Uncollected Blood (13 page)

“You must feed it, me.” The man said. “Tonight it has to be me, and every night after you must find someone else to feed to it, until it is your turn, Davey.” He climbed up on the railing of the platform, and spread his arms wide.

The horrible thing seemed to open its mouth wide, its glassy form made razor blade teeth spreading round and twisting like a carousel.

Dave’s feet shook on the platform. He knew whatever it was would eat the man. It was his only hope. He dashed forward and thrust his hands against the man’s ankles to knock him off his balance. The man swayed and screamed, “Thank you, Davey! The gods thank you!” The man fell back. 

As the man splashed against the water, the rushing rapids next to them returned louder than ever. The sky was tinted orange from the light of the city not too far off. Dave could hear his heart pounding, his brain pulsating at his temples. His breath was heavy. Only ripples ran across the glassy surface, and the crickets and frogs began to cheer.

He felt something in him, knowledge of what must be done, in the form of a song. He began to sing, “Duck my head in shame…”

He collapsed onto the dock and stared at the glassy surface. The thing wasn’t satiated. He could hear its stomach grumbling for more.

It beckoned him.

More.

He turned a sound in the distance caught his attention. He could hear his name being called. He could run, he could never step foot on Belle Isle again. He knew that but his brain was filled with words he knew were not his own.

The stomach growled again.

“Eric!” He called back, “I’m over here!”

He heard it beckon him again.

More.

He could hear the footsteps of his friend sprinting towards him. They were enough to keep jarring into the thoughts that raced through his head. It was beginning to make sense just when Eric came into view, out of breath he called to Dave, “Come on! Let’s get out of here.”

Dave understood what was meant by ‘a particular kind.’

He began to hum the strange man’s tune.

July 15, 2002

They found one of the boys early the next day, all alone on the banks of Belle Isle, exhausted. His parents were forced to continue an expression of concern, as the other boy had not been found. “I came back for him, but I couldn’t find him anywhere.” The boy sobbed into his mother’s shoulder. He told them the story of the man who had chased them.

“The police are going to want to talk to you, find out what happened to your friend, whatever you can remember will help them.” His father said. The thought of what might’ve taken place over the last couple days still weighing on him. He tried to drown the horrors of his imagination, tried to believe they were just lost. But the look in his son’s eyes was different. Something had changed him.

“I know. I’m sorry dad.” The boy said and lifted an object he had been clutching beneath the blanket his mother wrapped him in, “I broke your binoculars.”

The father laughed and forced the laugh louder trying to squash his worries he stroked his son’s hair. “That’s alright. You’re all right. They’ll find Eric, don’t you worry”

Dave lied, “I hope so.”

THE END.

“It’s not like that. I always had good experience with priests growing up.” There was still some doubt in Father Crosby’s face. “Really, as an altar boy Father Adair used to have us butt heads like before a football game. He’d rally us up with more energy than he had once he got up on the altar. He was a retired priest still getting in a mass here and there; he fell eventually, but he was great to serve with. Really it’s priests that made me want to be a storyteller. The stories they told, they made me believe. They made me want to instill that same kind of sensation in others.”

“Fiction?” He pried into the level of my faith, which perhaps I had instigated by using the word ‘stories’.

“Well, I wanted to tell fiction. Everything is fiction the second you put it into words or take a photograph of it, even if you videotape it. You are removing all the many facts that make its existence real and you display the facts you, the storyteller, find pertinent.”  I cleared my throat, I had spoke so fast as not allow my words to offend even though I believed them. “I believe in the stories they told me. It’s not like I don’t have faith in God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, everything I learned in Catholic school. That is engrained in me and I don’t think I could be made to disbelieve it until I’m at the pearly gates and told otherwise.”

“You still haven’t explained to me why you don’t attend mass any more.” Father Crosby was staring down at his notes. I wish I had lied. I really wished I had just said I’d started attending mass regularly down in Richmond.

I lie about little things all the time, why did I speak truthfully when the meeting about the wedding arrangements was going so well?

“You really do need to start attending mass, as part of your relationship, marriage needs spirituality and that must be nourished along with everything else. You need to start attending mass with her before the wedding,” then after a moment he added, “and after.”

“I know. I know.” I was desperate to end the conversation and get out of the rectory and start wondering if I’d actually start attending again or take more time and effort to fabricate a solid lie complete with the name of the pastor and priests at the church in Richmond I would start attending. But a lump set in my throat because I knew why I hadn’t been attending. 

Most people I knew assumed it was a priest who I literally hated that drove me away, and it certainly kept me away but I know I was gone before that moment. I looked at Father Crosby, his lower lip tucked in with disgust as he leaned back in the chair waiting for something more like a promise from my lips.

