Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits (11 page)

“Case, the longer we wait—”

Frank’s not a big man. Cason shoves him aside.

And then he sees. The window overlooks the porch. It takes a second to click, but the wild hair gives it away. It’s the woman from the woods: the one bound in golden chains. The one with wings—wings that are, at present, nowhere to be seen.

Someone else is there, too—

The other person takes a step back.

Alison.

Alison
.

Her eyes, empty. Mouth slack, with saliva moistening her lips. Her head has this gentle swaying, like a boat on the ocean lost to the waves. She’s holding a gun. A gun he bought her to defend herself—at the time she was working at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the telemetry unit (he remembers the way she answered the phone there:
Alison Cole, 2B Telemetry
), and she sometimes walked a long way to work and he wanted her to have a gun. She never took it. Never used it. And now here she is with it.

Suddenly, a feeling in his mind—different from when he was around E. but the same, too. Like an invasion. Like someone cupping his consciousness in a pair of cold hands. Probing. Looking for something.

“Alison,” he says. He has to get to her. Save her from this.

He turns.

There stands Frank. Gun in one hand, a steak knife in the other, with a silverware drawer open behind him. The gun is leveled at Cason’s head.

“Don’t,” Frank says. “You can’t help her. Not today.”

“That’s my wife.”

“Trust me, I know. And I get it; I do. But this isn’t the day.” Frank takes the hand with the knife and pulls down on the collar of his filthy white t-shirt. Turning it into a v-neck before finally the fabric starts to rip.

A symbol reveals itself. A symbol in scar tissue. Three lines crossing one another, forming a kind of asterisk. Smaller symbols at the six points, dead-ending each line: they look almost like letters (N, M, U), but they’re not quite.

“I gotta carve this into your chest,” Frank says.

“Fuck you. I want my wife.”

“And you’ll get her back. With my help. Not by running off half-cocked.”

Outside, more knocking:
wham wham wham
. A voice calling:

“I know you’re in there. Your wife and I would like to talk to you.”

The invisible hands cupping Cason’s mind start to squeeze. The urge rises in him, hot and white, to go to the front door. To kneel there. To let his wife put that gun into his mouth so that he may embrace oblivion.

Frank seethes: “She’s in your head already.” He smacks Cason across the face—not with the gun, but with the back of his gun-hand.

Reaction. Cason has Frank’s hand in his own. One twist and the man yelps: the gun drops into Cason’s hand. “I’m not letting you carve that into my chest.”

Frank’s eyes dart around the room. Sees a cup of pens and markers next to a dented toaster and a pile of fraying napkins littered with mouse turds. “Then we’ll do something more temporary.”

H
E’S THERE, AND
then he’s gone.

Psyche stands on the decrepit porch, feeling tight and tense and
unclean,
and one second she feels Cason’s mind in the house like a mouse in a maze, and then there’s the light of pain and he’s gone. Not fading like a ghost, but rather as if he was never there in the first place. How dearly, deeply disappointing.

She searches, of course. She pulls Alison along—not by her hand, but by a leash wound around the woman’s mind—and stalks around the outside of the house. The alleys between this house and the row-homes. Past barrels filled with rainwater and thousands of mosquito larvae twisting in the murk. To the house’s back door, long boarded up, beneath eaves thick with wasp combs. No one. Nothing. No trace of human life.

Worse, she can’t feel him
at all
. It took her a while to find him at first—she had to probe the holes in Alison’s mind, creating an image out of negative space, the Cason Cole-shaped
cut-out
in her memories, an elegant act of psychic surgery with the fingerprints of Psyche’s husband all over them (incurring in her no small swell of pride). Once she had him, she had him, and it was time to hunt. But now: nothing. Gone again. As if he never existed.

She goes inside the house, of course—no stone left unturned and all that. She finds the splintery wooden dolls in the walls. She sees and smells the residue of the creature that lived here: some foul skunk-ape from the local pantheon, nobody of any consequence, but worryingly dead just the same. She finds the plants. The bones. The blood. The mold. A wild-man with a wild-house, all
wildly
out of control. Ugh. So unpleasant.

