The Heavens Rise Read online

  Arthelle dropped the stick she’d been using to prod the carcasses when she realized the other end had sunk into exposed brain matter. The squirrels hadn’t tucked their heads underneath their bodies as she’d first assumed. Their skulls had been smashed in. By what exactly, she had no idea. If it had been a tool wielded by a man, the blows were amazingly precise. The poor guys weren’t that big, and the rest of their bodies were undamaged.

  Not smashed. That’s not right either. Exploded.

  Childhood horror stories about seagulls being killed by Alka-Seltzer pellets swirled in her head, but it was the stomach that got blown out in that scenario, wasn’t it? Not the skull. Not the brains. And from their respective poses, it looked like the squirrels had been crawling straight for the window when the event in question had reduced each of their heads to little mounds of gore. And it didn’t look as if it had all happened at once. Some of the poor little guys . . . well, they looked fresher than the others.

  There was a perfectly logical explanation, she was sure of it; gruesome, to be sure, and a very valid reason to get the hell away from the furry little devils and report the whole mess to security, but logical nonetheless.

  God knows, they didn’t need any more weirdness around Marshall Ferriot. That was for sure.

  Spend your day working around mannequins and you were bound to believe one of them had turned its head in your direction when you weren’t looking. This was normal, and to be forgiven. But it was also to be contained and dealt with responsibly. This was the lecture Arthelle gave Tammy Keene, Emily New Girl and the other nurses who had joined them for dinner that evening at one of the malls in Buckhead. The squirrel slaughter was common knowledge by then, and Arthelle figured the last few women who had invited themselves along were after gruesome details, not comfort food.

  For a moment or two, it seemed as if her lecture had worked. Arthelle’s fellow nurses responded with bowed heads and the dull clinks of spoons hitting cast-iron skillets as they all devoured their macaroni and cheese.

  “He killed them.”

  It was Emily who’d said it, of course; Emily, with her doe eyes, and that squeaky, cartoony voice Arthelle just knew was an act designed to get men to take care of her. Little Emily New Girl, her head full of childish ideas that would never provide her with a grown-up life. And even though she looked away quickly from Arthelle’s fearsome glare, the sight of it wasn’t enough to keep her mouth shut.

  “He can make you do things . . . he can. If you look into his eyes, he can make you . . . And when it’s over, you don’t remember doing any of it.”

  No one said anything until the waiter brought the check.

  • • •

  The bird was next. It happened early in the morning and, while no one saw the event itself, everyone who was on the wing at that moment heard the loud thwack the crow made as it flew right into Room 4’s window with enough force to crack the glass in two places. And because there had been no witnesses, no one could tell if the bird’s compact skull had cracked open during the collision or just moments before.

  And even though there was no evidence that young Marshall Ferriot had been disturbed by the event—or any other event that had taken place in his immediate vicinity for the past eight years, for that matter—he was moved to another room later that afternoon, this one featuring a view of a barren service alley with a Dumpster tucked at the far end.

  “Somebody better pop the lid on that Dumpster a couple times this week,” Tammy Keene said after she and Arthelle had tucked Ferriot into his new bed. “Make sure the rats are doing okay.”

  “Hush your mouth, girl,” Arthelle whispered. “I’m tired of this nonsense.”

  Sick to death of the whole subject was more like it. The poor boy was a vegetable, for Christ’s sake. And she was coming to hate how quickly the women in her life would give their heads over to superstitious gobbledygook. Sisters, in particular. Almost every girlfriend of hers from childhood had grown up to be some crazy Bible-thumping church lady. Arthelle sometimes felt like the only black woman in the South who wanted to live a life of the mind.

  There was also the fact that she didn’t feel like telling Tammy, or anyone else for that matter, about how badly she’d gone off on Little Emily when she caught the girl rooting through Ferriot’s file that morning. So some trust based at a New Orleans bank paid for the boy’s care? So what? None of it was proof that the boy was some kind of witch or warlock or whatever else little Emily was making him out to be to the other nurses.

  He was a patient just like all the others and, if he gave Emily the creeps, she should stay out of his goddamn room and stop making trouble. Otherwise, Arthelle would have her ass fired.

  They had a job to do, and it wasn’t to make up stories.

  4

  * * *

  TANGIPAHOA PARISH

  APRIL 2005

  After they crossed Lake Pontchartrain, Marshall used his fake ID to buy them a milk carton full of frozen strawberry daiquiri and, when they were passing through Madisonville, a tiny hamlet that sits right at the spot where the Tchefuncte River slides free of Lake Pontchartrain’s northern shore, Marshall reached across the gearshift and took Nikki’s hand. For several agonizing seconds, her 4-Runner thudded over the steel girders of the town’s tiny drawbridge before she closed her fingers around his. And even though she wouldn’t look at him, he sprouted a painful hard-on in his jeans.

  “Watch out for snakes!” Nikki said as they walked up the oyster-shell driveway to the property. It was the third time she’d warned him about a possible reptile encounter since they’d stepped from her car. Snakes didn’t bother him much, but they sure as hell got to her. He found himself taking note of this fact, lingering over it, wondering if perhaps he could put it to some kind of use. For her own good, of course. If I can cure her of a terrible fear, just think of the things she might let me do to her.

  Like most children who’d grown up in Louisiana, she’d probably heard that old story about the water skier on the bayou who lost his balance and started screaming, “Help, I’m in barbed wire!” Only, according to the story, it wasn’t barbed wire. When the boat circled back, the friends pulled the man from the water to find him festooned with thick, black serpents. An entire school of water moccasins! Maybe if he told her that he’d found the story listed in an anthology of debunked urban legends or that, while water moccasins were certainly aggressive, they had terrible aim when it came time to bite, she might like him even more.

