A Gentle Hell (5 page)

“You know these things can sneak up on you,” Thatch said.

His cell phone rang.

“Hold on, I’ve got to take this call,” he said. “Bill, you can take over from here?”

“How long has she been missing?” I asked as Thatch walked across the back of the house talking on his cell phone.

“Ever since that night I found you and her being chased outside by that crazy fucker,” Mimi said.

“And you didn’t call until now?” I said.

“Sometimes the kids go missing,” Mimi said. “They usually turn up eventually. But Tuesday, she wouldn’t be gone for this long. She’s a good girl.”

“How many are in the house now? Kids, I mean.”

“Well,” Mimi said, “about eight. Any idea what could have happened to her?”

I didn’t want to say, well, the woods swallowed her. We have a new god but our faces remain the same. You cannot be protected by cold bones and cross chains when you cry in the night. Tuesday was right. Loneliness is our origin and epitaph.

“Officer Redding, she didn’t run off with some boy, did she?” Mimi asked.

“No,” I said, “I think she's dead.”

“What are you talking about?”

I broke out into a run around the trailer and into the fields. Mimi called after me. I passed by Thatch on his
cellphone
. He yelled out my name as I jumped over a low, broken fence and into the grass. I ran toward the tree mouth, hung with mistletoe, gaping, and bent-fanged. I stopped. I had to get down on my hands and knees and crawl through the trees.

In Tuesday’s
faery
hollow I found the four missing children, dead. Their limbs
intertwined,
their mouths and eyes
socketed
with spring dogwood blossoms, skin growing gray and grayer. I found Tuesday on her back with her dress pulled over her hips, her skin bruised purple around her wrists and throat and thighs. Her mouth was open. Fingers broken and nails scratched into the dirt. Her wrists slashed.

Thatch found me a few minutes later with my hands in her hair.

“They're dead,” I said. I choked. “They're all dead in here. Call somebody out here to get all these bodies.”

I crawled out of the
faery
den, sick with vertigo.

“Jesus Christ,” Thatch said.

Mimi walked over to the two of us, followed by some of her feral, green-eyed children. “What's going on?” she asked. “What happened to Tuesday?”

“She's dead,” I said. “Somebody killed her. She's dead.”

Thatch put a hand on my shoulder. “You going to be okay?” he asked.

Out across the field near the prophet's house I saw movement in my periphery. I turned my head and saw the prophet of the Triple Goddess standing on the porch, holding a ragged cat. He looked straight at
me,
his eyes bleary pale, then turned and went into the house.

“Hold on a minute,” I told Thatch.

“Where are you going?”

“To talk to the prophet,” I said. “Wait here.”

I walked across the field toward his house. I pushed a lounging cat out of the way of the steps with my shoe and knocked on the door. No response.

“Gregory?” I called. “Open up, it's me, Bill Redding. You had me over for dinner one night, you remember?

The door opened. The prophet of the Triple Goddess stood heavy in the doorway. Up close I could see his eyes were bloodshot, with dark and puffy lids.

“Hey Bill,” he said, “What's going on?”

“You knew Tuesday, didn't you?”

“Yeah,” he said, “Yeah. I did.”

“She's dead.”

The prophet said nothing.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

“Oh well,” the prophet said, “I think not.”

My hands curled into fists. I dug my nails into my palms. I felt a sharp pain in my forehead where I'd scraped my nails against it last night.

“Explain to me why your goddess did this to that girl.”

He said nothing.

“Can you do that, Gregory? Can you explain why your goddess claims she is all-powerful and yet allows girls to be murdered and their bodies hidden in
faery
graves? Can you explain to me why a goddess who exists inside of everything breaks the spines of our children, why she separates us from those who could truly love us so that she may gain power through our love, without loving us in return?”

Gregory trembled. He began to pray with eyes half-closed. He said, “Oh goddess, please protect your faithful servant from your enemies. Please protect me from the world, for the world hates those who love you.”

“You got that right, Gregory,” I said.

Thatch walked up the steps. “Bill,” he said, “what the hell are you doing?”

“Just having a chat with the prophet of the Triple Goddess here,” I said.

“Come on, Bill,” Thatch said, “these murders. This is big. This is real big. We're going to get the state police out here to investigate.”

“I'll be seeing you again, Gregory,” I said. The prophet said nothing and closed and locked the door. I turned around and walked with Thatch out back to the field.

They got the state police down there soon enough. They dragged the bodies out while the feral green-eyed children watched and Mimi smoked cigarette after cigarette and the boyfriend paced around the trailer drinking a scotch and coke from a tall glass. They took pictures of the crime scene. They did tedious and expensive DNA testing to try to figure out who murdered this poor white woman’s sick and small-backed children. They found the prophet of the Triple Goddess’ spit in their mouths and his fingerprints on their wrists and throats.
Big scandal.
Thatch said he knew that man was a crazy, but everyone knew that.

