Authors: Patricia Lynch
Decatur
DECATUR
DECATUR © Patricia Lynch 2015
THIS EBOOK EDITION PUBLISHED BY TRAVERSE PRESS
ISBN: 978-1-62274-096-3
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. This edition is Published in 2015 by Traverse Press.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Chapter Index
Scholar’s Note
: …The paranormal exits in all cultures and how it is coded in each one is fascinating and the level of acceptance varies from culture to culture and from time to time. In some centuries there is almost total denial relegating the supernatural to old wives’ tales and in others, the truth about the depth and variety of beings that are on one side or another of the fifth of the elements becomes more visible. Vampires have been storied over the centuries, feared and rightly classed as Destroyers and there are distinct varieties within their species. They all require feeding on a life essence, in most cases, the victim’s blood.
My recent work has exposed me to a rarer class of vampires, one that is more deadly, because it takes not blood but the immortal life of its victims. The soul, which is the lamp in the spine, the single thing that unites all and weaves the living and those that have passed on together, this creature hunts it, feeds on it, needs it. It will do anything, however, to get to the most luminous; those souls that can channel the life force itself. These rare souls are ‘Instruments’ of the infinite and are the most highly prized by the creatures for their powers of renewal.
Bram Stoker’s publication in 1897 was the best thing that ever happened to these soul hunting vampires not that you should think these are common beings, they are anything but - however, with every one looking for fangs and blood, they were able to move about more freely than ever before. In many cultures, from the tree-dwelling Asanbosam of the Ashanti in Africa to the editor’s note in a Book of Psalms copied in Old Russia in 1047 and signed Upir Likhir, or ‘foul vampire’, the bloodsucker has obscured the rarer but more dangerous creature. Blood hungry vampires tend to be local. Soul-hunters work in a much larger area and are known to travel long distances over extended periods of time especially in pursuit of an Instrument.
In my latest dig in Peru I have found evidence that such vampires exist and had to abandon the site of a temple of a sect of violent and mysterious Incas because of a possible hunter on the prowl for fresh prey…”
Notes from a Peruvian Dig “ The Unseen” 1939, Dr. Gretchen Wendell
(This article was refused publication by the Journal of South American Anthropology.)
CHAPTER ONE
A Glimpse through Yellowed Curtains
Decatur, Illinois: 1973
She loved leaning out the back window of the restaurant when the lunch rush slowed, looking down the tracks that ran by the old brick and clapboard backs of buildings because this was as close to poetry as things got in these parts. A secret part of her mind was bent towards willing some stranger on a train rattling by to see her, all of her, the light she carried and the dark corners at the edges. A pretty woman in a black waitress uniform buttoned tight over her breasts with a white collar on, in all her intensity looking like a movie star just playing waitress with all the Midwestern everydayness seeping out of everything in Decatur but her. Sure it was harder now that she was on the wrong side of thirty – hell, she was on the wrong side of thirty-five, lying about it and mostly getting away it with it except when she let the cigarette droop down out of smudged red lips in broad daylight. There in the harsh prairie light you could see she touched up her hair and fine lines were beginning to form around her beautiful sleepy eyes. She wondered as she looked down the track to the oncoming train if she would ever get to normal or if she would always be subject to what her mother used to call “spells,” the mysterious episodes that set her apart.
The freight train rattled by as Walt, the long sorrowful hound dog faced cook with the tremor hands, wiped his apron and big fat Amanda who really did the cooking at the Surrey laughed at nothing in particular, sucking the wind between her gappy teeth. It was in that moment that Marilyn noticed the figure leaping with athletic grace from the open box car marked Illinois Central with its green triangle and white lettering, looking just as unremarkable as everything else, but the way the figure moved was anything but: the train had picked up speed as it left downtown Decatur, bifurcated with railroad lines slowly being overgrown with weedy grasses, but the man seemed not to care. He all but flew out of the dusty red boxcar and his body twisted like he was doing one of those double axels she had seen on TV for the Winter Olympics. He hit the ground and rolled as she tried to glimpse his face covered by light brown hair glinting in the sun. He was up on his feet then, like jumping from a moving train was nothing at all, spreading his arms out wide as the caboose on the freight flew by with the one lone occupant looking warily at the stranger on the gravel and grass below him. Marilyn thought for a crazy instant that the train hopper lunged at the man in the moving caboose in a hungry way as she heard Amanda stamp her foot and mutter “Fool.” Then Amanda’s big coffee colored hand reached up and pulled and the yellowed gauzy curtains stained by grease fell back into place across the window as Walt dinged the bell, hollering order up, and the moment collapsed like a cake that the oven door slammed on. But Marilyn had caught a glimpse of something in the stranger that hopped down from the train and the vision of him flying out of the boxcar had woken up some slumbering memory in her that April afternoon in Decatur, Illinois.
