Daylight saving time changeover was Sunday after next; we’d be springing forward. Even now the afternoons were getting a little longer, the sun not setting until six o’clock, near what it was now. I pulled my truck into the circular front driveway. A burst of orange sunlight greeted me from behind Mrs. V’s turreted Victorian roof. It set off the house in a jagged silhouette, like it was pushing the old place at me.
Her cook opened the front door but didn’t offer to let me in, instead kept a full three feet away from me, the screen door between us. I wasn’t sure if she was sizing me up or was afraid of me. I never done nothing to her, yet still she acted this way.
Who was I kidding? It was me who croaked her employer’s husband. That was plenty.
“She’s not here,” she said, her round cheeks full of food. She swallowed most of it. “She was taken to Nazarene Hospital this afternoon.”
My heart skipped a beat. “For what?”
Her face softened; the screen door opened and I stepped inside. “Heart palpitations,” she said, her tone more even now. “She’s not in any immediate danger. Just can’t get excited. All this rigmarole about finding her husband’s body is what did it. They want her to rest in the hospital a few days. No visitors.”
Horst her gardener husband joined us in the hall, wiped his mouth with a napkin. I thanked his wife for the information and turned to leave. Then I turned back.
“Look,” I said to them, “you two and me didn’t get off on the right foot those many years ago. Not sure why, and not sure what I can do to change it, but please, just get a message to Mrs. Volkheimer and her family to let them know I’m thinking about her.”
I made for the screen door, was surprised when Horst offered his hand while leaning past me to open it. “We’re thinking about her, too,” he said, his long face showing its age, his forehead a washboard of worry lines. “We’ll deliver the message.”
His shake was firm and honest. Mrs. Volkheimer had touched a lot of people during her lifetime. Old folks felt a kinship at times like this, watching other old folks get closer to death. It didn’t make sense to hold grudges, for real or imagined slights. Maybe this was what turned these two around. Either way, I was touched by it.
If I located more families on this list, I figured to get the same answer but not with any of them knowing they had this in common: firstborn infant sons dying at the hands of their parents. Real biblical-obedience bullshit, courtesy of the nineteenth-century Catholic Church.
Biblical. Now there’s a word I hadn’t used lately for sure.
I decided I would call Father Duncan in the morning. Figured me and him maybe ought to stop by the orphanage to do some thirteenth-century Bible reading.
It was about eight a.m. I didn’t get an answer when I phoned the rectory looking for the father, so I decided to take a walk.
It was supposed to be warm again today, in the low eighties. Tomorrow, Good Friday, it could reach ninety. Light-jacket weather now, short sleeves later. Hadn’t seen an April this warm around here since I was a kid.
Something told me Father knew all about them families already, the Goodes and the Schmidts and the rest of them, and their nineteenth-century babies, too. Something told me he already knew what I’d learned yesterday, which was those infant boys in the sewers were all firstborns. Probably had a hunch about it, but wanted me to chase the information down anyway. Something told me all this because he never said nothing yesterday about visiting the orphanage this morning, yet here I was walking half a block behind him, which he hadn’t noticed, the both of us headed to the same place.
Hell. Could be he was here on some other priest business, not to do any reading from a devil bible. Maybe I was just overreacting.
I’d picked up two escorts this last leg, Raymond in his wheelchair and Leo pushing him, on their way back from a grocery store errand, a brown Food Fair bag sticking out of the wire basket beneath Raymond’s seat. The three of us left the sidewalk and cut across the orphanage’s front lawn. The wheelchair shook and hitched as Leo pushed it over the uneven grass until we got to the side of the property, onto a hardened clay footpath, the ride finally smoothing out. We followed the bellied path around to the kitchen door in back. Leo stopped at the tip of the special wooden wheelchair ramp I built for the orphanage’s disabled kids; he resettled the red baseball cap on Raymond’s blond head. Raymond’s feet, snug inside a pair of beat-up red high-topped PF Flyers, dangled off the sides of their stainless-steel footrests, their canvas tops frayed white and torn in spots, a few of the silver eyelets missing. The tread on these sneakers hadn’t suffered near as much abuse, looked close to new and always would, long as Raymond was the one wearing them. Leo resettled Raymond’s feet inside the footrests and retied the laces.