Mimi said she knew it too, because he used to handcuff her to the bed and choke her during sex when they were living together.

“Don’t be dumb, Mimi,” the boyfriend said, “plenty of people do that and they aren’t serial killers.”

“What do you think of all this?” Thatch asked me.

“She knew she was going to die,” I said, “and there wasn’t anything any one of us could have done. There's been an insidious force in this universe from the beginning, trying to keep us apart from each other.”

“Maybe you should go home and rest for a while there, Bill,” Thatch said.

“No,” I said, “I've rested enough.”

**********

When the police went into arrest the prophet they found him kneeling on the floor in his kitchen, praying underneath his breath. When they hauled him up and put him into handcuffs, then led him away, he started to scream,
“
The goddess will deliver me! The goddess will deliver me!” all the way out to the police cruiser.

A limousine pulled up at Mimi’s trailer. The Triple Goddess came out of the car, her bodies wearing Chanel perfume and hip-tight black.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Mimi said.

We were all standing outside of the trailer in ninety-five degree heat, Mimi, Thatch, the boyfriend, the police, the Triple Goddess, the prophet in handcuffs, and me.

“So he wasn’t lying,” I said, “he really was their prophet.”

One of the bodies turned toward me through the crowd. Her eyes were gray. She wavered in the heat.

“Yes,” she said to me, “this is an unfortunate incident.”

“But you’re a goddess,” I said. “Shouldn’t you have known this would have happened?”

The three bodies of the Triple Goddess rose like arches above the crowd in their tall heels, their veins hard like shock rods against their necks and hands.

“Unless you knew he was a murderer, and you just didn't care,” I said, “unless you knew and you did nothing.”

“We value all human life,” the Triple Goddess said.

“If you valued life, you wouldn't have let your prophet live and Tuesday die. See him in the back of that car there? He's still praying for his protection. He wants to be saved so he can continue to kill children.”

“This was an unfortunate accident,” she repeated.

“You didn't know, then? Then you’re not omniscient, like you claim to be,” I said, “you're just like Jehovah. You really know nothing about humanity at all.”

“Bill,” Thatch said. He put his hand on my shoulder. All three bodies turned to look at me now. The crowd silenced.

“You’re not even benevolent, are you?” I asked. “You don't value human life, not really, only insomuch as it benefits you. Your powers are limited. Your powers are no powers at all. You’re not even a god.”

“Bill,” Thatch said again, “come off it.”

“That’s the secret, isn’t it?” I said. “Jehovah wasn’t a god and neither are you. You’re just the same kind of thing in a different body, whatever you are.”

The Triple Goddess said nothing. The police cruiser holding the prophet backed out into the road and drove off. The crowd began to disperse. Mimi and the children and the boyfriend went back into the trailer. The Triple Goddess climbed back into the limousine and the limousine drove off. Eventually the state police left as well, so that it was just Thatch and I standing out there in the red dirt with the sun scrawled heavy on our backs.

“I’m sorry, Bill,” he said, “
sometimes
things just happen this way.”

“There never was a god, was there?” I asked. “Not one that cared for us, that wanted to cure our loneliness.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “None of us know that. After they found Jehovah dead off the coast we thought well, here’s the fake god, and then
She
stepped forward and well, here’s the real god, but-”

“-But it doesn’t work like that,” I said, “
it’s
never as simple as that.”

“I suppose not,” Thatch said. “You want to go back to the station now?”

“No,” I said, “no. I’ll catch up to you later.”

Thatch left. I stood there for a while out in the front, back poised like a knife. I walked away from Mimi's house toward the field.

And I'd learned as I stood outside in that gray field with Tuesday, looking into the stretch-limbed abyss of the
faery
world, that the Triple Goddess was wrong.

I crawled into Tuesday’s
faery
hole and lay down in the hollow impression her body made. I pulled at the roots with my fists, scratched and scratched over her scared nails, this once-warm body hiked up to the hips, bled out, skull scuffed, silenced by the arm and ribs of the prophet of the true living Triple Goddess.
The serial killer of the benevolent.
The death of a girl who wanted to be married underneath the dogwood tree, but instead had the blossoms pushed into her mouth and spilled into her collapsed eyes.

I curled into her and she was cold.

The Dog that Bit Her

Every night my wife June stood with her arm outstretched over the threshold of our door, eyes closed, waiting for me to come back home and take her hand. No amount of time on a psychiatrist’s couch, no medication, no reassurances could convince June to close the door and go inside before I returned.