STORM WORLD
Book 1
SPEAKER OF THE GODS
A Novel
by
Jonathan Adam DeCoteau
~~
STORM WORLD
Book 1
SPEAKER OF THE GODS
Jonathan Adam DeCoteau
© Copyright 2011
All rights reserved
Smashwords edition
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.
~~
TABLE OF CONTENTS
~~
CHAPTER I:
ASLEEP AMONG THE DEAD
Everything I know, everything I came to be, began, and ended, at a funeral: a ceremony that I’d one day find out was not for one man, but for the passing of the entire earth. There was a time, ten eternal years ago, before I heard of Storm World, before I believed in omens and the end of ages. I thought the climatic changes—the rising of the sea, the unseasonable weather, the endless storms—were simply that: the physical manifestation of global warming, little more. I believed the earth would exist as it always had, if only for my convenience. Perhaps if I had learned that most worlds in the universe existed in a constant state of flux, of volatile storm, beyond human control, I might’ve been prepared for the annihilation of the earth. But I was eighteen, just shy of entering college, and I believed that the world had everything to learn from me, not the other way around.
I still remember the day that I first began to suspect the end of Man. It was last of earth’s funerals—the ceremony, so meticulously vague, where I’d meet, or rather become suspicious of, the greatest visionary short of Christ this world had ever known. It all started innocuously enough, for the end of days. I remember descending Burgundy Hill with the other pallbearers, my first memory of this new life. The knell of the old church bells guided my steps into a flooded valley that twisted and turned below us like the rivers of rain down the casket lid.
“Who was he?” I whispered to the nearest pallbearer, a ghost wrapped in yellow. “How did he die?”
There was no answer, just the pelting of ice.
With each step the old town unfolded in a canvas of scrambled sunlight and hanging clouds, as if each hill, each store was a part of the ceremony. The wind tore at the sea docks that housed the clam stands. The floodwater ate away the cracked gray boardwalk lined with myriad clothing stores. The sleet pelted the sprawling fields of horse stables and golf courses, in a flooded path that led up, through yellow marshes and rocky, gray cliffs, to The House on the Sea.
The signs, even then, were all around me. Between flashes of lightning, everything looked like it was dying—the hearse that had broken down, the cars that wouldn’t start, the writhing waters, the beaten trees, the overflowing marshes; there couldn't have been a better day for a funeral. I could feel the other pallbearers quickening their steps to the pelting of the sleet. I glanced at the simple pine coffin, trying to remember more about a man who felt no heavier than its white planks. Was he a banker, a man of importance, or just a drifter caught in the flood? I couldn’t say I knew my uncle well; I couldn’t say I ever saw him before this day.
I kept my eyes on the slippery patches as we headed farther away from the sunlight, farther into the sleet, winds and rain. Such strange weather for May—though it didn’t strike me as prophetic at the time. I looked over at the other pallbearers, hoping to get them to slow down as we fought our way down the hill, but their evasive eyes looked past me, through the rain and sleet, mapping out the land with military precision. Seeing their thick, yellow raincoats, old, mud-splashed, worn, I wondered if they knew they were at a funeral at all. Though I strained to hear the words exchanged between them, the pelting of the sleet against the gravestones was too loud, and though I tried to penetrate their eyes, they were locked, without tears, as if those eyes shared a secret as long guarded, as inaccessible, as the man in the casket. They looked so secretive, so occult, like a gang of acolytes offering up their dead to some forgotten god.
“Granna,” I called as I passed the anything but withering old woman. “Who—”
“Quiet,” she admonished. “Just focus on the ceremony.”
The ceremony felt bizarre, even the carrying of the casket. Still we went on, making it, after a few near spills, through the cemetery gates. While we headed towards the open tomb, I saw that there were more of these yellow-coated strangers. I counted two helping me with the casket and two more standing near the grave, right by Granna. They were just as motley, just as mud-stained and ragged, as the two at my side. Looking them over, I saw the familiar light auburn hair, wet, snarled with the winds, of Rhonda, my girlfriend. She was wrapped in the same yellow jacket and ruddy skin as the rest of these strangers. The circles under her eyes had grown in the six months I’d known her, and along with her elevated cheekbones, gave her face a harsher cut than the rest of her thinly curved body.
Fighting to take my eyes off her, I stumbled along, keeping my pace with the other pallbearers, placing the casket upon a small, carnation-draped platform by the tomb. The ancient white tomb, absurdly large and already open, told me nothing about the man or his mourners, let alone of the cult to which they belonged. It bore no crosses, no angels, none of the usual trappings—in all honesty, it looked like a giant marble cask, an insecurity, an absurdity, really, in a small town cemetery where the ashes of ages were tossed carelessly together. The extravagant tomb looked like something crying out for either correction or completion. I could not tell which.
When the sleet turned to hail, I stood under the tomb, waiting for a priest to emerge. But at a funeral where the coffin was carried until we all had a hernia, I wasn’t altogether surprised when one of the yellow jackets stepped forward, and with his friends, lowered the casket prematurely. That was John David, my cousin, which somehow, perhaps even psychically, I knew at the time. Even then, he was dealing in death, helping us commemorate the passing of all those we’d so soon lose. His eyes were a sepia darker than the sea beneath the shadowing cliffs. The eyes were hard like the ice of the hail, but soft like the edges of melted rainwater around that icy center. Though he might have had five years on me at best, his flat face looked unnaturally older, stronger. His flattened cheeks were half-covered in long, stringy waves of ash-white hair, his distinguishing feature, as I’d soon discover. Surprisingly, the stoic face, immensely pale, almost corpselike, had an everydayness about it. Like the thin body whose taut muscles belied immense strength, or the sharp, sloping shoulders, that, somehow on a six-foot man, stood out, the face struck me as a contradiction in terms that could not last. I imagined, even then, that this yellow jacket must have been the son of the dead man. I did not know, then, that despite his youthful appearance, his body was millennia older, as old as any to ever walk the face of the earth.