He checked the leather straps across his buddy’s chest and legs, making sure they were tight enough for the short trip up the incline. I grabbed one handle and Leo grabbed the other; we pushed the wheelchair up the ramp together. I brushed past them to get at the door, aware of Raymond’s open, sightless eyes. They blinked a few times.
you’re not overreacting
This thought stopped me. Except it wasn’t a thought; it was a voice. I took my hand off the door handle. “You say something, Leo?”
“Nope. Wasn’t me.”
“What do you mean it wasn’t you? Who else, then?”
He shrugged. “Maybe it was God. Or Raymond.”
I let that pass. “But you heard it?”
“Yeah. Kinda.”
“Kinda? Explain ‘kinda.’”
“Kinda with my mind I heard it.” He was studying me and smiling a small, goofy smile, one that hung around longer than it should have, betraying he was worried about my reaction.
Jeez-o-man, stay calm, I told myself. “Tell me what you heard, son.”
“I heard someone telling you you’re not overacting, something like that. Sounded like it was Raymond.”
“Like Raymond? Really, now.”
“Yep. Sometimes I watch him while he’s doing it. His lips don’t move and nothing comes out of his mouth, but I can hear him in my head anyway. Sounds like he’s talking from inside a big seashell, next to the ocean.” Leo’s head bobbed up and down, looking for my approval. My squinty expression betrayed me.
His eyebrows drooped. “You don’t believe me.”
I placed my hand on his bushy noggin to pat his wild sandy hair, then I caught myself doing it and stopped. “I don’t know what to believe anymore, son. What you said doesn’t make much sense to me.”
“Raymond says I can talk that way, too.”
Leo looked at me like he was about to say Hey, it’s really true, and boy-o-boy, did it surprise me, too.
hey it’s really true and boy-o-boy…
The echo. It wasn’t me. It was Leo’s voice, but his lips—his mouth—nothing moved.
“Leo? How in God’s name—?”
I was feeling real uneasy, staring first at him then at Raymond, slowly looking Raymond over in his wheelchair, head to toe and back, settling on his narrow, emotionless face, his lollygag head tilted to one side, his left cheek leaning on his shoulder.
I was sixty-five friggin’ years old, for God’s sake. Old soldiers like me had enough crap tricking their minds every day. I didn’t need stuff like this making me doubt my sanity. “Forget it, I don’t want to know. Just stop it, whoever it was.”
we’re sorry, Wump
“Raymond this time,” Leo said. “He started talking this way a coupla months ago. Tells me not to be afraid even though he’s getting sick. He’s my best friend, Wump. Please don’t make him stop.”
Leo’s eyes moistened up, and I nodded an okay, told him to ignore what I’d said. “You boys talk anyway you need to. Just do your best to keep this old man out of it.” I put my hand on Leo’s shoulder. “Let’s get inside. Your school bus will be along soon.”
The orphanage kitchen was cluttered from breakfast dishes and bowls and mugs piled high in the large sinks and on the counters next to them, all ready for sudsing and rinsing then drying and reshelving by the nuns, except no one was here, at least not in the kitchen. Leo left Raymond under the arch to the hallway, turned the grocery bag on its side on an empty part of the counter, and let the contents roll out. Some fruit, a few small spice jars, and an institutional-size can of Crisco. He folded the bag, stood everything up for the nuns to put away, then threw open the door to the Frigidaire. Out came a quart-size glass bottle of soda. He shook it hard with both hands then put it on the table; he carefully unscrewed the top. The excess pressure escaped little by little until most of it was gone.