“Even if you’ve lost faith in the church, please, go.” He said.

And then I slipped up again. I spoke the truth when I was better off lying.

“I can’t.” I squeaked out of my lips and landed on the table between us. Father Crosby’s bottom lip flipped out and his tongue wet his upper as his eyes strained to understand what possible excuse I would attempt next.

“You’re right, it’s not just laziness.” I shrugged. “I challenged the Devil.”

I hid my eyes and waited to hear his lips form a response, but nothing came.

“I was very self righteous. I wanted to become a priest. I wanted to fight evil, the Devil himself. And one evening in Church I can remember it was in the fall, because of the drive home. I challenged the Devil. I told him I was going to take him out. And something terrible hit me, the worst kind of feeling of dread, like my challenge had been heard. My sister drove us back home that night from the youth group and the trees… the way the headlights played off their naked branches, it wasn’t right. It was the darkest night I had ever experienced.”

The memory was like a knife in my brain, twisting.  I could remember the weight in my stomach.

“I had nightmares, I hope that’s all they were that night. Maybe I was just young, maybe it was all the stories I’d been hearing about possession, exorcism, the stories of Monks in South America battling the devil in their rooms late at night.  I’ve always had a great imagination.

“I felt evil on my bed. I felt it pressing down at my feet, looming over me, taunting me. I prayed and prayed.  I didn’t have a lamp next to my bed, I do now and will always have one, so to jump up and run to the door to flick on the light was too much for me. I slept tucked under the covers in a fetal position tight enough to be back in my mother’s womb.

“I slept with the lights on for a few weeks after that. Plenty of nightmares keeping me up until one day it just stopped. Maybe I’d had something else on my mind but life went on.

“I wanted to be a writer and an artist and started to pursue that, as priests came and went in our parish I met more that didn’t inspire me and worse in the lay people who ran the youth groups. They were the worst kind of people in the world. When I see Sarah Palin trying to run for office I see those women and it turns my stomach. I don’t mean to get political but that woman defines the evil PTA president who bans classic books. I don’t know much about Palin, I just get that vibe from her and others do too, so I assume I’m not crazy in my dislike for her.

“So I lost my extracurricular interest in Catholicism, I explored it rarely now, I’d read the Catechism as a sixteen year old! And now I was more interested in just writing stories and girls and college.

“I kept up church for most of College and the passion in me to fight evil came back and I thought about how I could do it and not have a repeat of what I believed had happened. No matter how much of it might’ve been my mind playing tricks on me. I didn’t even want to trick myself again. The safest way to battle evil would be a pen and paper, or in my case a computer and a keyboard.

“My interest in battling evil and the occult had only grown. I met interesting people, Wiccan’s who I didn’t view as evil and many other faiths but I still had mine and I still believed in evil. So I started a fictional story about the dangers of the occult. I had trouble finding other stories and movies on the subject and wondered why that was the case.  Sure there are the well known like the Exorcist, and the books of Dennis Wheatley, but I don’t think many were striving for the realism that I wanted to report on.

“And no offense, but modern thinking and even the Church, I felt were straying away from demons, and it did leave me wondering a bit more if I had been deceived by those priests I’d idolized. Heck, rumor was one of them even performed an exorcism in our area and I’ve heard stories from non-Catholics around here that would be enough to support those claims if I trusted the mouth they came from.  I’m not asking you to confirm anything.” I added and wondered if I was speaking too fast, but he sat with his brow lowered and his chin pushing folds of skin against his neck.

“So the project came and went depending on my current passion for it, in my mind I’d take notes. But it wasn’t until I actually started to work on it. When I completed a first draft, bad things started again. My life around me started to fall apart. I ran out of money, I was kicked out of my parent’s house, got into a heated argument with my girlfriend’s father. All around my world was just this terrible place and I wanted to rebel and escape it.  Gave up writing, tossed a lot of work, burned my artwork. I wanted to be somebody else and all the time just haunted and pained at night.  I had gone to Church and felt nothing.

“It was Easter Sunday and I was outside the church because it was too crowed and they had a tent with a television on so we could see the altar. I felt detached. It was the first time I ever felt that, and I’ve felt it ever since.

“A few weeks later everything resolved itself, almost like it had never happened.  I had stopped going to Mass, though I would show up on the holidays required by my family. You know when the twice a year Catholics show up.  But my life made an upswing. Grades improved, found a job I loved, had my future fiancé. My relationship with my family was even the best it ever had been.