When he opened his lips, there was no awkward stumbling around for syllables as a lump formed in the throat, no suppression of tears. Just a distant language, maybe Latin, full of the flinty edges of hard letters all tumbling down into the stormy air. The prayer was short, punctuated only by thunder, hail, and the ringing of a shovel hitting the rocky soil.
I remember the first English words he spoke: “Friends, the storms hang over us; the times are upon us and all our order.”
I thought he was crazy—which, it turns out, was true. Still, he continued in Latin, until the clanging of a shovel became an exclamation point all its own. The rusty metal end of the shovel dragged along the soil until one yellow jacket lifted it and handed it to this mystery man. The man shoveled a rocky mound of wet earth and placed it gently on the lid. I watched for a tear. Only raindrops streamed down his face, into a puddle of grass below. Long after this odd man leaned the shovel against the tomb, the hollow ring of the shovel hitting stone echoed.
“And so it has come to pass,” the mystic said in English. “The end of one world. The beginning of another. Today, we see the first casualty.” He paused, gathering in the grief of others, a grief he didn’t seem to share. He concluded, “Let us mark The Great Passing that will soon sweep the earth.”
As this man proclaimed the last of the obsequies, my eyes followed the ringing in the air, over the crumbling tops of ancient tombs, past the echoes of thunder, to the edge of the cemetery.
Lightning flashed. Mud and rock flew up. Only when the lightning gave way to more thunder did I see the outline of another yellow jacket, darker, stockier, more muscular, than the others, digging another plot. I searched around, but saw no other committal ceremony in progress.
Lightning blazed. A flurry of hail rattled against the stones. I protected my head with my hands, as did Granna. The yellow jackets, even Rhonda, formed a semicircle in back of their lanky leader. All except the one who became the lightning. I lost sight of the man and instead caught a yellow silhouette of the crumbling restaurant roofs, wind-torn boardwalk, and flooded docks of the sea valley below. The thunder gave way to the ringing of steel against stone that came from another patch of earth, just up from where I saw the yellow jacket last.
Burgeoning hail winds and complaints from Granna brought the leader’s words to an unceremonious close. Granna and Rhonda, with the other yellow jackets, paid their respects to the dead man’s son and followed the winds back home. As the hail rang against the gravestones, I followed Granna. On the hill, I turned around one last time to see a whole row of freshly dug plots worming its way down near town with unending piles of freshly turned soil as wide as the cemetery itself. There must’ve been hundreds of plots, maybe thousands. All freshly dug. All as empty as lightning in a yellow sky and just as mysterious. As Granna called for me, my eyes followed the line out until it wormed right up against the restaurant roofs and docks, until it looked as if it was ready to swallow half the town.
~~
CHAPTER II:
THE HOUSE ON THE SEA
The ever-expanding clouds, the hail that punished the waters, only to vanish into the immense blue design of things: both made me feel even more alone as I drifted in my gray metal rowboat, stuck in a vision of hell. I’d had the power of visions since childhood, but nothing quite like this. As I sat writing, I found myself seeing, describing, in vast numbers, the death of men and women, the watery ruins of nations. I could see them all—great mountains of flesh. Through images—screaming shadows, reaching hands adorned with fingers of blood, John’s yellow jackets, standing, watching coolly—this waking nightmare held me until real arms reached out from the reflection of the waters.
My journal fell from my hands, as I saw, in the watery image of jagged shore made animate, a stranger’s face with Rhonda’s, their skins rippling, uniting, then dividing, on the fallen crest of a wave. My eyes followed the disintegrating wave back towards shore, where I saw Rhonda and this stranger plucked from the sea, standing on the cliffs, waving me down. Rhonda’s turquoise eyes gazed into the stranger’s with such unforced familiarity that I found all the inspiration I needed to leave the images of death to the sea and find out what this yellow jacket wanted. The cloud palaces whizzed by, my motor ate the waves, whipping me to shore until I was only a good five tides from where Rhonda stood. I killed the motor, grabbed the oar and rowed the boat in until the yellow jacket took hold of the rail and helped me push her to shore.
“Looks peaceful out there,” he said. His voice was like a beloved melody heard once too often, familiar, yet strained, sweet, yet hypnotic. “Is it?” the stranger asked, his eyes on the sea.
“Not these days. Water feels riled up. Angry,” I told him, straining to forget what it was I saw.
“Yet you spend so much time out there.” He let the observation roll with the waves, as did I. “Trying to get away from something?” he asked.
“Maybe someone,” I muttered.
The stranger laughed. “Well,” he said, his voice unruffled, “at least you can handle a rowboat. That’ll come in handy.”
“Comes in handy now. What did you bring me back for, anyway?”
The stranger’s eyes, gray as seawater in a hurricane, looked through me. “Granna told me not to expect any warm welcomes from you,” he indicated, a smile usurping his lips.
“That's funny. She never mentioned you. You're John David, I take it. Son of the deceased?”
He nodded, his eyes still looking through me, at the waters curling fingerlike along the edge of the shore.
“Samuel Johnson,” I said.
“Already writing, Sammy?” Rhonda asked.
“Samuel.”
“He has this thing about his name,” Rhonda told her latest interest.
“Yes, I like to be called by it,” I reminded the stranger. “Anyway, John, for what it’s worth, I'm sorry about your father.”
“Thank you,” he said. His voice became more hollow than the metal of the rowboat and just as devoid of sentiment.
“I can't say I ever met the man. What did he do?”
“He wandered around a lot,” John said dismissively. “I hadn't seen him in years.”
“No wonder you didn't cry at the ceremony.”
