The Waking Dark Read online

  It didn’t fit; it didn’t last.

  She was, had always been, Jule, an ugly sound that twisted the mouth into an ugly shape, and easily attached itself to other, more important things: Jule-do-the-dishes, Jule-get-the-laundry, Jule-stop-whining, Jule-find-us-some-beer.

  They were names that hadn’t always defined her, not when defiance was safe because Uncle Scott was there to protect her. Her mother’s bloodsuckers could say what they liked, but let them even think about raising a hand against Scott Prevette’s darling niece, and they would reap the consequences. Jule was the family’s only child, and Scott the family’s only authority. That made her safe, but that was before: Before he’d started sampling his own merchandise, before he’d started seeing enemies everywhere – in the bushes, in the bedroom, in the bloodline. Before Jule had stopped being cute and started talking back.

  She was still his favorite – but that wasn’t worth nearly as much as it once had been. Which meant if the parasite wanted beer, she’d better get him beer. Though the options on that front were limited. Scott’s younger brothers, Teddy and Axe, were locked in the trailer at the edge of the compound, brewing up another batch of the “stuff” that Jule – presumed to be a moron – wasn’t supposed to know about. Their women, usually high and always temporary, saw Jule as a threat. When her uncles weren’t around to impress, they competed among themselves for who could humiliate her the most efficiently. (Scott’s latest, a strung-out redhead with cigarette burns running up and down her arms, was currently in the lead.) But her uncle James, the youngest of her mother’s brothers, was likely to be awake, unoccupied, and sober. His girlfriend – an actual girlfriend, with a name and a sock drawer of her very own – had once given Jule a manicure, just for the hell of it, and since then seemed to consider them girlfriends.

  Jule kept her eyes open as she crossed the compound, but there was no sign of the crayon. James and Gloria lived on the southern edge of the barren grounds that had been marked out as Prevette territory, as far from the meth labs as they could get. James preferred pot to speed. James preferred pot to pretty much everything.

  She knocked at his trailer. There was no answer.

  “James? Gloria?” She paused, listening. “Mom wants some beer.”

  Nothing. But she could hear them, behind the door, and that was strange, because neither James nor Gloria was the yelling type. They were yelling now. Not even yelling, but yowling, like the cats did when Scott seized them by the tail and swung them over his head. She eased open the door.

  Even though she knew better.

  She really should have known better.

  James was… leaking. At first, her brain scrabbling for purchase on the situation, that was the only word she could muster. He was sitting on the floor of the trailer, leaking glops of something dark and red and —

  No, she told herself, some dim animal sense of self-preservation jerking her gaze away from the hole in James’s stomach and the things sliding out of it. But she couldn’t look away from the sounds he was making. The feline screams had stopped, and now there was only a soft, wet noise, a whimpering snuffle moistened by sprays of blood.

  Stranger danger, she thought, moving in slow motion, out of the trailer, away from the quivering, leaking thing that had been her uncle James. She stumbled backward, but not quickly enough. Gloria lurched out of the bathroom, a matching hole in her stomach, a bloody hunting knife in her hand, a knife she noticed as if for the first time and then threw against the wall with what must have been her last burst of strength, because in the same motion her legs gave out. When they did, it was Jule’s neck she slung her slippery arms around and Jule’s shuddering body she dragged to the floor. “I did that,” Gloria said, blood bubbling from her lips with every word. “Why did I do that?”

  Jule threw up.

  Gloria died before James, though she had stabbed him first.

  The knife had been Uncle Scott’s favorite, and later, after making his new woman wash off the blood, he reclaimed it as his own.

  The Lord will raise me up.

  The Lord will raise me up.

  Raise me up, Lord.

  Raise me up!

  The Lord was silent.

  The Lord was disappointed.

  Ellie prayed for His forgiveness.

  Ellie prayed for His suffrage.

  Ellie prayed.

  The Church of the Word was empty at this hour, as the faithful fanned across town to Spread His Word. Fortunately, Ellie had the key to the youth ministry office, for Ellie had been indispensable in rallying troops for the annual Spread His Word Day. Ellie had worked tirelessly on promotion and organization, Ellie had sacrificed her summer to the Lord, and about that Ellie had no regrets.

  But Ellie had failed.

  She’d tasked herself with the most difficult and least desirable of assignments, because He said whatever you did not do for the least among you, you did not do for Me. The Prevettes were, by any measure, the least. Reverend Willet had warned her away, but Reverend Willet was soft. That’s what Deacon Barnes always said, though never to the assistant minister’s face. Ellie liked Reverend Willet, but she listened to Deacon Barnes. His was the voice that had brought her to God, and this voice tolerated no weakness.