“I always wanted to go back to Church, it wasn’t like I had actually lost my faith. I still believed it feverishly.  It wasn’t even a disgust at the way things were being done or even how the scandal was handled. I knew the media is what it is, it’s meant to sell, and they worked an angle that was unfair to the Church as a whole. So like I said, it wasn’t that.  It was the people at Church with me. I didn’t believe in them. I didn’t want to be associated with them. They would say ‘Peace be with you’ and shake your hand (before germs scared that tradition out of the parish) and then they’d cut you off in the parking lot or gossip solely to put others down.  If that was a Christian I didn’t want to be one. So I did start to develop my faith more personally with God, but I admit I wasn’t doing it every Sunday.

“But the project was still there, it was still something that would shout into my mind and sometimes I’d mean to start it again and forget, and other times I would sit down and get to work on it and passionately report my work to others only for bad things to start again. Creepy things.  I mean most of it would sound so cliché, right out of a horror movie. And again it may have been my imagination already in tuned for the writing.  Sometimes it would be little things, like the way my apartment’s bedroom door is, it looks out into the hall and is 90 degrees to the bathroom door and the entrance in about a door’s width’s distance, and I think I had lit a candle in the living room down the hall and in my bedroom, and then had partially closed my door, not too far because I wanted to remember to blow out the candle.

“And I went to work. Researching, taking notes, getting excited about inspiring others that evil can be fought.  And I hear a creak on the floorboards, this was an apartment in the Fan District, every wood floor creaks when you step on it.  I paused. My computer was in line with the door and I stared over at the door and listened. Some one was there watching me.  I could feel them, same as when my roommate would use the bathroom, and I knew he was outside the door brushing his teeth and still watching the television in the living room. Through the crack in the door I could even make out the dark figure that candlelight was silhouetting.  I knew some one was outside my door and I couldn’t take it. I knew I was the only person in the apartment that night. It felt like it was one motion, but I flung the door open and stood up, and there it was.

“My bathroom door was open all the way, against the wall, the towels on the door hooks had been the dark figure. It was my mind playing tricks on me, but how come it felt like something had just left? Like there had been something there in that space a moment ago? Do you know that feeling?

“I stopped working again. Had a bad day at work the following day, other little things.  That’s what always happened when I would work on the project, things would get real bad and if I said no more and shelved the project things returned to normal. Like nothing bad ever happened. Any bridge that seemed burned was never burned at all.  It was strange and comforting to know.

“But my attraction to this project still stood, still stands.” I corrected myself, “I remember jotting down a note in my yellow pad for when I was brave enough to tempt fate and forget superstition and write again, and that night I was awoke by what I thought was arguing, but there was no arguing but perhaps in my dream. Ellwood Avenue was strangely quiet that night and then I heard a woman’s voice, screaming, and it sounded like she was screaming into my window from the porch outside, the window right next to my pillow.

“’I’m not afraid of you anymore!’ She screamed, several times, but it wasn’t so much fear but as if she were mocking me. As if she meant to do me harm. Suddenly I swear it was a gunshot and maybe it was a door slam. But the night became quiet again. I waited for sirens, anything. Her words repeating, ‘I’m not afraid of you anymore.’

“Terrified of what might’ve happened if it had been a domestic or something. I searched the Richmond Times Dispatch the following day and found nothing. I was convinced it was another of the strange bad things that happened when I worked on the project. I didn’t pursue work on it again.

“Well until maybe a year later, and I remember waking up and seeing the dark form standing against my door. It was the most terrifying shape just lurking there against my door, watching me sleep. I knew it wasn’t going to do anything unless I got up, it was waiting for me to move and I swear I could feel it smiling.

“When I woke up I realized what I had seen. The bedroom door has two hooks on the back that I hang my Cahart jacket on and my nice jacket on. When my fiancé had visited to attend someone’s wedding she’d hung her dress on the one hook and moved the Cahart jacket over top the other jacket.  When she’d left I hadn’t switched the jacket back over since it was late spring and I wasn’t using either. In the way the streetlights illuminate my room at night the whites of the wall stand out. Without the familiar dark shapes on the door and just this one monstrous one I must’ve imagined it. And the smile? I could even equate that to the flickering of a Netgear Router I’d moved up higher so my roommate could get a better wireless signal. Perhaps it had flickered and caught the hood of the Cahart jacket just right.

“You see I can explain it all. It’s not unexplainable, there’s always an answer and I should be content with the idea that it is solely my imagination. But I can watch a horror film and never jump, never get tense. And I’m left with a phrase I’ve heard so much, ‘the greatest trick was…’

I didn’t finish, Father Crosby knew the line and it sent shivers up my spine to even remind myself that something more than a jacket or a towel was in my room that night.