The Surrey was a dark place, wood paneled with a pressed tin ceiling, square tables up near the window and cashier, narrow wooden booths in the back, with an old-fashioned revolving door. It was only open from eleven to seven five days a week, and eleven to two on Saturdays. Marilyn had worked there for eleven years, Betty for twenty-two, and Mona for seven. Betty smoked Pall-Malls one after the other, crisp jet black hair that smelled like a chemistry kit, white cardigan closed with a jeweled insect clasp, and her eyebrows drawn on making her face look comically surprised. Betty was divorced and frankly didn’t much care for men anymore. Mona was always the new girl; even after seven years, she still chewed gum. She flipped through magazines that she would bring in a big red fake leather tote in the back booth, her nails long and frosted, pointing out hairstyles that failed and arguing with Betty over the suitability of wearing jeans. Mona was married to a truck driver and couldn’t have kids. No-one knew if she minded -- it was generally accepted that she did. And when her husband was gone on the road for a month she would wonder aloud if he had kids with some woman in a state like Kentucky where bigamy wouldn’t be much of nothing. Betty would humph, “good riddance,” but Marilyn, who never entered these waters with these women, shrugged. Marilyn was different -- she knew it and so did everyone, even Scott the manager who was the late boss’s son and dumb as dirt. They all knew Marilyn was just visiting them in a way. Sure it had been eleven years and they saw her six days a week but that difference never wore off. Everyone had their theories and cures, the latest being for Mona to take her to the local psychic house for a palm or tarot card reading after work that evening.
The Surrey was a place of regulars, the salesmen with their yellow ties and pink shirts from the nice men’s store Bachman’s across the street, the tobacco-stained lawyers upstairs from the store, the optometrist down the block, and his receptionist that changed every few years but always looked more or less the same, dyed blond hair and blue eye-shadow. Everyone knew everyone. Sometimes the two priests from St. Patrick’s would come in and they would get free coffee along with the cops.
Marilyn always thought the priests were a sign of the times. There was the aged monsignor that nobody saw anymore and only someone like her would have any real memories of, he was like a fading postcard from the fifties doddering around in the parish rose garden. But Father Weston with his dark eyes and romantic looking hair, going just a little puffy around the jowls, his thin nose and sensual lips… Father Weston had Monsignor Lowell in his pocket and the keys not only to the sacristy but to the whole parish house, and a rather considerable bar stocked with exotic liquors and whiskeys. Marilyn knew this for a fact. She had been inside the parish house more than once. Hell, Father Weston had been inside of her. Drove her home in the rain to her apartment and blessed her with his whole body. One time when the old priest was off for a Florida retreat, Father W had let her in a side door to the parish house and they sat in the old leather chairs smoking and drinking whiskey. That was a few years ago. Of course when Father Troy came and took the third bedroom, she was never snuck back in. Naturally Father W was resistant to the new hippie priest Father Troy, who wore sandals with socks and his hair long and had wire spectacles and wanted to bring a folk mass to St. Pat’s. Father Weston got free coffee everywhere and a steak dinner at the Blue Mill once a month where someone would always get the tab, and made his living looking godly in a green satin vestment. Father Troy was always going on about good works and St. Francis of Assisi and playing and singing guitar to the kids at Sunday school. It was a lamentable development from Father W’s point of view. Marilyn wondered what Father Troy would say if he knew everything she did about the parish house, and that she had once dreamt of him holding up his right hand with a stigmata standing in the dim hallway, the blood dripping onto his white wrist while someone was crying in a distant room.