I stared into John's eyes, but found no reaction stirring beneath their polished sepia exterior.
“Your grandmother wanted you to show John around his new home,” Rhonda jumped in. She took one of John's hands and one of mine and led us up the muddy grass patches of Burgundy Hill.
“New home?” I asked on our travels.
“Granna offered to take John in,” Rhonda said. She fought to tame her lips from curling into too bold a smile. “Isn't that wonderful?”
“But doesn't John already have a home?”
“Here and there,” John answered quixotically, watching the sun resting on the hill as we waded through rain-soaked grasses. “In fact, I haven't seen the old house in years.”
“You mean you haven't been there yet?” I stood still a moment, digesting the tail end of my words. “What have you two been doing all this time?”
“Samuel, you're worse than the Inquisition,” Rhonda said, as if provoked. “John's just lost his father. Can't you grill him some other time?”
“Grill him? It's just a simple question that requires a simple answer. What's gotten into you? You've never snapped at me like this before.”
“Don't start.” She tugged at my coat sleeves.
“Who's starting?” I asked, releasing her hand.
“I just showed John around my place. Happy?”
“For three hours?”
“There was a lot to show.”
“In a cottage with a bedroom, a living room and a kitchen? What'd you do? Circle the damn thing ten times!”
“We’ll talk later,” Rhonda ordered. The embers of anger swept her face, inspired by, but oddly not directed at, me.
My face was lost to a vermilion fire, but I kept walking until we were nearly at the house, until I was calm enough to speak.
“You two never said how you met,” I whispered.
“Samuel,” Rhonda snapped.
“What?” My voice rose. “I'd just like to hear the story. So tell me, John. When did you and Rhonda get together?”
John let my words fall like the rain tails down his yellow jacket as we ascended the crest of the hill and wandered towards The House on The Sea. His eyes searched the cracked white of the old neoclassical mansion, following the two circular steeples, one the top of a lighthouse, the other housing a golden bell, down four flying buttresses and two stories of thirteen stained glass windows. He looked over the old stained glass portraits of twenty-four elders clothed in white, of four beasts full of eyes, of the book with seven seals, searching. His eyes fell on the four Corinthian columns shaped like the four angels holding the winds of the earth, then on the two large pine doors, shaped like a circular seal that made the decorative old place look like an ancient cathedral.
“Weird, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Even more remarkable than I remember,” John whispered over my words.
“And it's right by the sea,” Rhonda indicated. “It'll be perfect.”
“Perfect for what?”
“Sammy,” Rhonda said, as if she never heard me. “Be a dear and let us in.”
Opening the monolithic pine doors, I watched John stepping inside with unfeigned reverence, as if a holy king returning to a long-lost shrine and admiring the ghost of its past grandeur. His fingers traced their way up and down the dusty railing of the spiral stairs, feeling out the curved grooves in the face of the lion of Judah that decorated the end of the railing. His stride was swift, certain, as he stepped into the long living room, touching the stained glass faces of the angels, the thick, graying pine of the walls, the polished white oak of the floor, bowing his head to the irrepressible weight of memory. He smirked as he saw the modern silk sofa worn into a faded maroon, the china decorating two marble stands, the oak coffee table with feet like a lion, the pictures of Granna, me and my rowboat, as if these items somehow clashed with the strong mental image that commanded his thoughts.
“I've been away too long,” John whispered, turning to me.
“You lived here before?”
His eyes made a spectacle out of the odd old mansion.
“Sammy? John? Is that you?” Granna’s voice rang in from the gardens.
“What do you need?” I called back.
“Hallelujah! He's risen from the dead,” Granna sang triumphantly. “Thought you’d never come back from those waters.”
“Your little entourage resurrected me.”
“Bring your cousin out here, Sammy. Hurry!”
“The name’s Samuel.”
“Who wiped your little brown butt when you were small?”
I ran my fingertips through the beads of moisture in my hair. “Not this again.”
“Who changed your diapers too many times a day to count?”
“And in a few months who'll be changing yours? Keep it up and you won't have an answer for that one, will you?”
“What an awful thing to say,” Granna admonished, perhaps too gently. “I'll never be so sick I'll allow my grandchild to wipe my butt. Now can it and bring my other baby in here! That girlfriend of yours whisked him away before we had a chance to visit.”
The marigold of anger took my features, but I kept quiet and headed down an old hall, following behind John and Rhonda, out onto a veranda with a stone wall just above where Granna fought her neverending battle against weeds. Hints of the sweeping pastel greens and golds of the winding valley still lingered below black cloud tails, and one or two horses still circled quiet fields, their muddy hooves pounding out the colors of Spring, their wet white manes taking in what little fresh ocher the sun had to offer.
“Used to be one hell of a sight from up there,” Granna said, holding her latest casualty in her hands. “Before the storms swept in I could stand up there for hours and just look out. Now weeds are the only thing I can get to grow.”
“Amazing,” John iterated, his arms planted on the veranda wall like a forgotten caesar sizing up a long-ago conquest. “After all this time, this place still feels like home.”
“It’s your home now,” Granna assured him, dropping her weed and raking it in as mulch.
“I don't have the strength to manage the place anymore. Frankly, I expected you a long time ago,
John. Long before the first storms.”
“Are you insane?” I yelled at Granna. The taut wrinkles on her face drooped in shock. “I can tend the house just fine,” I hollered, marching down the stone stairs.
“Hush, dear,” Granna scolded, fighting with the stalky head of her next victim. “You can barely wrest your butt off the sofa.”
“It's my house!”
“Why do you always have to be so mouthy and so selfish?” Granna complained. “Speak less and listen more. The house isn't mine. . .or yours. I never said it was.”
“Are you trying to tell me we've been squatting for twenty years?”
“Not squatting,” Granna said, tugging at a weed. “Waiting.”
