Children of Chaos Read online

  I cleared my throat and tried to play it cool. “Did she hit the lottery or something? When I knew Mrs. Doyle she wasn’t exactly rich. She was a teacher’s aide, and Mr. Doyle was a foreman for a cranberry bog. Since when has she had the kind of cash to hire personal assistants and toss around thousands of dollars like bubblegum?”

  “Mr. Doyle died in an accident on the bogs fifteen years ago,” she explained. “Apparently the company’s machinery was at fault and Mrs. Doyle received quite a large sum as a settlement in a lawsuit she brought against his employer. I never knew Mr. Doyle.”

  I remembered Martin’s father as a brusque and distant man who rarely spoke. “So she’s in the money now, is that it?”

  “Mrs. Doyle is comfortable financially.”

  “Is she still living in the same house over on Spring Street?”

  “No, she hasn’t lived there in some time, but she’s still in New Bethany.” Janine removed a slim wallet from her purse and unsnapped it. A compartment opened to reveal her driver’s license, two credit cards and a photograph of her, presumably with her boyfriend, a man in a Marine dress uniform, their arms around each other as they smiled for the camera. In the picture, Janine was dressed far more conservatively and casually, had virtually no makeup on and seemingly had little in common with the exaggerated, overtly sexy and meticulously coiffed version sitting before me. She pulled a folded slip of paper from a pocket in the wallet and placed it on the table next to the cash. “This is her address. I’ve also written down the house phone number as well as my cell phone.” She saw I’d noticed the photograph. “My fiancé,” she said. “He’s fighting in Afghanistan.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Sometimes being apart can make you feel even more for a person.” She wet her lips with her tongue. “Don’t you think?”

  “You tell me.”

  Janine gathered her things, stood up, and stepped closer to me. “I’m heading back to Massachusetts as soon as we’re through here. I need your decision.”

  She was so close to me I could feel her breath on my face. It smelled like mint. Her eyes sparkled behind the designer frames. A black widow seductively spinning her victim round and round, I thought, just before she devours him. “Oh, you’re not staying?” I asked as the tightness in my crotch turned painful. “And here I thought you were part of the incentive too.”

  “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression, Mr. Moretti.”

  “Back to Mr. Moretti, huh?”

  She adjusted her glasses. “I’m just trying to do my job. Mrs. Doyle and I are very close. She’s become like a mother to me. I’ve been with her for almost ten years now and I know how important this is to her.”

  “So you think you can come here, throw some money and cleavage at a burned-out case like me and I’ll let you drag me around by my dick, is that it?”

  She smiled so quickly I almost missed it. “When should I tell Mrs. Doyle to expect you?”

  With a weary sigh, I scooped up the cash. “I’ll leave tonight.”

  “If you have a passport, bring it along. Mrs. Doyle will explain why.”

  “My passport, why would I—what the hell has Martin done?”

  She strolled to the door then stopped and looked back over her shoulder at me. “I’ll see you in New Bethany.”

  I closed my eyes.

  Lightning flashed through curtains of rain as a sword dripped the blood of angels. Unclean spirits howled in rapture, their horrific shrieks ringing in my ears.

  Leaving the visions where they belonged, in the dark, I opened my eyes and said, “I’ll be there in the morning.”

  But Janine was already gone.

  THREE

  I counted the cash for the third time in half an hour then returned it to the envelope Janine Cummings had delivered it in. My favorite jacket, a battered black leather number I’d owned for years, hung over the back of my desk chair. I tucked the envelope in the inside pocket and decided rather than putting all those miles on my already ailing 1998 Chevy Cavalier, I’d rent a car for the trip to Massachusetts. Though Gillian would be in school and had probably had her cell phone privileges revoked as Trish had threatened, I thought about leaving her a voice mail anyway to let her know I’d be out of town for a few days and if she or her mother needed me for anything to call me on my cell. But I decided against it. Instead, now that I had the backup funds, I wrote a check for the next two months of child support then stamped and addressed an envelope to Trish so I could drop it at the mailbox on the corner on my way out of town.

  The rain had stopped and the sun was struggling to break through, but it only made my headache worse. I grabbed a can of Coke from the fridge, emptied half of it into the sink then refilled it with Jack Daniels. It wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning. Even after years of living this way, there was always a little flicker of surprise whenever I took a drink before nightfall. An “Am-I-really-drinking-this-early” hesitation, as if each time were the first and I’d found myself on the brink of uncharted territory. I could’ve made excuses and told myself like so much else in life it had crept up on me, and by the time I’d realized it was there it was already too late. But the truth was I’d worked hard to fall this far, and it hadn’t happened overnight. I’d been on a downward spiral for years and hadn’t done a damn thing to stop it. In fact, most days I’d reveled in it. I had nobody to blame but myself.