CHAPTER TWO
The Monsignor Falls
The gravel sprayed up around his ankles as he hit the ground and rolled away from the open boxcar. The urge to jump had been unstoppable even when he realized the freight train was picking up speed. Every second was precious as he could feel the train carrying him further from the source and that made his chest feel like it might fall in on itself like an old mining shaft where the timbers failed, so out he leapt. The shock when he hit solid ground ran up his knees and into his back but it was electric. He opened his arms wide and felt the wind of the rattling freight blow by and he howled willfully into its noise, letting this world know he had arrived as he playfully batted at the man in the caboose flying by. The source was close and that was all that mattered.
Gar turned his head looking backwards down the track. His gold flecked irises widened, his lashes fluttering rapidly like lens shutters as he took in his surroundings. He was in a city, drably built of cement, brick and cinder blocks with a few humble wooden structures papered and tarred and branded with fading feed-and-seed logos squeezed in between. His nostrils picked up the scent of fertilizer and a burnt smell of processed corn and soybeans and the deadly perfume of big fields sprayed with chemicals killing the grasshopper, beetle, horned slug, and any other pest deemed by these farmers as crop harming, spreading out past the city limits. This was a town made for silos, train shipments, and extracting money from the crops in the modern way, big vats of things bubbling.
Overhead thick clouds were moving like they had some message to send. A cool wind moved in the weeds and whispered welcome to the dumpy little burg. The source was here, and now that he knew that he had to find a place where he could base himself till he found it. Gar remembered this much from other sojourns, he had been chasing it for so long and for all the lifetimes that he had missed it, none of that mattered now. Here at the end he would find it, sating the all-devouring hunger and, renewed, begin again. But he should find shelter. It wasn’t cold now but it would be after dark and he felt the cold more keenly these days. It would only remind him that he was running out of time and getting desperate never helped.
Stone steps,
he thought,
look for those that lead to a church.
They might take him in and more than that his luck might begin again there. His mind filled with images -- the narrow archer windows of the Castello nunnery
where it all
began,
and then the long Buddha-lined monastery walkway sprinkled with saffron threads and rose petals,
another missed connection
, and finally the exquisitely plain meeting house coated with snow when he had last
found and
lost the source
. For there were always ties to a religious community, although the beautiful Instrument was never fully religious, more likely rebellious. It was dependable, part of the journey just like looking for those wearing uniforms or habits had become second nature to Gar. These were his clues and he relied on them as much as his enhanced sensory gifts.
Looking up he spotted a lone spire in the distance and began moving on it, like a lion would a stray from a herd.
Gar trotted down Eldorado Street with ease, secretly pleased that he was on a street associated with the lost city of gold, and keeping pace with the pick-up trucks and Chevys as they stopped and started at the traffic lights mindlessly put at every block on the wide Midwestern boulevard with ugly steel streetlights and green directional signs printed in white hanging intermittently above. The church, a gothic stone edifice that was built when Decatur was a Victorian town on the Sangamon River with some hopes of success, now looked like a pious dowager in a room full of rubes. Wide stone steps led up to it and Gar felt the springtime siren of hope sing in his chest for the adjoining stone parish house had three stories with a big overgrown rose garden attached. There would be room here and much to do.
The housekeeper who opened the door to the parish house was in her mid-sixties with sensible shoes and ankles that swelled out of them like cauliflowers and a faded ivy leaf apron with red zigzag trim. She had a practiced air, though, of being asked for help by complete strangers, as she surveyed the big-chested man with light brown hair and gold flecked eyes in front of her. He was wearing work pants and a plain brown shirt with a cord tied around his trim waist, with no jacket. His shoes looked foreign to her, pointed toes and thin soft leather, these weren’t work boots by any stretch of the imagination but when the man smiled she forgot about the strange shoes. He seemed shy for someone so robustly attractive in an old world kind of way. Not like the fake good looks of the movie stars or the skinny long-haired musicians that everyone admired so foolishly these days. No, the stranger in front of her was reminiscent of old photos she had seen of her people when they first came to this country, proud and humble at the same time with noble noses and wide foreheads. The way he brushed the hair out of his eyes and half bowed to her nearly reached in and touched her in a place she had pretty much sealed up like a crypt when her boy was lost in that damn (Forgive me Jesus and make a quick sign of the cross now) war two years ago.