“For these…people?”
“For what's already come.” Granna’s voice trickled into the earth as an especially stubborn weed commanded her full attention. “Now stop being a nuisance, Sammy,” she told me, “and help me with this weed. Damn thing has roots deeper than an oak tree.”
I heard the tearing of plant flesh as I tugged at the weed, pulling its tangled roots up with such force an explosion of soil pelted the wilting yellow and pink petals of the lilies and rosebushes. Granna shook her head at me as John stood watching the open fields, his eyes flickering in the dying sunlight as if looking past the valley, into the brighter horizon Granna's offer had opened up for him.
“How far along are you?” John asked Granna as if they just saw each other last week.
“Far enough to feel too much pain to keep standing here,” Granna replied, sitting in her white ottoman.
“Then I'd better take over,” John announced in answer to a question that was never asked.
“Judging by these clouds, we don't have much time to prepare. I thought we’d at least have a few months. Now I can see it’s only a matter of weeks.”
“Weeks,” Rhonda called out. “We’ll have to start—“
“As early as tomorrow,” John whispered, eyeing the clouds.
He stepped down from the veranda and started pulling at the weeds. Rhonda followed. I watched as John and Rhonda grabbed at the stalks sneaking up behind the rosebushes. Their bodies covered mine in shadows as the tips of their milky fingers touched briefly, tugging at the same snarly weed.
“It will take some work,” John said, looking on Granna's weary face, “but we'll get this place in shape. Isn't that right, Samuel?”
“I have a headache,” I whispered, looking at Granna. “I'm going to lay down.”
“But who'll show John to his room?” Granna protested.
“I'm sure Rhonda knows the way.”
Granna shook her scarlet mane in overwhelming disapproval.
“It's okay,” Rhonda said. “Samuel's had a long day, I'm sure.”
“Probably all that hail pelting his head at the funeral,” Granna quipped.
“Only thing close to a tear that fell there,” I snapped back. “I mean a man died. Doesn’t anyone care? You were his mother-in-law,” I said to Granna. “And you were his son,” I reminded John. “And all you do is bury him quickly. No family gathering after. Nothing. You’re all a bunch of—”
“Your sunshine will be missed, dear, but head off.”
“Not until I get some answers!”
“Please, dear. I need you rested up for tomorrow,” Granna insisted.
My face scrunched up in confusion. “Tomorrow? What are you talking about?”
“The day that follows this one. You haven't forgotten, have you?”
“Forgotten?”
“John's party,” Rhonda said, as if reminding me.
“The man's father just died and you're throwing a party?”
“A homecoming party,” Granna announced, as if this is the first great idea to come along since long-distance relationships. “Really, Sammy. You act like we never tell you anything.”
“Since when did everyone go crazy?”
“Since when was anyone sane?” Granna asked.
I headed back up the veranda stairs and into the hall. I stood there a minute, struggling to piece the funeral, John, the house, together, when I heard two hollow thuds against the oak doors. I headed towards the stairs and was about to climb them when two more knocks, louder than the first, rang out. I ascended the first stair, but the knocking would not be ignored. I condescended to open the door. Standing, wrapped in a thick, yellow raincoat ribbed in layers of protective padding, was a short, stalky Latino man whose square shoulders and bull neck had the look of a pagan warrior. I only caught a brief glimpse of leather skin, a short, stout, body, wide and curving at the shoulders and wrapped with wiry little muscles, wet, butched brown hair, a dirty tan face, and granite-colored eyes that never blinked, perpetually on fire with insolence and challenge. His bruised hand, thick with bone for such a little man, carried an ancient-looking leather case, marked, in a blood red circle, with a lamb's head bearing an eagle's beak and a lion's body with eagle wings. I stared at the markings, then at the pagan warrior, who, without a word, handed me the bag.
“Who should I say sent these?” I asked, reading John's name on tags that bore no address.
“Well? Speak up, man.”
Looking up, I noticed that the gravedigger, yellow jacket and all, no longer stood in front of me. I looked around the living room, but saw no sign of yellow coattails through the pentagons of light falling from the stained glass windows. I stepped out the door, only to see the circular shadows of clouds along the muddy grasses. I sank down on the steps, rifling with the lock on the bag, wondering just who in the hell this family of mine was.
#
The black cloud tails delivered on their threat, releasing icy rain pellets that rapped on the roof, then rolled down the giant stone walls of the basement to the mists of night wrapped in the maple trees below. In between the rattling of the pellets I heard a creaking, sharp, shrill, against the night. I pictured the pagan warrior stalking near Granna's bedroom, his thick, bony hands lost to the dark. I pulled myself up and put my bare feet on the icy floor, then stumbled along until I knocked over the leather bag that reminded me that the gravedigger was not the conjuring of a head struck by one too many hailstones. The feisty old lock smashed against the floor. I approached the bag, making out something like a map marked with occult symbols, but the creaking grew louder. The picture of those bony hands, the unblinking eyes, won out, propelling my feet down the stairs.
“Damn these old floors,” a familiar voice whined from the shadows.
I assaulted the shadows and lifted Granna up by her thin waist. “I could hear you fall all the way upstairs. Are you all right?”
“Couldn't sleep. Too much hail.” She sighed, wincing as I sat her on the sofa.
“You mean too much pain,” I speculated, sitting on the cushion next to her.
“I was fine until the damn floor came up and hit me.”
“Those floors can move.”
“Can they ever.”
“But you can't, can you?”
She put her hand up, as if it could drive the truth back into the silvery shadows stalking the walls. “Sammy,” she said, sliding away. “You worry too much. You were always a worrier. It's unnatural in someone so young.”
“You could've told me you couldn't sleep nights. Or that you were having trouble walking.”
