Page 48 of Bent Heavens

“It’s not true,” Liv said. And it wasn’t, not anymore.

Aggie knocked over her glass, but it was empty. She tried to focus her eyes upon the tabletop droplets, but it was too much work.

“Sorry, Mom,” Liv whispered.

With only minutes to go before eight o’clock, Liv went to her mother’s side and helped her stand. Aggie’s body felt as if it belonged to a different creature. Believing this made it easier on Liv. This wasn’t her mother. It was another captured, injured beast. Liv hurried the beast down the hall and into the bedroom, and let the beast curl into a ball atop the mattress. The beast made moist murmurs, but Liv had to hurry. She shut the door, threw on her raincoat, and sprinted into the backyard, quick as a deer, admitting that tonight she was a beast, too. The time of humans had passed.

No time, no time. Quick, quick, improvise. An idea hit her, a crazy one, her only chance. She snatched the tools she needed and evaded her old friend, whose car she heard rattle into the driveway, and she reached the shed minutes before anyone would make it to the backyard. She knew by the din of laughter that the assembled teens were waiting under umbrellas for Doug Monk, their grand marshal, to parade them to the show. The sound of so many people so close to A was terrifying, but Liv did what she had to do before a line of twenty-some teenagers snaked around the side of the house.

Liv crouched in the rain at the edge of the woods to wait, watch, and listen. She therefore wasn’t present for the show—she could only hear the loudest noises near the end—and yet, shivering against the wet bark of a tree and wrapped in a white sheet of her own breath, she believed she could picture every single thing that happened.

It goes like this. Doug reaches the shed door and whirls around with enough dash that you can imagine a magician’s cape joining his ensemble of jacket and shorts. He welcomes one and all, as if instead of trudging across a soggy lawn, they have arrived at an exclusive club. He ignores the tittering at his cordiality, pretends he doesn’t see the flasks of liquor passed about. There are people here who lampoon Doug at school, and that should bother him, but it doesn’t. He’s too proud of the attendance—strong for having had only one day to pull it together.

Liv knows how Doug can monologue, but to these kids, his ability to harness so many words is an amusing surprise. They laugh and applaud, and Doug, as always, is deaf to their derision. He gets serious now. He motions them to be quiet. He cautions that they shouldn’t be scared by what they’re about to see, nothing’s going to hurt them, and this gets some in the crowd cheering louder, even while those with keener survival instincts feel their first twinges of concern.

When Doug switches the subject to Lee Fleming, the frivolity ebbs. What does Liv’s missing, basket-case father have to do with this? And where, come to think of it, is Liv? Doug’s off script now, ranting about how Lee Fleming tried to warn the whole ungrateful town, but no one listened. Even the most belligerent audience members feel a cold, eely slither in their stomachs.

Doug unlocks the padlock and flings open the shed door. Everyone has been to a Halloween haunted house before, and girls squeal and burrow into their boys, and everyone laughs. There’s a nervousness to the sound. Liv pictures the whole group waffling, but no one backs down. This is Doug Monk. You think anyone wants to admit being spooked by Doug Monk? Some guy goes first, and the rest crowd in after.

The fluorescents dump light like white paint. The contents of the shed are revealed. Those things all over the walls, holy shit. Are they weapons? A couple years back there’d been rumors, but everyone assumed the reality was a few handmade knives, not dozens of terrifying tools mounted like antlers in a lodge. Those nearest the walls try to edge back, but they’re packed too tight. Kids who live on farms recognize the hot claustrophobia of livestock shoved to the killing floor.

Doug is the room’s deadliest weapon. He’s standing with his back to them, looking at the floor. A sound catches their divided attentions. It is a soft, high-pitched sound. Those in the back have trouble isolating the source, but those in the front see it plain as day. At Doug’s feet is a wrinkled blue tarp. It bulges in the middle. It is covering something. Whatever it is keeps moving. Whatever it is whimpers. Everyone stares. No one breathes.

Doug stares, too. He looks as if he might have lost his nerve, and in some ways, this is the most frightening thing of all, because the crowded kids have no choice but to hope Doug Monk knows what he’s doing. Screens, though, are a way of establishing control, and out come the gadgets, glowing wands to ward off the fear, to reduce it to a harmless video file that will serve as proof of their survival.

Recording video means that Doug can’t stop now, even if he wants to, and Liv knows he wants to, because by now he can tell something’s not right. When has A ever been covered by a tarp? Doug doesn’t kneel down beside it as planned. Instead he reaches for the tarp as one might reach into a fireplace to extract a valuable. He pinches it with thumb and forefinger and lifts it away.

Under the tarp is a dog. A sheepdog mix with mud-spatter spots, whiskered with age, whining because it has been leashed for ten minutes in the cold. For a moment, the possibility of horror lingers, and the crowd holds its breath. But there’s something funny about this dog. It’s wearing a Chicago Bears football helmet. After the dog blinks at all the people, it recognizes Doug, and its lips stretch into a goofball grin. It stands, and without the tarp pressing down, the football helmet falls off, and when the dog begins dancing from the excitement of so many humans, it’s inevitable that somebody laughs.

You know how it goes. One laugh breeds a second. The girl who laughs second has a goofy-sounding laugh, and it provokes a third. The absurdity of the situation breaks over everyone. What a relief it is to crack up! Everyone guffaws, howls, roars. If Doug had intended this as comedy, it would be a smashing success, but he’s too shocked to play it off like a joke.

Some of the cameras have lights. Doug has to squint. He looks unsteady. There are two whole days before classes resume. Forget the Jackson Stegmaier video; this footage will trump all others. He’ll be the biggest joke in town. Except, perhaps, Lee Fleming, whose madness, in the form of a shed full of lunatic weapons, will be fully exposed at last. Everyone in Bloughton will see that Lee had been dangerous after all, and they are lucky to be rid of him. In other words, the opposite result of what Doug intended.

Get out, Doug says. Leave, he says. But it’s warm in the shed, and a rollicking good time, and no one listens. A girl squats down to scratch John’s ears, and Doug grabs the dog by the collar and yanks it away. He does it too hard; the dog yelps. People object, call him names. Get out, he repeats, but invectives have started to fly. Doug’s not just a creep, he’s a psycho, mean to animals, and the cameras catch it all. Doug flails his big arms and screams for them to get the fuck out, and get the fuck out they do, because the night has been crazy, this kid is crazy, and those crazy weapons look like they could really hurt someone.

23.

“I never should’ve given you a key.”

Doug hadn’t moved from the exact center of the shed. He drew long, shuddering breaths through his nostrils, his mountain shoulders rising, then dropping, all those tons of granite. Liv stood just inside the door, rain drizzling down her raincoat, back aching from too much time shivering in the woods. John licked her palm, the only spot of warmth in the world.

“It’s over,” she said.

“Where is it?”

“Where’s A, you mean.”

“Fine, A. But it’s an it, Liv.”

“Safe. A’s safe.”

Doug mashed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, as if grinding away the vision of those mocking classmates, their gleeful mouths, their glowing cameras. His cheek bulged with the fierce throb of his jaw.

Be the tallest you can, Liv told herself as her ice-block heart battered against icicle ribs. Doug’s whole body was shaking. She thought she could feel his vibration through the floor. She inched away and John followed, sniffing skinner all over her. Liv’s fear was that Doug could smell it, too.

“We need to turn A over to the police,” she said.

“No.”