“We have a soup kitchen that Father Troy runs on Thursdays out of the church basement. You could get a meal there tomorrow.” She offered in the flat tones of one who had spent her life on the industrial prairie and wasn’t much given to expressing emotion no matter how Italian their surname sounded.
“Oh, no ma’m, I’m looking for work, the garden there could use some help, if you don’t mind me saying. Shame to let roses run wild.” He spoke softly in an unhurried way and seemed to be genuinely concerned about the mess the Monsignor’s garden was becoming now that he was so frail and the two young priests had “agendas” of their own.
“Who’s there, Mrs. Napoli?” Monsignor Lowell appeared at the top of the paisley runnered steps leading up from the parish office to the living quarters above. The old priest was unshaven and his thin white hair wispy around the skewed roman collar twisted hastily around his neck. Gar’s nostrils flared at the old man’s smell; somewhere buried in the sour sweat and decaying toe jamb there was a faint memory like an ancient potpourri of some other smell, oranges and sea-salt, rosemary and cedar, the source, this priest had once reached in and touched the source.
It must have been the way the afternoon sun framed the man in the door, but to the old priest, he seemed almost lit from within, a glowing stupendous figure who stirred something in him that he hadn’t felt since the mystery of the strange little dark-eyed girl of nearly three decades ago.
“Someone you’ll know,” the stranger half whispered, and at that moment the old man felt an uneasy whoosh in his chest and he could picture his heart now pumping and then stuttering a little and suddenly he was falling, or was he flying, down the stairs towards the stranger.
Mrs. Napoli felt the big tramp rush past her and as the priest fell, he was there like a miracle, the bag of bones the monsignor had become fell into the younger man’s arms and with a gentleness men rarely achieved he cradled the priest saying, “Hold on, now just hold on.” Then like everything had been decided and he was now a member of the parish house he instructed with simple grace, “Let’s get him to his bed.”
Mrs. Napoli made an extra large meatloaf that night before she left even though this was the night Father Weston was to dine at the Blue Mill, which was a mercy, considering as he and Father Troy would have no doubt had hot words about the fate of the tramp and poor poor Monsignor Lowell. The old priest was resting comfortably at least in his big square room with the silver cross and the picture of St. Patrick and the serpents. Gar had joined her at the yellow Formica counters in the kitchen and there he peeled potatoes over the plastic garbage pail like they had made supper together for years.
Father Troy was a little taken aback when he arrived home from visiting the nursing home shut-ins and playing his guitar, but after a few gentle questions that the man called Gar shrugged and only half-answered, the long-haired priest called Mrs. Napoli into the parish office. “You know he’s one of them” Father Troy said in an earnest way, “The vets. You can tell by the nickname. Gar, Cigar, see? Nobody wants to know your real name in battle and then when they get home no-one wants them at all or will even give them work. Scarred, they go by their nicknames, wandering from town to town looking for a way to piece themselves back together.” Mrs. Napoli nodded, gritting her teeth. Her own boy. It could have been him hopping trains looking for a way to piece himself back together if only there had been something left to piece. Father Troy fingered the silver cross he wore like a pendent on his chest. “We could let him sleep in the basement for a few days if you think the Monsignor won’t mind. There’s the rolling cot and God knows we could use a few things done. You know, seminary never taught the practical arts. Unless you count guitar.” Father Troy laughed a little self-consciously at his own joke, nervously stroking the beard he had just lately grown in an effort to look older.
Like co-conspirators the housekeeper and the young sandaled priest invited Gar to be among them, who accepted the offer with a warmth and naturalness that implied he knew it was coming all along.