She placed her hand on my arm. “And have you drag my wrinkled butt to some snot-nosed doctor? Sometimes I think you can't wait to throw me in a body bag.”
“That isn’t funny.”
Her hand turned into a wagging index finger. “Don't look at me like I'm a little girl. I said I'm fine and I'm fine. Why don't you head back up to bed?”
“Can't sleep.”
“You slept through storms since you were a baby,” she said, listening to the dying of the hail. “Our little Stormbearer. That’s what we called you. What could be wresting those eyes open now?”
“Nothing.”
She lowered her hand. “Nonsense. Something's eating at you. It's Rhonda, isn't it? Always the girls.”
“No.”
“Sure it is. You were rude to her today and you feel rotten like a good boyfriend should.”
“I was rude? She was clinging to John every chance she got!”
“Sammy, she hasn't seen him in years.”
“What do you mean seen him?”
Granna laughed, though the laughter died against the final rattles of thunder sweeping the walls.
“Aren't you the jealous boyfriend! But you needn't worry. I don't think infants date.”
“Then how did she know him?”
“Same way you did. Don't you remember?”
I looked across the room, as if the old silk sofas and lion-head railings would stir my memory.
“He lived here three months,” Granna said. “Before his crazy father dragged him across the world. You and Rhonda both loved him. You really don't remember?”
“Rhonda's only been here six months.”
“She lived here when she was just a baby before she lost her parents to the fire. After that, she wandered around with John and his father until something happened six months ago. She never said what.”
“Wandered?” I let the word sit in the silence of the air. “With John?”
Granna’s lips wrinkled into a surreptitious smile.
“Who the hell are these people?! What are you holding back?” I demanded of her.
Granna's smile fell like the flashes of dead lightning to the shadows. “Holding back,” she said. “Shame on you for thinking such a thing of your own crippled grandmother!”
“One fall and you're crippled, huh? I shouldn't be surprised. You haven't been honest. Not about your cancer. Not about anything.”
I got up, leaving her on the dark end of the sofa.
“I've never lied to you,” she said as I walked off.
“You're right,” I called back. “You never lied. You just never mentioned John. Or
Rhonda. Or the tiny detail that this house isn't even ours.”
“You really don't remember the fire, do you?” she asked with the airy contemplation of a professor.
“You said I was too young.”
“Three. I thought you remembered parts of it and just didn't want to talk,” Granna whispered, looking out at the quieting rains. “I could understand why. Flames eating the top of the steeple, the floors, the chambers. It must've looked like hell to a little boy.”
“You're changing the subject.”
“I wish I were. But those fires are the reason we moved in permanently.”
“To look after the house?”
Granna nodded.
“But whose house?”
The midnight shadows covered whatever light of truth might've swept her face. Before I pressed the matter, her eyes rolled up towards the creaking ceiling. Mine followed the same methodical pacing echoing from above.
“John can't sleep, either,” Granna whispered.
“You sure it's him?”
My shoulders tensed. “Before I came up to bed I saw the local gravedigger. He had John's bag. Strange little man.”
“I think you're losing too much sleep.”
“This guy was different. Eyes never blinked. Like he'd been digging forever. When I first heard the crash down here, I thought—”
The pacing, just as methodical, reversed itself. Silver-tongued shadows extended along the stairs.
“—Go to sleep, dear,” Granna said, looking up at the pacing dismissively.
“I'm telling you I've seen him. I saw nearly a hundred fresh plots dug in the cemetery. I want to know what’s going on. I want to know who these people are!”
“Maybe the flooding was worse than we thought. Maybe the digger had to keep up.”
“With a hundred fresh graves? Have to be a hell of a downpour.”
“We'll talk about it some other time,” Granna said, punctuating her words with a yawn. “Right now I feel a good, long sleep coming on.”
“I’m not going until you answer.”
“I have no answers to give, darling,” she said, still wrapped up in her yawn. “All I can say is that there’s something large and terrible at work in the world.”
“Something. . .terrible?”
“Ask John at the party tomorrow. He’ll explain everything then.”
“Actually, I thought I'd head into town tomorrow.”
Granna’s red locks flew in a whirlwind of malcontent. “Why for God's sake would you miss your own cousin’s homecoming party?”
“To get you a doctor. And to see about those graves.”
“No need,” Granna insisted. She rolled her lashes at the words that were about to come out of her peach-skin lips. “Dr. Chesterton will be coming to the party. So you see, Sammy—”
“—Samuel.”
“Everything’s arranged.”
“But by whom?” I whispered.
“All the families from the Hill will be there along with John and his friends,” Granna
announced. Whether she simply chose not to answer or didn’t hear my words I can’t say. Her eyes looked beyond the sticky film of distant shadows, lost in the bubbling bisque of champagne reveries.
“Will Rhonda be there? Can you at least tell me that?”
“Of course. She’s almost one of the family.”
The words were full of insinuation. I just couldn’t figure out whether that insinuation applied to John or to me.
“I guess I’d better stay.”
Granna looked up towards the stairs, stuttered, then said: “But I do need the house in the morning. I have some people coming in to decorate for the party.”
“So I'll go to town—early.”
“I thought your time would be better spent apologizing to Rhonda.”
“You women always stick together, don't you?”
“But maybe your idea is better,” Granna said, her eyes still on the stairs. “You could show John around town. Make him feel at home.”
My eyes followed the stairs, only to see the drapery of shadows.
“No, you're right. I should apologize.”
“Great! Then Rhonda can show John around right after you apologize. Better yet, all of three of you could go.”
“Either you’re growing twisted in your old age or you’ve lost any connection to reality.”
“Sammy, I've got cancer,” Granna reminded me, smiling primly. “You shouldn't talk to me that way.”
“That's your excuse for everything, isn't it? Just wait until I get a life-threatening illness.
You'll never hear the end of it.”