  I looked down at the can. Why did I feel the need to disguise my drinking even when I was alone? It helped me lie to myself, I suppose, and I’d become quite talented at that over the years. It’s amazing how much of this life you can forget if you try hard enough, how much you can convince yourself never happened if you truly want it to be so. Over time the mind begins to play along, and the lines between memory and fantasy all blur together into one tangled and confusing mess. Sometimes it’s what keeps us alive and all we have to keep us moving forward. And sometimes it backs us into nasty little corners where the only thing that prevents it from driving us completely insane is booze or drugs or even the horrible fear that without it whatever version of ourselves we’ve created might cease to exist altogether, leaving only the open wound of raw, unfiltered truth. That’s why I’d come to prefer the dark. Horrible things could hide in darkness, but so could I. As frightening and uncertain as it often was, everyone was on equal footing there. At least that’s what I believed then.

  I didn’t yet understand how deep into that darkness I was destined to go.

  I sat on the windowsill and watched the street awhile in an attempt to distract myself. Thinking about the upcoming meeting with Mrs. Doyle from every possible angle, I worked as many scenarios as I could but kept coming up empty. The last time I’d seen her or Martin was twenty-six years ago. I’d had no contact with any of them since and had no idea what he’d done with his life.

  What could his mother possibly want with me after all these years?

  The last time Martin, Jamie and I had been together, the call that preceded our final meeting came a few days after graduation, and it came from Jamie. I hadn’t spoken to him in quite awhile, but he sounded guarded and more than a little nervous. He told me Martin had contacted him and wanted to see us both the following afternoon down at the boulder. It had been our meeting place for years, and when we were kids we’d spent countless hours there. An enormous boulder on a lonely country road that led to the town dump, it was surrounded by a few miles of woodland and had been a great secluded place to play, read comics or throw a football or baseball around. In 1972 there were only a handful of TV channels (even counting UHF), so when Masterpiece Theater had shown the BBC miniseries presentation of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, we’d all watched it, and at eight-years-old it was damn near the coolest thing we’d ever seen. In the following weeks the three of us spent countless hours out at the boulder and in the surrounding woods recreating the story. Later, when we’d gotten a bit older, I tried my first cigarette there from a pack Martin had l
ifted from his mother’s purse. Doing my best James Dean, I took a deep drag and proceeded to cough and hack so violently I vomited, which left Martin and Jamie rolling around on the ground with uncontrollable laughing fits. The boulder had a lot of history. Our history. Together, as friends. If there was to be a final meeting, and apparently there was, Martin had picked the perfect spot. Reluctantly, I agreed to see them.

  “We have to go back,” Martin said. No hello, no thanks for coming, no explanation, just that statement. He stood near the boulder, one hand resting on it as if to glean inspiration, the other holding a folded section of newspaper. “Have you guys seen the paper? Have you heard what they’re doing?”

  Jamie sat up on the boulder, knees drawn to his chest, arms wrapped around his shins. He still looked so young, with his mop of brown hair and wide eyes. He nodded and let his chin rest on top of his knees. “He means the shopping mall and the condos,” he said for my benefit.

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “The field’s been sold. All of it.” Martin’s dark eyes bored into me, distracting me from his mane of curly hair, which he’d taken to wearing nearly to his shoulders. Dirty blond and thick, at first glance he looked like a rock star from some hair band, and his torn jeans, seashell necklace, hippie shirt and checkerboard, slip-on Vans sneakers completed his stoner look, but closer inspection revealed thoughtful and intense features, his nose rather large for his face and slightly hooked, his lips full and his brow almost perpetually knit, as if he were constantly in deep thought or just on the verge of saying something truly profound. Of the three of us, he’d grown the tallest, but was still under six feet and quite thin. Yet he possessed the same effortless presence he’d always had, even as a young child. Martin was the kind of person you noticed, looked at and listened to, but were never entirely sure why. “They’re gonna dig up the whole thing. They’ll find it.”

  After sinking the body, we’d returned the sword and book to the scarred man’s knapsack and buried it. I remembered kneeling in the mud and loose dirt while the rain gushed down on us, our fingers squishing through the earth as we dug with our hands until we’d gotten a few feet down.

  I shrugged, wanting nothing more than to get out of there. “So what?”

  “They’re both ancient.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  Martin’s eyes blinked slowly, like a cat’s. “If they find them—and they will—they’ll do all sorts of tests on them. They’re artifacts. They’ll bring experts out of the woodwork. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem. But that sword was covered in blood, and the book will be too. Not to mention our fingerprints.”

  “They might have to fill in part of the river when they build the condos,” Jamie said softly. “If they find his body or…what’s left of it…and then they come across the knapsack and everything in it, there might be an investigation.”

  “It’s been three years,” I said. “There’s nothing at the bottom of that river but bones, and even they’ve probably washed away down river by now. They can investigate all they want, there’s no way or reason to suspect us.”

  Martin stepped away from the boulder, closer to me. “We’re in this together. That’s just the way it is. We need to go back and get that knapsack out of there.”

  “And do what with it?”

  “I’ll get rid of it.”

  I looked out at the dump road. Quiet and desolate. The heat was rising, and I’d broken out in a sweat beneath the summer sun. “I don’t want anything to do with this. You two do whatever the hell you want. I’m out of here.”

  “We should go together,” Jamie said. “It’s only right.”

  “Right? Are you kidding?” I laughed, but it was laced with anger. “There isn’t anything right about any of this. There never was.”