It takes her far too long to find the passageway.

It’s more
cellar
than
basement
—dirt floor instead of concrete, rock walls. A great many bugs. Cockroaches and crickets and pill-bugs. Spiders, too—thin-bodied, diaphanous spiders with long, wispy limbs hiding in the nooks and crannies.

Behind a water heater is a hole.

She smells Cole’s scent: his blood, his sweat. His fear and uncertainty.

But there’s someone else, too. The smell of blistery skin. Lotion and eyedrops. Fear, too—but more overpowering is the hatred lurking there. It’s a smell she knows. One she hasn’t caught scent of in quite a while, now. Decades.

The smells are fading. The breath from the tunnel is old, stale, carries only meager strands of scent. Still. It’s what they have, and the hunt must go on.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Ants And The Elephants

T
HE COLD CONDENSATION
on the outside of the pint glass feels good against Cason’s palms. The splinters are all gone, now: picked out in the bar bathroom and dumped in the toilet before a flush. He knows he should be afraid of infection, but right now he’s afraid of
so much more
. Afraid for his wife and son. Afraid for himself. Afraid for the world, and most of all, afraid for his own sanity; because none of this can be real.

Except it sure feels real.

The symbol on his chest is a reminder of that. Drawn there by Frank with a permanent marker. Frank snorted as he drew it, muttering, “Bullshit it’s permanent, you’ll
wish
it was permanent, shoulda let me use the knife.” The symbol only added to Cason’s fear and frustration—it offered him little psychic solace.

Now: the two of them sit in a red leather booth not far from Citizens Bank park, where the Phillies play. Frank totters back over, drops a wooden bowl of peanuts on the table. The floor is littered with peanut shells: everywhere you walk,
crunch crunch crunch
.

“I like to make bombs,” Frank says, out of nowhere.

“That one I already figured out.”

“My bombs are special. Different.”

“Yeah, they’re different all right. That last one was filled with dolls.”

“Ohtas. Little wooden ceremonial dolls made by the Lenni-Lenape.”

“The bomb that killed E.—”

“Eros.”

“That wasn’t filled with little dollies.”

Frank shakes his head. “Nah. Arrowheads. Specifically bronze arrowheads. Paid a pretty penny to have those made. I mean, I guess I coulda just robbed a bunch from the Art Museum—they got a whole collection and I know a guy—but it felt wrong somehow.”

“You seem like a guy who’s real concerned about right and wrong.”

“You’d be surprised.”

Cason sips the beer. Dark. Bitter. Cold. Good.

“Can I tell you a story?” Frank says.

“Can I stop you?”

“It’s an important story.”

“They have my wife. And probably my son. Nothing’s more important than that, Frank. You understand?”

“I do, and that’s exactly why you need to hear this story.”

He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. Fingertips with too-long nails—each overhanging a half-moon of filth—pull tight across the table.

Then he tells it.

“Y
OU KNOW HOW,
in the 1980s, the 1950s were big again?
Peggy Sue Got Married
and
Back to the Future
and Oldies Stations and all that garbage. I was young, twenty-two at the time, and a buddy of mine convinced me to go to this... sock-hop. A dance, a fake high school dance where they played Chubby Checker and ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and you danced for hours—but you had to take your shoes off, like in the original sock-hops, so your shoes didn’t screw up the floor varnish.”

It must be hard for him to talk this long. As he speaks, he dips a paper napkin into a glass of water, wets his lips with it. A little tub of petroleum jelly comes out of his pocket, too, and occasionally he dabs a blob onto a pinky finger and smears it around his mouth—not just on the scar tissue that forms his false lips, but a good half-inch radius in every direction. His crater mouth shines in the light.

“I didn’t know what I was doing at this thing. I couldn’t dance worth a good goddamn. I was like a bug trying not to burn his feet on a hot plate. Better than how people really danced in the ’80s, I guess, but I didn’t have a lick of rhythm.