Leo eyed me eyeing him. “It’s okay,” he said, grabbing a jelly-jar glass from a cabinet. “The sisters said it doesn’t much matter if Raymond has soda this early in the morning. He likes Black Cherry Wishniak but only if there’s no fizz. Not as much burping.” He pulled a paper straw out of a drawer, carried it and the glass of soda over to his friend. Leo held the glass and straw steady while Raymond eagerly sipped. The straw circled the bottom, searched and found the last few drops.
Leo pushed Raymond down the hallway and left him outside the library. A few cranky doorknobs turned, the last one the knob to the orphanage’s front door. Leo squeezed himself outside with a book bag slung over one shoulder, then pulled the door shut behind him. Now it was real quiet, like on those early mornings when I lived here. Maybe quieter. Midnight quiet.
I heard Raymond in the library. No, it couldn’t be, because what I was hearing were voices. They were down the hallway and across from the library, in the parlor. Children’s voices. As I got closer, I heard a woman’s voice, too.
“Don’t you look handsome in those knickers, young man. Handsome indeed.
“Here’s a new bonnet for you, child. Oh, aren’t you a beautiful sight this morning. You’ll be the prettiest young lady at the Schuetten town fair.”
The town hadn’t been called Schuetten for more than fifty years; what the Christ was going on? “Hello, Sister?” I called down the hall. “Who’s there? Hello?”
“Don’t be raising your voice inside, Johnny. Go wash up. And your potato sack better be out back, not inside. I don’t want to be smelling it in here.”
I hustled to the end of the hall and whipped around the foot of the stairs to face the parlor. “Now see here, Sister, what’s all this talk about—”
I was talking to no one; the parlor was empty.
Raymond—where was he? “Where’d you get off to, son? Raymond?”
More noise, coming from behind me, across the hall, on the other side of the library’s closed pocket doors. A clap-a-tap rapping that sounded like wood against wood. It started out slow and soft, but now it was louder and faster. I felt a rush of air blow against me. It pushed me back a step, away from the library, where from behind the doors it now sounded bad as a Midwestern twister ripping into a cluttered soup kitchen, with so much knocking and banging that the pocket doors shook and snapped their edges against each other but somehow stayed closed.
My ears popped; the chaos got louder. They popped again; louder.
Pop, louder, pop, louder. “Owww…”
I covered my ears and turned weak-kneed away from the doors. This noise—it needed to stop, felt like it was shredding my eardrums—
The air suddenly retreated. The racket dwindled, the painful pressure in my head disappeared. I dropped my hands to my sides and slowed my breathing. Nose-to-nose with the closed doors of the library, I knew how terrified I was, could smell it in my own body odor. Still, I had to face it down.
I cozied up to the doors, cupped my hand around my ear, put it next to the polished wood and concentrated. Nothing moving inside far as I could tell; all quiet. Dead quiet, like a hospital morg—
The door I leaned against rumbled open so fast its beveling nearly took my ear off—THOCK-K-K-K!—the doors then slamming into their pockets. I had my arm coiled and my fist cocked except I was left staring at…what?
The archway was empty.
I stepped inside the library. No sunlight showed through the windows. I checked the parlor with a glance over my shoulder; still was a sunny day. A straw-colored lampshade, its bottom rim curved under like a rice paddy hat, covered a dangling light bulb, the bulb socket’s length of black wire disappearing overhead, into the dark near the ceiling. It felt close in here, unsafe, like the rubber hose room at the cop precinct or a boxing ring, two places where pain could come at you unexpected and from any angle, or in the prison hallways where you had to keep your eyes on everyone’s hands, or on the farm, where a leather strap settled everything. Or worse, where the gripping, gruesome agony in the room was not your own, but rather your defenseless, dying son’s.
The shade and bulb swung slowly, silently, like a clock pendulum. They cast a shaft of yellow light onto an opened book on a card table in the middle of the bare oak floor. I stilled the light with my hand then tipped the shade up to get a better look at the library.