  Martin reached out and let his hand rest on my shoulder. “Phil, look, let’s just get this done, and in a couple months, once the summer’s over, you and Jamie will be in college and I’ll be in Europe. I got a job as a deckhand on a cargo ship out of Boston, that’s how I’m getting over there. In no time you guys will be doing your thing and I’ll be doing mine, and none of this will matter anymore because it’ll finally be over.”

  “It’ll never be over.”

  “Maybe it never happened at all,” he said. “Maybe it’s all a bad dream.”

  “Then there’s no reason to go dig up that field.”

  “Maybe that’s the best reason of all. Maybe it’s time we know for sure.”

  Jamie slid down off the boulder and looked at me as if he expected a response, but gave none himself.

  “I’m sorry this happened,” Martin said. “If I could go back and change it I would. I’m sorry it cost us our friendships, I…I miss you guys. I never meant for it to be like this.”

  I knew he was sincere, and it broke my heart, but I shrugged his hand off and took a few steps back, my car keys already in hand. “Do whatever you have to do, but leave me out of it. I’m done.”

  “You think you’re the only one dealing with this?” Martin made a sweeping gesture toward Jamie and then back around to me. “We’re all suffering, all of us equally. We didn’t mean to kill him.”

  “You killed him, Martin.”

  “We all had a hand in it,” Jamie said.

  “I’m out. You hear me? I’m out.”

  Martin gave a slow nod, his eyes smoldering not with anger, but disappointment. And somehow, that was worse.

  I could still remember him standing there in the sunshine staring at me, Jamie behind him, head bowed like the obedient sidekick he’d always been.

  I left them there at the boulder, but like the scarred man, they remained with me, a part of me I couldn’t shake free, gargoyles refusing to be pried loose from their stone perches. Now, I wondered if all these years later I might finally get the chance to cleanse myself of this once and for all…if such a thing was even possible.

  After I’d downed the Jack and Coke, I pulled the shade, took the phone off the hook and collapsed into bed. I lay there awhile, watching dust motes dance across shadows and thin beams of daylight leaking through the cracks in the blinds, covering the apartment in a zebra-like pattern of shadow and sunlight. I pulled the covers up over me and snuggled up tight with my nightmares.

  Somewhere out there I imagined Martin and Jamie trapped in similar cages, and just beyond the shadows, the scarred man stood watching it all, his piercing blue eyes stalking us across time and space, faith and reason, washed in the blood of devils and martyrs alike.

  * * *

  He comes to me from the silence, slides through opaque currents of night, the whites of his eyes emerging first, and then his face. His hair is matted down with what appears to be mud, slicked back in front to make his wraithlike countenance even more prominent in the dark. He is disguised in ceremonial paint of various dark colors. War paint, I think. Deep greens, black and earthy browns cover his face and neck, and two swathes of red have been smeared along each cheek from temple to chin, crossed at the bottom to form inverted crosses. His body remains in shadow. But I can smell him. I can smell his perspiration, his lack of cleanliness.

  Tell me your dreams.

  He speaks, I can hear him. But his mouth never moves, only his eyes show expression, as if they’re talking for him.

  Tell me your nightmares.

  “You know my nightmares.”

  But do you know mine? I dream of fire. Skies devoured by it…burning…dying…purified by flames…

  We sit in the dark silence awhile. I can hear him breathing, crouched there and staring at me, so I try to ignore him and instead think about the small framed photos on my desk. One is of Gillian—my favorite picture of her—the other an aged black and white photograph of my parents on their wedding day. In my wallet, tucked deep inside, I still carry a picture of Trish. Now and then I look at it and allow myself to remember when we first met. Trish’s entrance into my life had helped heal some of the wounds left behind by my mother’
s sudden death a year before. I remember the first time we slept together, and how I’d never experienced anything so powerful with other women. After a year of dating and falling in love, we’d married at a nearby beach resort rather than a church because even then I’d been unable to return to the Catholic churches of my youth. I remember our wedding day, and how beautiful Trish looked, how she cried when we said our vows and how she gazed lovingly into my eyes when we had our first dance. I remember our life together before Gillian was born, two years as a young married couple, and how much fun we’d had. I remember the exact moment, three years later, when Gillian came into the world, and recall the first time I held her in my arms and wept with joy. I remember the five years after Gillian was born when we were all together and a family. It is the closest I have ever come to being truly happy in this life. But even in my dreams I can’t hold onto it, can’t make it work. It slips free, escapes my grasp like water running between my fingers. And I just stand there helplessly and watch it go. In eight short years, Trish and Gillian arrive and are gone.

  Somewhere nearby I hear Jamie reciting prayers.

  I picture him kneeling not before ornate altars or beneath cathedral windows of stained glass, but rather in the center of a cramped and dusty room laced with shadows and the forgotten webs of long-dead spiders. Broken and alone, he prays listlessly, as if he no longer believes them either.

  The sounds and visions of Jamie leave me; return me to the quiet, to him.

  Something rushes in behind me. I can hear it surging across the floor. At first I mistake it for water, some unseen night tide washing in. But as it glides across the floor and over my bare feet, accompanied by a harsh dry wind, I realize it isn’t water at all. It’s sand.