerie sentience, finding KJ’s body and spinning around some part of it: her arms, her legs, her torso, her ears and fingers, her mouth. KJ looked down, obviously bewildered.
The strands kept coming, by the dozens; and then, it seemed, by the hundreds, and as more and more of them sprung out of Good Arcturus to entwine themselves with KJ, the scarecrow started to… deflate, almost. As if it were a skein of yarn that someone was quickly unspooling. The body under that tattered pink fabric began to fall in on itself.
The crowd actually got quiet. Most of them seemed—at first anyway—to be frightened by this turn of events. Disturbed.
For a second, I saw a look of absolute horror on Ken Kobayashi’s face. But by the time Ken had taken two steps forward—as if he were going to extricate his daughter from the web of red string that was rapidly cocooning her—his features had already smoothed back out into a benign excitement. He started to clap.
Other people joined in with clapping. KJ was clearly realizing that something was not right. But slowly, like someone who has woken up from a deep sleep and finds their house on fire. She was struggling a little, moving her shoulders to keep the red strings from holding her completely still.
“WHAT IS HAPPENING TO HER?” I shouted. “What is going on? What—”
I looked for some spark of human emotion in the people around me. I took two running steps forward, slammed into Alex’s back, and spun him around by the arms.
“Are you okay, Darian?” Alex asked in the exact same gentle, even, pleasant tone that he always used for everything. He looked mildly concerned.
I didn’t answer him. I suddenly didn’t believe that he was really there, that any of them were really there. I was in a field watching something terrible happen to KJ, and the only other witnesses might as well have been mannequins.
I shoved my way to the front of the crowd, almost falling into the bonfire—which had become enormous, a conflagration that seemed like it could devour someone whole—and then I ran wide around it.
“Darian, wait!” I heard someone yell. Rita. I ignored her. I stopped in front of KJ.
She was almost entirely held in place by red strings. She looked like—my first thought was like a fly caught in a web—but no, it was more extreme than that. She looked like she was being mummified. Only her eyes were visible.
“KJ!” I said, and reached for her.
Lines of deep red sinew twisted across her mouth and nose, and I realized that she probably couldn’t breathe. I tore with all of my strength at the strands around her face. My hands pushed through a mist of red strings that moved with their own sentience, sliding around my fingers, unbearable as they brushed against my arms. I could hear a muffled sound: KJ trying to scream.
The strands moved away as I touched them, like living things. They were slimy and cold, the undersides of rocks that hadn’t seen daylight for a very long time. My fingers went numb where they grazed my skin.
I could hear my own voice, like someone outside of me was running my mouth, saying total nonsense in a high-pitched stream: “KJ. You’re okay, you’re gonna be okay, okay? Okay, just hold still. Just get off her! Get off of her, oh god. Oh god, please no, oh stop, oh stop, oh god, please no—”
Then, more panicked than I had ever been, I tried to push KJ—who could barely walk because she was so bound up—toward the edge of the clearing, thinking, nonsensically, that she would somehow be safer if she was hidden by the dead sunflowers.
Red thread unraveled what had been Good Arcturus’s body faster and faster, surrounding us in a sinewy mist. And no matter how much I tried to bat it back, no matter how much KJ struggled, it was inexorable. The last of Good Arcturus flew out toward us. The leathery and faded cloth that had once covered the scarecrow fell to the ground with a soft whooshing sound.
I was crying, at some point I had started crying, but I didn’t have time to wipe my tears away. KJ was disappearing into the red string. Again I tried to drag her away from the thread, but I wasn’t strong enough.
The end of the thread was attached to a needle. The needle that KJ had found in her sacred cake.
KJ was trying to say something, but when she did manage to open her mouth, the threads immediately covered it again. At the last second she swung her shoulder out and shoved as hard as she could at me, making me stumble back. She made a gesture, a wordless and stifled gesture with her shoulder. It said clearly: Get away, go away from here.
But I couldn’t leave her.
The needle moved through the air like a birch leaf caught on a gust of wind. It spun, sinuously, toward the rest of its red thready body. And then it paused, hovering over KJ’s face like a wasp about to sting.
“No no no NO!”
I was screaming. I understood what was coming. I actually jumped up and tried to grab at the needle. It evaded me like it was being moved by an expert puppeteer.
Then Birdie Plum was there, holding me by the wrist as I watched the needle move toward KJ.
“Do not interfere,” she hissed. “I don’t care if you are a Sabine. Touch Him again and I’ll bury you out here.”
I ripped my hand away from Birdie’s grip. Her nails left welts on my skin, but I could barely process it. I took a stumbling step toward KJ, and the needle that had been poised above her face struck downward, in a sudden, incredibly quick movement.
“DON’T, OH GOD!” I shouted. The needle pierced KJ’s left eye, and despite the gag around her face, I could hear her shriek of agony. And it didn’t stop—no, the needle went in farther and farther, leaving a single bloody tear in its wake, until it had disappeared entirely inside KJ’s body.
The string started to unspool as quickly as it had wound her up. Now I could see that it was all one connected mass—one string—topped off at the end by the long stinger of the needle. All of the thread followed the needle into KJ’s eye. Slithering, disappearing inside her body, although it seemed as though there was too much string to ever fit inside one single human being.
I got close enough to try to grab one of the ends of the thread and pull it back out by force, but then KJ—whose mouth was fully uncovered now—let out a cry of such immense agony that I dropped my hold.
“AHHHAhahhhhhhhha… ahhh…,” KJ moaned. Her voice trailed off into a gurgling whisper. It was like she was drowning.
The thread moved exponentially faster, gliding so quickly into KJ’s eye that it was almost blurred. The last of it disappeared, and KJ shuddered. Her eyes closed. She started to fall backward.
“KJ!” I screamed, and tried to catch her, hold her. But she never hit the ground. KJ’s body was lifted up entirely in the air. She floated, lying on her back like someone asleep, bloodred tears dripping from her left eye. And then, after a second, her body jerked as if invisible hands were pulling it through the air on an invisible wire. KJ’s body flew toward the doors of the old black house and shot inside. The doors slammed shut with a sound so enormous and final that it shook the very clearing where we stood. The people of Kesuquosh cheered throughout all of this, like they were watching a sporting match where their favorite team was winning.