“Good thing is, while I may have danced like a drunken orangutan, I still looked damn good. I know, you’re sitting there thinking—
but how could he look sexier than he does now?
—but trust me, I did. I wasn’t just handsome. I was what you might call a ‘pretty boy.’ Hell, that’s what my friends actually called me. Pretty Boy. Frankie ‘Pretty Boy’ Polcyn.”

The words are made imperfect by ruined lips. Consonants are breathy and ill-formed; the ‘p’s don’t pop, the ‘b’s buzz unnaturally, the ‘m’s are a whisper that never quite connect. His s-sounds are sometimes mushy and slurred (
thatsh what my friendsh actually called ffffee
).

His eyes glisten. They stop watching Cason and drift toward the dim bar lights hanging from the ceiling.

“So I attracted the eyes of an equally pretty lady. Hair the color of straw. Freckles all up and down her cheeks. Some girls there did the Pink Lady
Grease
thing, but not her—she was all sweetness and light and twirling seafoam poodle skirt. And
she
came up to
me
. That’s how she was. Forward but not forward, you know? Still made you feel like you had to work for it. She didn’t come up and ask me to dance. She hovered. Acted all coy. She still made me do the work, right? I still got to feel like a man. She gave that to me.”

He draws a deep breath.

“Sally. That was her name. Sally Delacroix. Sweetness and light and seafoam. Did I say that already? Whatever. We danced. Danced for hours until the music wound down and the lights came on and for a second I thought the dream was over. Dead and done. The lights killed it—bright, harsh, hot. But then she asked if I wanted to go out and get a drink, and at first I thought maybe she meant a milkshake or something—keepin’ in the spirit of things—but she said no, a proper drink, and we did. We went to a bar not unlike this one. The Buttonwood. I remember I had a beer. She had a gin and tonic.

“We made love that night. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s easier just to say that we fucked like two ferrets in a tube sock—but this was something different. It wasn’t just the in-and-out of the thing, it was the way we moved together. Way I felt nervous. Way she...” He pauses. “I remember she shook, you know? Trembled. And I could smell her deodorant, a powdery smell, light and airy, but I could smell
her
beneath it. Could smell her sweat and her body and then her hair would fall across my nose and I’d smell strawberries and cream because that’s how her shampoo smelled. She was soft and long and moved against me like a pillow stuffed with angel feathers (and just so we’re clear the air on this, angels are real, don’t you dare think they’re not—scary motherfuckers each and every one of ’em).”

He sips his beer. A long slow pull.

“We got married a week later. I know, right? Fuckin’ bad idea, and maybe it was, but nothing in my life has ever felt smarter than that one decision. We went to Las Vegas. At the time I lived out on the West Coast, so driving to Vegas was a thing you did; and so we did it. We did the whole Elvis schtick. I guess continuing that whole 1950s vibe. We did the Elvis chapel where you get married by him—though not the young jailhouse Elvis, nah, they stick you with the bloated toilet-clogger Elvis all stuffed in his sequined jumpsuit, like some kind of fat-ass Evel Knievel. But it felt great just the same. We loved our Fat Elvis. We hugged him and laughed and he watched us kiss.

“So began the honeymoon. We didn’t have a lot of money—she answered phones for a local construction company and I drove a schoolbus—so we ended up at this little motel way off the Strip. But it was nice. Pink flamingos. Palm trees. A kidney-shaped pool that had waters so green it glittered like emeralds—though thinking back it was probably just the tile they had at the bottom of the pool, but fuck it, the illusion was the illusion and was good enough for me.

“First couple nights we did our thing—
that’s
when we fucked like ferrets, boy. We did it up-down-left-right-sideways. We were like deep sea divers, having to come up for air from time to time. Towel off. Drink some water. Get back into it. The room was like our womb. I’d filled it with flowers, you know, like, tropical flowers. Not roses, but—well, I don’t know my flowers, but the kind you’d find strung on a hula girl’s necklace. It was perfect. Best days of my life.