  Clair and Morgan, her youth co-leaders, praised the Lord for her bold sacrifice, but she knew they thought she was showing off. They hated her for it, as she’d hated Clair for baking twelve batches of cookies for the bake sale, and she and Clair had together hated Morgan for spending all day in the rain, helping to build the Noah’s Ark float for the Fourth of July parade, despite having the flu. (She called it the flu; her doctor called it mono. They all politely ignored the fact that Andrew Chadwick – with whom the virginal Morgan had certainly exchanged no fluids, how dare you? – was down with the same thing.)

  But Ellie wasn’t showing off, not this time. She was testing herself.

  And she had failed.

  She’d failed from the first moment she set foot on the compound, her heart thumping rabbit-fast, and she’d spotted a blond giant who could only be Scott Prevette lurching toward her. He was perhaps the town’s most infamous sinner, his prison stints, his war with the cartel runners, and his subsequent appropriation of the county’s meth distribution all common lore. The least of us, Ellie had thought, crouching ignobly behind a rusting Buick. The very least. But it was only after Scott Prevette had wandered off with his unsteady toddler’s gait that she dared rise to her feet. With a silent prayer for strength and forbearance, she’d passed one trailer after the next, this one guarded by a loosely chained Doberman, this one padlocked, this one occupied by someone screaming what her mother would have called bloody murder. Finally, she’d found it within herself to approach one of the sad excuses for a house, and smile inanely at the girl who opened the door, who had blasphemed and slammed the door in her face. It was all the excuse Ellie needed to burst into tears and run away.

  She wasn’t delusional. She knew Scott Prevette lay beyond her powers of redemption. But Jule was just a girl, probably a sad and lonely one, if the glimpses Ellie caught of her at school were any indication. She needed help. And instead of delivering it, Ellie had fled.

  Because the trailers frightened her, yes. But also because she’d been looking for an excuse. The compound was dirty. The compound smelled. Jule smelled, or at least her trailer did, an unsettling mix of mold, dish soap, and sewage. People weren’t supposed to live like that. Facing Jule, with her ratty, skintight jeans and combat boots, her tangle of black hair that had surely never seen the inside of the Cut-N-Edge, her dark skin that everyone was supposed to ignore because of course educated people knew better than to care, Ellie had been seized by a powerful revulsion. It was the same wave of disgust that had washed over her in the soup kitchen and the cancer ward and on the day she’d accidentally stumbled into a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and taken – meaning touched, meaning drunk from – one of the rapidly cooling cups of coffee. Those other times, she’d been i
n public, surrounded by people with certain expectations of sweet, kind Eleanor King. So she’d stroked damp foreheads and shaken callused hands and drunk that entire cup of weak coffee, and smiled throughout, because people were watching. At the Prevette compound, no one was watching, and Ellie’s true nature had revealed itself.

  Raise me up, Lord, she begged, but the Lord wasn’t listening, and who could blame Him.

  She’d let herself into the office thinking to bury herself in work, but the work was done. Today there was only the Work, and sitting in the office, surrounded by her lists and maps and happy-face-dotted Post-its, reminded her too much of failure. She would retreat to the nave, she decided, where there would be less to distract her from prayer.

  The nave, too, should have been empty, but when Ellie slipped into the dark, hushed chamber, she could hear someone breathing. They were high, rapid breaths, air whistling through a clenched throat, and Ellie’s heartbeat sped to match the rhythm. On sunny afternoons, the soaring stained-glass windows showered the pews with rainbows, but this day the deep summer haze had bleached the sky white, and there was little sunlight to filter through the glassy scenes of sorrow and retribution. It took Ellie’s eyes a moment to adjust, and a moment more to place the man who’d intruded on her solitude. She had entered at the back of the nave; he was all the way at the front, up in the sanctuary. But as she approached, shuffling down the aisle even though everything in her screamed that she should be heading in the other direction, she was sure. It was Henry Pierce, who did odd jobs around the church, repairing drywall, plugging leaks, uncrossing wires, all for what he claimed was a churchly discount but what Deacon Barnes referred to, not always under his breath, as extortion. He was widowed and mustached, and more than occasionally smelled of whiskey.

  He was nailed to the cross.

  Ellie rarely had lurid dreams, and never nightmares. But surely this was an exception, because surely Henry Pierce was not in the church sanctuary, stripped naked and hanging from a wooden cross by stakes driven through his bloody wrists and ankles. Even more surely, Eleanor King was not standing before his spread-eagled figure, her fingertips approaching, then touching – touching! – the cross of blood that anointed his forehead. His face was slick with sweat. His eyes were closed.

  And then they were open.

  Ellie screamed.

  “Go,” he whispered. “You have to go.”

  The dreamlike detachment collapsed in on itself, and suddenly the sticky blood and the fetid sweat smell and the pain in his voice and the fear in his eyes were all too real. She screamed again, and began tugging first at the thick spikes pinning him to the cross and then at his arm itself, trying to ignore his choked moans every time his torn flesh ground against the iron. She tugged, and his lips flapped, and no sound came out until, again, every word a labor, “You have to go.”

  “But I have to help you,” she said, fumbling for her phone, staining her dress and purse with blood.

