Page 62 of Bent Heavens

She worked her way around the outbuilding’s side, found the door, and noted both its lack of lock and the dented jamb that suggested the lock had been clobbered. The door squeaked open. The contents were pedestrian. A wheelbarrow piled with work gloves, hand cultivators, and seed bags. A tractor tire cradling a carton of dust masks. A twiggy tangle of hoes, rakes, shovels, spades, and picks. There was no space for hiding anything. Liv was both crestfallen and relieved; she felt cornered and wanted out.

One step backward was as far as she got. There was something in here: a scent. She inhaled. Under the peaty odor of dirt and the sneezy tickle of pesticide squirmed sourer smells. Doug’s unwashed hair, sweaty clothes, stale gorp. Much stronger, A’s smell. Liv took her phone from her pocket and turned on the flashlight.

Liv swung the light from side to side. Shadows lurched, and details particularized. Over the wheelbarrow ran a shelf stretching wall to wall. Like the shelf in Faddon’s kitchen, this too was covered with small items. It was the neatness of these items that leaped out. Jars and bottles, clean and free of dust, each placed an equal space from the last like teeth in a jaw.

Liv came closer. The white light gleamed from glass too brightly for her to see anything, so she moved it to a more oblique angle. With a trembling hand, she picked up a mason jar. She brought it close, rotating it for the best angle. The contents looked limp and soft. For a moment she held out hope that the jars contained nothing worse than canned foods.

It was an eyeball. A’s eyeball, her dad’s eyeball. It was bloated, double its usual size. Liv recalled the eye’s perpetual nervous twitch, the strongest sign of Lee Fleming’s stubborn life. More than revulsion, Liv felt a bruising grief. The bottom of the eyeball was flat, having conformed to the jar’s shape. The sky-blue iris had gone a coin gray. It stared at nothing.

Somehow Liv put it back without dropping it. She swung the light over the shelf, and now that she knew the morbid context, a glance was all that was required to identify other artifacts. A bottle containing one of her father’s fingers in some kind of oil. A section of plywood upon which had been tacked dozens of multicolored tumors. A padded case that had once held an engraved pen but now held Lee’s short, bony tail.

The other jars, who knew? It all blacked out as Liv staggered away. Like Lee Fleming’s Armory, this was no mere shed. This was a sideshow to the main attraction, an in-progress museum waiting for description cards. Even after degradation in front of classmates, Doug still insisted on being a showman. Ages ago he’d angered her by saying that if she didn’t want to work the maze, she could run the adjacent barn. Usually owners sold cider and corndogs, he’d said.

Sometimes they turned it into a haunted house, he’d said.

From outside the building came a roar, loud as a passing jet. The world lit up. Liv threw herself against a wall, cowering, suddenly knowing that, one way or the other, this was the end, the end of all of it. She opened her eyes a slit and found that she’d collapsed into the cluster of farm tools. She took hold of the pointiest thing she saw—a pitchfork—and exited, grimacing against deafening concussion blasts and squinting into blinding starbursts of lights.

32.

Once upon a time, Liv knew which names went with which fireworks. Chrysanthemums, peonies, girandolas, willows, flying fish. All she knew about this one was that it was the size of a planet, exploding into dozens of whistling pink streaks. The cornfield went purple, an alien landscape, and Liv wished for it to be true, that she’d been abducted to the place her father had believed he’d gone, and from there watched the distant earth, that tight fist of misery, finally detonate.

Before the wiggling trails dissipated, a fresh round of crackling began, and sparks plumed from a spot maybe fifty yards into the maze. It thickened into a fountain of liquid fire, higher and higher, as green and red gusts of smoke billowed. This one was easy, a Roman candle, or more likely, a ream of Roman candles. I’m here, it said in its bang language. Come and find me. She angled toward the mouth of the maze, tripping and catching herself three times, unable to take her eyes from the soaring, sparkling spout. The corn was as dry as kindling. There would be a fire. The whole field would go up. What was Doug thinking?

Liv hesitated at the maze’s opening. Mazes had brought her here. The improbable twists of her long relationship with Doug, the inconceivable turns of rogue science. The corn on either side of the entrance bloomed with phosphorescent color. She trembled; the pitchfork slipped inches in her grip. Not once had she been able to successfully trace her finger through Doug’s Trick.

She forced herself to think of the Biatalik giant paused at the fringe of Black Glade. He’d had more to fear than she did. Liv looked down, saw Roman candle sparks reflected in the glass of her father’s wrist compass. Captured there, the sparks were so small. All her fears, she told herself, could be that small. His compass told her what it had always told him: The quickest way between two points was a straight line.

Liv charged down the mown path, and when she hit the left turn she did not turn. This was corn, not electrified fencing. She hurtled through a patch before bursting into a mown junction that she also ignored, keeping a compass trajectory toward the towering sparks. The maze seemed to come alive at her rejection of its rules. Thatches of ragweed cinched around her ankles. Corn leaves sliced thin cuts into her hands, neck, and forehead. With the pitchfork she batted away the worst of the stalks, which popped like her father’s bones when hit with a baton.

“It’s Dad!” she cried, though it was lost in the fireworks’ crackle. “It’s Dad, it’s Dad, it’s Dad!”

The size of the central clearing was so big that Liv, expecting more corn soldiers, careened ten feet into it before falling. Keeping both hands on the pitchfork, she hit the dirt hard, her shoulder bursting with pain. She rolled, bringing herself to an elbow, and there he was, Doug Monk, facing away from her, squatting in his army-green shorts, holding a butane lighter to the end of a long wick. It took, and Doug scuttled back to watch it burn. Liv squinted in the strobing light. It looked as if this batch of Roman candles was wired to another, then another, a chain of fireworks intended to keep going for thirty minutes, an hour, even longer.

Doug jumped back from the new flume, his feet knocking over his school backpack. He looked feral, his clothes filthy, his face smudged in mud, shreds of corn caught in his hair. But he looked happy, Liv thought, content at what he’d built and orchestrated. His smiling face oscillated to watch hundreds of sparks fall harmlessly to the dirt he’d cleared, and that’s how he caught a glimpse of the one element he hadn’t planned for, at least not this soon.

He turned so fast that he tripped. Gorp spilled from his pocket.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

Next to the candle’s percussive reports and the ringing of Liv’s ears, he sounded distant and muted. His face squashed into bewilderment, or rage, and this time he belted it.

“What are you doing there?”

Liv tried to push herself upward, but her shoulder, her palms, her toe, everything hurt, and she fell flat. Doug showed no sign of concern. He shook his head, his greasy hair twisted like more wicks ready to be lit. He was gesturing wildly.

“Didn’t you see the entrance? I set it up so you wouldn’t miss it! I lit the fireworks to guide you!”

“Where is he?” Liv panted.

Doug looked aggrieved. “A? I told you I’d take care of it.”

“That shed over there. I saw what you did.”

“What I did?” Doug rubbed his weary-looking face with both hands, his sweat turning dirt into mud. “You started it. The first night, remember? I’m just finishing because you don’t have the balls. You literally don’t have them.” He studied the stalks she’d broken, turquoise now in the fireworks’ light. “I’m going to have to repair all that. Do you know how long this took me?”

“Doug, listen to me.” Liv struggled to her knees. “Did you hear what I was yelling?”

“We can repair it together. I’m sorry I yelled.”