“So you'll be a good boy and show John around?”
I yawned, getting up. “I'll let you know in the morning. Come on. I'll help you to your room.”
“Sammy! I am still alive, you know,” Granna said. She rose to her feet, her knees shaking like two twigs caught in a squall. She took a step, then looked back as if I should be entirely convinced of her immortality.
“Good night, Granna.” I headed towards the stairs.
“Try to get along, dear,” Granna suggested. “These storms. John’s coming. They’re no accident. Remember that.”
After Granna disappeared down the hall, I hit the stairs. The farther up I walked, the more the shadows that sat upon the stairs curled up and retreated. I followed the tail of the shadows, searching for human form, but heard only the slamming of a door. When I reached the top of the stairs, my door was wide open. Pale lightning illuminated my room. I saw my bed, the plain oak and white mattress moved an inch to the right. The stand with the television now faced the left of the bed. The bookcase nestled the mahogany an inch or two farther from the door. There was only an empty spot of pine where the bag with its crimson symbols should’ve been sitting in the unsettled shadows of night.
“Crazy bastards,” I yawned out, too confused to rest as my head hit the pillow.
~~
CHAPTER III:
CONJECTURAL WINDS
After hours of uneventful contemplation, I awoke to a nightmare: the sight of a yellow jacket stalking my room. The coat, a combination of what looked like metal plating, rubber, down, and leather, was worn around the sleeves, with three red slashes on the right shoulder as if a coat of arms. The shoulders underneath the coat were solid, like the pagan warrior of before, rippling with bone, but not as broad. And the legs and body were also longer, lanky even, giving the man an air of immensity and a poise that was more assured. I watched as the yellow jacket turned his head over every inch of my room, from the mahogany dresser to the scratched TV stand to the bed. Only when he stepped towards the window did I see the dangling white bangs that could only belong to John.
“You're up,” John said. His face was buried in the stained glass window.
“I am now.” I half-yawned. “Do you normally case people's rooms while they're sleeping or do I just look exceptionally stupid?”
“I thought you might have a bag for me,” John said, staring out the window in unidentifiable anticipation. “Has my clothes, among other things. I planned to shower and get ready. You’re showing me around town.”
“You look dressed to me.”
“I haven't changed since the funeral,” John asserted. His voice was uneasily flat, as if he saw this conversation in his mind and was simply talking by rote. “I wanted to make sure I had a change of clothes before the party today.”
“You came to the right place. You must've left it at the funeral because the gravedigger dropped it off yesterday.” I paused, watching for any discernable change in John’s features. His eyes were just as lost to the window and the world outside. “I would've given it to you, but it was taken last night, just after I smashed the lock but right before I had a chance to rifle through it.”
John tilted his head halfway towards my bed, smiling obliquely. “Not too trusting,” he observed. His eyes finally turned, only to look through me like a scientist examining a fly trapped in an especially sinuous slab of amber.
“Don't give me that,” I said. I ripped my skin from the sheets and headed towards the closet. “You magically appear at the funeral of a relative I never even met, claim the only home I've ever known, and you top it off by taking your own bag in the night and then canvassing my room, asking me if I've seen a bag you already have.” John’s evasive smile remained intact. “Is it some kind of test, John? To see if your cousin's a liar as well as a snoop? Well, you can rest assured. I'm the only one in this family who isn't lying.”
“What makes you think that?” he asked flatly.
“I just answered your question truthfully, didn't I?” I pulled cackies and a Champion t-shirt out of the closet. “Just like when I tell you that I have no intention of taking a man I don't know and don't trust around town. That's called honesty, John. I'm the only one around here who hasn't forgotten the meaning of the word.”
I slipped off my old clothes.
“I'll answer anything you want to know just as truthfully—if you promise to show me around town,” John told me.
“What's it to you?”
“Let's just say we have some catching up to do.”
“How touching.” I briskly put on the cackies and the t-shirt.
“Ask away,” John urged. His voice was strained, as if he was somehow insulted at my skepticism.
I turned to him, unsure what to make of the man. “Why the hell not? Three questions?” He nodded. “You answer correctly and I'll show you around. You don't and you leave me alone. Deal?”
He placed his forefinger on his chin, lost to contemplation. “Two out of three,” he finally said.
“Why two?”
“Because I know which two you'll ask first. The third question you'd ask I can't answer.”
“All right, Houdini, what's the answer to my first question?”
“Yes.”
I scoffed. “That’s it?” I asked, putting on a black leather belt.
“I did hear the knock at the door,” John said, his eyes unwaveringly on me. “I knew you had my bag, and I wanted to see what you’d do. And yes, it was a test. One you just passed.”
“That doesn't count as two questions.”
“Fine with me. The answer to your next question is no.”
His eyes looked as certain as if he were describing the angel’s face on the stained glass window of the room.
“You sure about that one?” I asked, hoping to throw him.
“No, Rhonda and I never dated,” he whispered.
I smirked, adjusting my shirt until the tag rested between my shoulders. “Not bad,” I admitted. “Though anyone could’ve guessed the questions I’d ask. Just out of curiosity,
John—”
“What was the third question?” John interjected, something hard, even bitter, but like a smile, taking his face. “Why didn't we date? I told you I don't know the answer to that one, Samuel. I did see her just before she moved here.” He let his words linger in the dusty air of the room, collecting like the archipelago of cobwebs along the corners of forgotten walls. “But it never happened like I’d hoped and it won't, now that you two are together.”
“That simple, huh?”
He stared right into me. “You have my word.”
“Right now that doesn't mean much.”
“In time it will.” His eyes looked lost between me and some misty horizon lingering among the clouds, seen by him alone.
“Well, as glad as I am to hear that, John, my third question was just going to be whether or not you're hungry. I know a tiny place in town that serves the best clams you've ever eaten.”