  Henry Pierce swallowed. His bare chest heaved as he drew in a mighty breath, readying himself to speak again.

  The words came slowly, and softer than before. “He’s. Coming. Back.”

  For one slow, stupid moment, Ellie thought he was referring to the Lord.

  “Run.”

  The pieces fell into place, and already she was moving, her legs smarter than her foggy brain. Henry Pierce was nailed to a cross.

  Someone had nailed Henry Pierce to a cross.

  Someone was coming back.

  She did as Henry said and she ran, reaching the doorway just as Reverend Willet emerged from the passage behind the sanctuary. She was about to scream in panic and joy and sheer relief – until she noticed that Reverend Willet was carrying a can of gasoline in one hand and a lighter in the other. Reverend Willet was coated with blood.

  Crouched on the safe side of the door, Ellie peered through the crack and dialed 911, but she couldn’t speak. She could only watch as Reverend Willet – who had helped her memorize her first psalm, who took any excuse to don a costume, who played hymns and, in trusted company, Beatles songs on his ukulele, who was too kind, too tolerant, and all too soft – poured gasoline over Henry Pierce, and the altar, and the pews, and himself. He flicked his lighter, and she watched the fire spark. She watched them burn.

  And something within her sparked, too.

  The flames burned away her fear. She swung the door open wide. “I see you!” she shouted at Reverend Willet, at the burning thing he had become. As the fire devoured the men and their cross, Ellie understood with a blazing clarity that the tests she had set for herself had been nothing but a child’s game.

  She saw her purpose now.

  She saw, even across the burning sanctuary, the reverend’s eyes, which held something she understood and was finally prepared to fight.

  She saw evil.

  The street was deserted, but it was daytime, and you could never be too careful. So they would not hold hands. No matter how much West might have wanted to.

  They walked slowly, ostensibly to accommodate Nick’s limp but also, by unstated agreement, to draw out the trip back to town as long as possible. They couldn’t stay in the cornfields forever, lying on their backs and naming the clouds, tall stalks bending in the wind, their linked fingers and tangled legs hidden by waves of golden green. They could, if they dawdled, delay the inevitable return.

  “I found a new one,” Nick said. “Jupiter 5050 – a bunch of astronauts accidentally travel to the future and end up the main exhibit in some kind of alien zoo.” Their current obsession was bad sci-fi movies from the fifties, the cheesier the better. (Extra points when the special effects involved alien spaceships dangling from visible strings.) “You want to come over and watch Sunday?”

  West didn’t answer.

  “We don’t have to watch the whole thing,” Nick said. “We could just…” He cleared his throat. “My parents are out of town.”

  “Can’t.”

  Nick looked alarmed. “I didn’t mean – I mean, we don’t have to…”

  “It’s not that. I just… can’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m going to that picnic thing,” West said. “With Cass.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s no big deal,” he said quickly. He didn’t know how this worked. He didn’t even know if he wanted it to work.

  No, that was a lie. He wanted it.

  “It’s just a thing.” He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s fine,” Nick said. His pace quickened, and West pretended not to notice him wince each time his weight landed on the bad leg. Nick wouldn’t say where the limp had come from. Rather, he said plenty, fantastical explanations about skydiving crashes and circus calamities, until West gave up asking. He knew only that in fifth grade, Nick had been perfect, one of those golden-haloed kids that the others knew instinctively to follow, as if the shine would rub off on them. Maybe too much of it had, because Nick had appeared on the first day of sixth grade with long hair that nearly covered his permanent scowl and a leg that moved like a block of wood. At unpredictable intervals, it gave out beneath him, pitching him into pratfalls that the old Nick would have known how to turn into a joke. The new Nick only lay there, rubbing his leg and scowling harder, as if daring someone to kick him while he was down.

  The limp had improved over the years, but it always marked him as different. West sometimes wondered whether that made the rest of it easier for him, not having a choice.

  “I can tell her I can’t go,” West said, hating himself for how little he wanted to do that. Cass was like armor. As long as he wore her on his arm every few weeks, he was safe. Or, at least, safer – nothing about this was safe. “I will. I’ll just tell her.”

  “I said it’s fine.”

  “It’s obviously not fine.”

  Nick reached for him, then remembered himself, and pulled back just in time. He shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” West said. “I really am.”

&nbs
p; “It’s a movie. We’ll watch another time.”

  “I know what you want me to do, but… I can’t.”

  “Jeremiah.” This time, checking first to make sure there were no cars in sight, Nick did take his hand. Only briefly, long enough to give it a single, quick squeeze. Nick was the only one who called him Jeremiah. Even his mother had been trained out of the habit. “I don’t want you to do anything. The way things are now, it’s fine. It’s good.”

  “Now is when you say ‘But…’” It stunned West how well he had learned to read Nick’s face, the crinkle of concern in his pale forehead or the way he bit the inside of his cheek when he was nervous. As he did now.

  “But it’s going to be different, once school starts.”