Wow. The furniture was all jammed up unnatural-like against the ceiling and windows and walls like twigs in a bird’s nest, only the nest was upside down and close enough overhead to make my scalp tingle. Grade school desks, their wooden lids cocked and twisted off their hinges. Paintings and mounted photographs clawed from their fractured picture frames. Arts-and-crafts papers, some shredded into strips and hanging, others ripped into tiny pieces of confetti sprinkled overhead like stars in a midnight sky. Books, their pages pulled from their spines, the bookcase shelves they once sat on snapped and crushed. And attached to the ceiling, the steamer trunk, big and black and sturdy enough to hold a car engine, gaping like a screaming mouth. Inside the trunk its contents hung there, frozen in place.
Get out, my mind shouted. Go.
I wiped my palms on my trousers. That’s when I noticed it, on the wall above the fireplace. Two floor lamps, their shades gone, their long brass poles slapped against each other. Into a cross.
My blood pounded in my ears. My eyes centered on the book on the card table. I could hardly breathe. I leaned over it.
The Devil’s Bible. My nose filled with the reek of attic must and cat piss.
Creak.
I jumped. A wheelchair rolled out of the shadows, slowly, each plank of hardwood floor groaning as it crossed it.
“Raymond.” I held my hand to my chest and exhaled.
I strained to look at his face, at those open, unfocused, other-way eyes, and I listened, waiting like a fool, somehow hoping to have this orphanage library bedlam explained by, how was it Leo put it? A voice from inside a seashell?
Raymond stirred, his weak, chicken-bone chest rising to catch a full breath. He lifted his head off his shoulder, his eyes widening but still vacant. His chin rose. Then he laid his head back down, exhausted.
“You should go,” I said. “So should I.” But my eyes were drawn to that Bible.
I told myself it was just a book. With a trembling hand I reached under the heavy front cover, its leather binding strips cracking from age. I closed it then opened it again.
A maze was on the top half of the first page, in reds and blues, a circle working itself outward from its middle. The German started right in, written in a flowing hand beneath the circle, the first few words large, including Der Heirlige Bibel, or “The Holy Bible,” then smaller, Am Anfang, or “In the Beginning.”
What I knew about the Bible could fit inside a comic book. If there was anything in there worth seeing, like—well, like maybe something that could explain all them infant skeletons—I’d need to translate the whole book to find it.
the back
I glanced at Raymond, swallowed hard, and turned to the last page.
Inside the heavy back cover was a brown envelope newer than the book, more like a businessman’s small portfolio than an envelope, with an accordion bottom and leather shoelaces tied around its middle. I unwrapped the laces and shook the contents onto the card table and spread them out. Maybe a hundred or more old death notices, flimsy and yellowed and in different sizes.
I tried to remember what Father said. How many newborns died back then and didn’t get buried in Our Lady’s cemetery? A hundred and, ah, what was it, one hundred and—
one hundred and nine
I pushed them into a pile then squared them off. First card showed a drawing of the Blessed Virgin with a short supplication for the dead under it. It was for a Baby Warner, no first name, born October 17, 1879, died the same day. Second card had the same drawing of Our Lady, same prayer, was for a Baby Gunther, who also died the day he was born, November 2, 1879, again no first name. Third card, Baby Hochmeyer, January 21, 1880, same story. Aside from the names and the dates, each card looked the same, all showing a black and white sketch of Our Lady and carrying the same prayer for the dead that ended with the words “…some shall die so that all will live.”
Wait a second.
March, 1880—April, 1880—May, 1880—
I turned through the pile of cards, slow at first then faster, stopping once to take a swipe at sweat on my upper lip. Some of the notices ripped as I turned them over, they were so flimsy.
Sonovabitch.
They were in order. By month, day, year, oldest to newest. But they came out of the envelope in a sloppy pile, upside down, some even turned over. All I did was push them together. Just how in the Christ—
Something moved, above me, on the wall. I snapped my head up, heard a scrape, metal on metal.
ignore it
I shook the noise off. Here was the last notice in the pile. April 20, 1899.
take it
I stuffed it into my pants pocket.