“Aren't you going to shower?” he asked, returning to earth as we know it.
“Who showers? It's a sea town. Everyone smells like fish.”
“So no bad blood?” John asked, his face perplexed, as if I’d deviated from my expected line.
“It's not that easy,” I told him. “I don’t even know you. But I'm hungry. You're hungry. Right now that's all we need to know.”
Downstairs Granna directed traffic, guiding deliveries of gaudy, ornate punch bowls with limp swans chiseled into their glass and monolithic blocks of ice as old as Antarctica itself. As she rattled off hors d'euvres to what must have been a caterer about to shoot himself on the other end of the line, her long, birdlike arm stretched out. The sickly white skin on her index finger was taut with anxiety as it rudely directed John and me to the door.
“Granna, what in God's name is all this?” I inquired from the stairs.
“It's called class, Samuel dear,” Granna indicated with her usual flippant air. “I hoped you’d recognize it.”
“It's just a party, Granna. You act like you're erecting a monument to the man for God's sake!”
“This may be the last party I throw,” Granna replied, peppering her words with her patented melodramatic tone. “I plan to go out in style. So if you and the guest of honor will kindly leave me to my work, I'll leave you to yours.”
“I'm just showing John around town, Granna. I'm not apologizing to Rhonda, if that's what you mean.”
“Then you better learn to love these blocks of ice, dear,” Granna so predictably said. Before she continued, her lips drew themselves out as if the weight of such incredibly witty words was too much for them to bear. “The reception you'll get from Rhonda will be much, much colder.”
“Granna, that was about as fresh as these old blocks of ice you dug up from God only knows where.”
“As are you, dear, if you think you can get away with talking to your own grandmother that way. Move along,” she said with a dismissive wave of the hand. “You’re ruining John’s surprise and that I can’t have.”
John momentarily put his grizzled hand on my shoulder. The gesture instinctively got my feet moving towards the door. We stepped outside. Despite Granna's talk of chilly receptions, the sun throttled my skin. Each ray of light formed little beads of sweat on my arm that looked like miniature versions of the clouds that vanished with the night. I looked at John, still wrapped in his ridiculous, military-style raincoat, standing there, his eyes on the sky, his ears listening, as if the voice of God was up there flitting among the afghan blue.
“You should take that thing off,” I told him. “I don't think there'll be any burning buildings for you to rush into. Besides, the weatherman said there shouldn't be a cloud in the sky.”
“Weathermen,” John said glibly. “You've lived here all your life. Can't you taste the air or read the sky?”
I gave John a confused glance, then shook my head. “Right now, the taste of the air isn't enough to fill my stomach, John. If you don't mind, the clams are calling.”
For a stranger, John's stride was remarkably comfortable. His feet stalked the grasses with unfeigned familiarity, maneuvering down paths that led like winding snakes through wet grasses to Hill Street and Ocean Avenue below. We passed the fresh marshes. Tall, stalky grasses batted grains of sand left by the rising feet of the gulls. John's eyes looked past the gulls, stalking the oceanfront, measuring the length of the grassy waters as if he saw them only yesterday and was confused by their altered appearance. Even when we hit the first clam stand on the burning gray boardwalk, John's eyes remained on the marsh.
“Fried clams and a Coke,” I told the sunburned kid behind the stand.
“Large on the clams? Medium? Small?” the kid asked without looking up.
“Medium,” I answered. “John, what about you?”
John refused to relinquish the sight of the oceanfront marshes, as if this kid, this stand, were no more than a temporary imposition on Nature’s grand design.
“Salted?” the kid barked.
“Yes, please.”
“Coca-Cola Classic? Diet? Caffeine free?”
“Regular,” I said, my tone escalating.
“Classic?”
“Yes,” I half-yelled.
“And that was a Coke?”
“A Coke, damn it,” I hollered. “Just clams and a Coke! What's so hard about that?” I cursed under my breath, then turned to my preoccupied cousin. “John,” I shouted, “what'll you have? Better know the number of ice cubes or this kid will piss his pants!”
“Whatever you're having,” John said dismissively, ignoring the menu on the stand's counter. “These stands and stores are of no concern to us, Samuel. In a matter of weeks they won’t even be here.”
I squinted at John the way I would at a sea horse trapped among the shallows. “Are you feeling okay, John?”
“I haven't seen that marsh before,” John indicated. “Is it new or has it just been that long since I've been here?”
“Depends. How long has it been since you’ve been here?”
“Too long,” he whispered.
I searched the sand-blown wrinkles on his face, the deep sepia of the eyes. If he was lying, he was a damn good liar.
“These parts are notorious for their floods,” I told him. “Makes the marshes that much bigger.”
“Been many?”
“Floods?”
He nodded somberly.
“Small ones. Each year,” I answered, smelling the clams as I handed John his order. “Granna once told me that since she was a girl there've been four big ones. One flood ate all of the power lines and turned the town into a saltwater lake for nearly two months.”
I grabbed my own clams, checking to make sure they weren’t spit on, then headed with John to the nearest bench. It was small and gray, the color of the cottages after their wood has been weathered by sand and storm.
“How long ago was this great flood?” John inquired, sitting.
His question sounded almost rhetorical.
“Shortly after Noah stepped off the ark, I suppose,” I said, sitting next to him. “Whole part of town is still under one of those saltwater marshes from that last big flood. Took some of the residents and cars with it. Too bad it didn't take that kid at the stand.”
“You're not very patient, are you, Samuel?” he asked with the eyes of speculator.
“It has nothing to do with patience. I just don't like people.”
“Teenagers?” John asked, sizing me up.
“Young people, old people, middle-aged people. Fat people, thin people, tall people, short people, bald people, hairy people. Need I go on?”