The book suddenly slammed shut, scattering dust in my face. I cleared my eyes with my fingers and palms, not sure of what I seen. My shoulders were in a knot, and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I told myself it’s only a book, damn it. I stepped in closer.
The cover flipped open. The first page rose by its bottom edge, its top corner dragging down lazy-like and sounding as scratchy as sandpaper on wood. My wrinkled hands balled into fists so tight I could feel my fingernails biting my calloused palms. The first page settled flat against the inside of the front cover. The second page lifted itself the same teasing way, moved in slow motion, right to left. Then the third, and the fourth.
I wondered what would happen if I touched it—
The old pages suddenly flipped by my face in a wind-whipped, tan blur that halted at a page near the back of the book, the air above it shimmering like summer heat rising from a city street’s blacktop. The overhead lamp pulsed yellow then white-hot then yellow again. The pages settled into a mild flutter then finally flattened out. The cone of lamplight now swept across them, slowly, each pass like the creak of a rocking chair. Then, like a magnet, the pages pulled the light steady again, centering it above them.
Hell, I should have guessed.
The book was open to the leering little demon Father showed me before. Clawed hands, long, red, and sharp groping fingernails. Lunatic smile. I leaned in, looked into the demon’s eyes. Black. Crazy.
“All them dead babies in the sewers,” I said to it, my voice raspy. “Why?”
I waited for a response, a sign, anything, swallowed hard, then waited longer. I burrowed my eyesight deep into the demon’s face. “C’mon, you little fucker, tell me, damn it—”
I froze. Something was on my leg, lightly crawling up the back of my thigh. It moved softly, felt big, like one of them hairy tarantulas. It tugged at my shirt.
I grabbed it and felt fingers.
“Raymond!” I was breathing hard, about to crucify this kid.
yes
I released his fingers, lowered his long bony arm into his lap.
read the book, Wump
“The what?”
the page facing the picture. read it
I lingered, looking over this young man and his long, thin body. A body of not much use to him his whole life and failing him even more now that he had the leukemia. His mind—maybe it was making up for all the other parts of him that never worked. I turned back to the book, to look at the page Raymond said to look at. Nothing was on it. Or—maybe there was something, real faint, like a shadow, showing through its back.
I turned back one page. Still blank. Yet when I turned it back again the shadowy writing was still there.
It was on this page. It only looked like it was on the other side because it was slanted the wrong way, like it had been written—
yes, backward
read it from the other side
I tilted my head and leaned in, almost flat to the book, concentrated on seeing the handwritten words against the light and through the paper, on its other side. I squinted. Now I could make them out.
“Ich wurde von ihm herausgeschmissen,”
I was banished from him,
“wird wieder geboren,”
will be born again,
“der erste aus zwei…”
the first from two…
“jungfrauen,”
virgins,
“ihm gewidmet.”
avowed to him.
I lifted my head up. “Sounds like crap.”
keep going
“Mein kind folgt seinem,”
My child follows his,
“ein tausend mal zwei,”
a thousand times two,
“schreckliche ende fuer seine diener,”
vile ends for his servants,
“ein neues Universum. ”
a Universe new.
Above me I heard a long, tortuous scraping of metal. I snapped my head up, saw the crisscrossed posts of the two hanging floor lamps moving, sliding against each other, slowly grinding out silver-gold sparks from the contact, the sparks spraying the clutter on the wall and ceiling, the lamp posts twisting, shifting from an upright gold cross into a throbbing, glowing, red X. It sizzled like a branding iron as it hovered. I stepped back.
“Out. We need to get out—”
I grabbed at Raymond’s wheelchair from the front, both my hands on its arms. The chair was stuck. “The brake! Where is it—?”
Flames from the X exploded over my head. I stumbled backward, hit the floor, felt the heat—
Raymond. God, help me help him.
I strained to reach the brake lever, twisted it to free the back wheel, stood and quickly backed the chair out of the fire’s reach, toward the library archway, toward the way out.
The library doors slammed shut in our faces. I looked back, saw the blazing cross, heard its ferocious roar. Another fire blast exploded like a stoked flamethrower, shot across the card table, tickling the pages of the demon bible. I draped myself over Raymond, watched in panic past my shoulder as something took shape in the center of the flames.
Out thrust the face of the demon, its skin charred, its lips parting, its lazy eyes opening. The lips separated into a smile, showed silver-white dagger teeth drenched in spit. The smile became a leer.
I was way past fear. My mind quickly entered a place I’d seen other soldiers go when the horror of the battlefield had closed in on them, where adrenaline took over, and the soldier’s own life didn’t matter. I straightened up, turned to face the demon head on, Raymond to my back. I leaned forward, my chest broadening, leaned into the heat, no turning back—
“Open these doors!” I bellowed. “Open them! Now!”
I inhaled a breath, my lungs filling up in a fiery agony. I quickly exhaled. The air leaving my mouth felt scorched, like I was burning from the inside out. My mind was overcome by images of lungs on fire and arteries igniting like long fuses, their red-hot trails coursing through my arms and legs then sizzling their way back through my veins and into my heart, my beating, fiery, unsacred heart, charring it tar-black. Now I knew what the fire was after. It tickled a wafer-thin inner sense of my being, my inner tabernacle, my pure—
The demon’s leer was now a booming, scorn-filled laugh…
—and everlasting—
The laugh ricocheted inside my skull.
HAHAHAHA!
…SOUL!
YES, YOUR IMMORTAL SOUL!
FUCK WITH ME, OLD MAN, AND I WILL BURN IT!
The blast-furnace flames on the cross immediately retreated, sucked back inside the cross, whole. With a hiss, the devil-head disappeared. I hugged myself, saw and felt no burning flesh or fiery blood vessels, aware my heart was working overtime but still on the job.
Raymond.
I turned to him. He was unharmed in his wheelchair. He hadn’t broken a sweat from all this commotion. But his eyes…
They were still an ocean-blue beneath narrow blond eyebrows but somehow, in some way, they were different.
They were focused. On the wall. Focused on the lamp-cross now throbbing with a red glow, the cross again suspended in the nest-like debris hanging there. His eyes were focused and doing what? Staring? Like a sighted person?
His eyes fluttered and all at once, the stare I thought was there was gone.
The glow of the cross dimmed until the polished yellow-gold of its plated brass returned. I unclenched my fists, the tidal wave of adrenaline in my blood beginning to retreat, but still…
We needed to get out. I tried separating the doors. Useless. I swung around, looked for another way, got ready to scream at the lamp-cross again except now I noticed the cross was dripping water.
I took a few slow, careful steps around the book on the card table. I raised my hand, tapped a finger against the brass; it felt cool. I tapped it again, saw the lampposts were sweating. The water droplets pooled onto my fingertip, ran past my knuckles into my palm, soon became a trickling stream. I stepped back as the stream changed color, a sparkling crystal turning cloudy until—
It erupted, became a baby-shit-brown waterfall that gushed from the crossed lampposts, stinking like a rain-swelled cesspool, and it was then that I saw it. Another shape, forming from a glob of head flesh, with thumbprints that became eyes and a small gash that turned into a suckling mouth, and—
Out of the sewage waterfall leaped the vision of a baby’s face, its eyes and mouth closed, its cheeks puffed like tiny pink balloons. The infant’s head was shaking, struggling, its only noise a fierce grunting as it fought to keep its eyes closed and its lips sealed. The cheeks deflated and the lips parted, the mouth now gagging furiously as it gulped in the sewer water, the eyelids pressing down hard until they couldn’t stay shut any longer. The eyelids opened, and I seen in the newborn’s face a deathly terror, a terror that came from not knowing cold, not knowing pain, and not knowing what it meant to drown.