“I think you’ve just about covered it,” John answered, tasting the clams. “But you’ll change. Life will change you.”
“Short change me is more like it.”
John looked through me, as if at another man inhabiting my skin. “You talk like you’ve seen the world,” John said, “but there’s more to sophistication than cynicism. You’ll see that soon enough.”
“And you talk like you just ate a philosopher for breakfast,” I told him. “What is it you want from me, anyway? Granna said to show you around town and I’m showing you, aren’t I? So stop freaking me out.”
John’s face scrunched up, like God had whispered some incredulous message in his ear and then bid him be off to the people Israel. He rose without a word, walking, clams in hand, down the boardwalk, keeping parallel to the marsh.
“You're going in the wrong direction. The trash is over there,” I shouted, pointing to the other side of the boardwalk.
“So it is,” John said, maintaining his path.
I got up and followed John down the boardwalk that held the finest shops in all New England. I looked to the right, at Pisces, an elegant little seafood restaurant in a rebuilt Yankee clipper with a chipped stern. John took no notice of the salt and lemon aroma of Burgundy swordfish. Nor did he head up the left side of the boardwalk to the Yankee Custom Shoppe and its collection of maritime antiques. As the boardwalk led up from the quaint and colonial to the most famous Eastern contemporary designer of summer fashions, Dawn Marie's, John took no notice of the vacationers with their Camaros, or of the town-e's, as the old money called them, wrapped in their portable laptops and silver-plated cell phones. He opted instead to walk to the end of the most luxurious boardwalk on the coast like he had just passed a smelly burger barn on the edge of a broken-down highway.
“You've just cut our time in half,” I told him as he stepped off the boardwalk and looked to a small cove underneath. “That was the town. The only houses I could show you belong to people so rich they have their own guards to keep dogs from shitting on their lawns.”
Wrinkles rippleed on John’s tense face like the sea in a midnight wind. “You love that, don't you?” he asked, his voice bristling with accusation.
“Shitting dogs?”
His eyes slanted, looking at me as if taking in the dimensions of a bug dangling on the end of a blade of grass. “That's all you see when you look from your house down at Burgundy Hill. Luxurious restaurants with a great view of the sea. Clothing stores that charge ten times more than their rags are worth.”
I stopped for a moment, puzzled by the hostility choking this weird cousin’s voice. “It's better than living in a dump,” I said when I could find the words.
“But it's only one side of Burgundy Hill,” John implored. He waited a second, as if testing me, anticipating an answer that would never come. “All those fancy restaurants need their busboys, don't they?” he accused more than asked. “All those extravagant clothing outlets need their stockboys.”
“So?”
“So follow me.”
His bobbing yellow coattails led the way until we came to a small little cove where the boardwalk tangled, then disappeared. Underneath was an immense blackness not even the Burgundy sun could fully drive away. Without sizing up the darkness, John hopped under the graying tiles, and, though I almost got stuck—too many clams, I suppose—I managed to join him. Through the alternating shadows and sunlight, I saw a six-foot gray-haired hulk of a woman wrapped in a ratty green raincoat. She rose, indeed, became the action of rising, her fists clamped, as she protected what looked like a dead fireplace with a trifling stick.
“You don't belong here,” the woman yelled drunkenly, waving the makeshift club. “You're not one of us. Get out before I cut off your balls and feed them to you on the end of this stick!”
“Easy,” John said calmly. “Agatha, isn’t it?”
The woman’s arm slackened; the stick fell tenuously to her side.
“I brought you something,” John told this Agatha, presenting her with the clams.
The woman sniffed the clams, eyeing each and every bulbous body, but did not lift a finger as she approached the sunlight. Her face was painfully ruddy, full of the scars of life. Her body, though massive, was disproportionate, with a belly curved sharper than her shoulders, and supporting legs that were slightly bent, as if ready to fall under her immense weight.
“Don't need charity,” the woman said after a struggle.
“Then why aren’t you working?” I asked.
“None of your business!”
“See, John. A bum. Plain and simple,” I pointed out with the air of a conquistador.
“You little snot,” the old woman thundered. “Is it my fault that bastard Asterton told me to take a hike? That he said my services were no longer required and threw my ass to the streets? What he meant was I was getting too old, too crippled, even to be a dishwasher in a restaurant I worked at for thirty years!”
“This isn't the Depression,” I kindly informed her. “Get off your butt, clean yourself up and get another job.”
“And where can I clean myself up?” the woman asked. “Huh, tell me that, you snot-nosed little brat!”
Even as the woman cursed, John’s eyes stayed with me, looking at me and through me all at once, trying to read me like they did the morning sky.
“They have shelters just outside Burgundy Hill,” I said. I refused to lose a battle of wits to a bum. “You could go to one of them instead of sitting here, crapping your pants.”
The woman’s fist tightened around the stick, splintering off tiny pieces of bark. “I did go,” she shouted. She pointed to the straggly white threads of hair that remain on her wrinkled up head. “Where do you think I got this lice?”
“That's enough for me,” I informed John.
I jumped unsuccessfully for the boardwalk above me. “John, are you crazy?” I asked as if I didn’t know the answer. “Come on!”
“Take this,” John said to the woman. He put the plate of clams on her small, crumpled blanket.
“For free?” the woman asked caustically.
“On one condition,” John told her.
“Thought so,” the woman said, grabbing the clams. “Take your damn clams!” She raised them as if to throw them squarely in John’s face. “What do you think I am, some cheap whore that will bend over for a few clams?”
“No one’s asking for that,” John said, unbelievably, with a straight face. “But there is more food. Plenty of food. Free. Tonight.”
The woman held the plate of clams limply. “I’m listening.”
“Gather your friends and come to the white mansion at the top of the hill. They’ll be more food there. But you have to bring your friends. All of them. Tonight.”
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