  He followed the beam of her flashlight, which she kept angled on the mud underfoot, across the broad lawn that sat between the house and the dark, gurgling rectangle of the swimming pool. The entire property was plated in deep darkness that became impenetrable at its wooded borders, and the fact that she wasn’t leading him into the house, or in the direction of any shed that might contain light switches, sent shivers of delicious anticipation racing up his spine.

  This is what you get when you work hard enough, he thought, as he listened to their intermittent gasping breaths. If you sit through enough bullshit coffee dates, if you’re a man of promise and resources, you can get a girl like Nikki Delongpre to take you to her secret love nest under the cover of darkness.

  Even better, he was one of the first people to see this place in its current incarnation. The house had been finished only a few weeks before, and the contractors had filled the pool just a day or two ago. There was some kind of party planned in the next few weeks, probably a housewarming, but she got fuzzy on the details as soon as she brought it up, probably because she wasn’t ready to invite him. He’d floated some details about the shitty fund-raiser at the Plimsoll Club that his parents were forcing him to attend in a week, just enough to see if she wanted to be his date, but she’d gotten vague and distant then too.

  But none of that mattered in this moment. He was here! Elysium!

  She dropped the icy milk carton onto a lounger he could barely make out in the darkness. They were standing on flagstones now
.

  “Let me get some cups, turn some lights on,” she said, already turning for the house.

  He took her gently by the arm and held her in place.

  “Don’t leave me . . .” he gently whined.

  Her laughter was more breath than anything else, and he couldn’t see her face, just that she had bowed her head slightly to keep their mouths from meeting. Lights meant more chatter, more feelings and more bullshit. The dark promised him the taste of her neck, the heft of her breasts and the heat between her slender thighs.

  “It’s too dark,” she whispered.

  “What are you afraid of? Snakes?”

  “Seriously. Don’t even . . .”

  But in her rush to make this point emphatic, she’d lifted her lips to within inches of his, and he seized the moment. Their connection was instant, moist, her mouth yielding, her body going limp as he curved his arms around her back. She was as hungry for this as he was. At least it seemed that way for about three minutes, and then she started to stiffen. He needed to make another move, and fast.

  He lightened up on the kissing, allowed her to breathe for a second or two, but he kept his arms wrapped around her as he walked them closer to the pool’s dark edge.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of anything,” he whispered. “I’ll protect you from all of it.”

  Then he hurled them into the pool.

  The water was so cold it hit them with the force of an anvil, and only then did Marshall remember what she’d said about its being fed by some kind of artesian well. But he kept her locked in his embrace, even as she coughed and cursed him and sputtered.

  “I’ve got you . . . I’ve got you . . .” he said over and over again, and after trying to pull away from him, she finally relented. When she held to him with fresh childlike desperation, he realized it was her total fear of their dark, rippling surroundings that had sealed her body against his. She would rather cling to him in the freezing cold than dog-paddle a few feet through water she couldn’t see the bottom of.

  And so he went back to work, with more force now, attacking her neck, peeling her soaked shirt up above her stomach, palming her breasts and then kneading them, and the whole time he kept waiting for her bone-rattling shivers to come to an end, for the warmth of desire to fill her as it was filling him. But she kept shivering in his arms, no matter what he did to her. And when he went to lift her shirt up over her bra, when her arms became caught halfway overhead inside her soaked sleeves, he realized she wasn’t helping, she was resisting, trying to pull her arms free while kicking herself away from him at the same time.

  “Hey,” she said, and her voice was as cool as ice, without a trace of desire in it, and just this simple word told him she was feeling none of what he had just felt. None of the desire, no loss of control.

  There was a deep, resounding thud against the stone nearby. Marshall felt it in his chest, then he felt it in his outstretched arms, and realized he’d been the cause of it. In the darkness, he could just make out the white’s of Nikki’s eyes. He had taken her by both shoulders and slammed her head into the side of the pool.

  “Marshall,” she said quietly. But there was a trembling edge to her words that sounded like both a question and a challenge. Just by saying his name she was asking him how much further he was going to go. That Nikki Delongpre, nothing gets to her. Not even concrete. But he had gotten to her, all right. She was terrified. Paralyzed, hardly hysterical, but terrified nonetheless. And for a moment he thought about doing something to her, something really bad, something he’d never done before. But she wouldn’t keep it a secret, not like the other skanks he liked to play with. And if she wouldn’t keep it a secret, that meant whatever he did would have to be . . . final.

  “Marshall, I’m going to get out of the water now.” Soft, gentle and condescending, like she was talking to a man with a gun. And wasn’t she, in a way? After all, he was taking stock of certain things, like the fact that she’d kept everything between them such a secret. Had she even told anyone she was out there with him? How far away was the nearest neighbor? A ten-minute boat ride?

  Too much work.

  That’s what it came down to in the end.

  He allowed her to slide free of his grip and hoist herself up onto the flagstones. As soon as her feet were on solid ground, she grabbed for the flashlight and wheeled on him. “You son of a—” but the words died in her mouth when she saw what the beam had landed on.

  The pool was full of them.

  At first he thought it must be some kind of plankton, or maybe even sawdust left over from the construction. But these things weren’t the color of wood, they were the color of skin, and they were everywhere, clustered together in beige clumps that looked like shredded human flesh. And they were drifting through the water with determination, driven by currents he couldn’t feel.

  Then darkness descended over him as Nikki took off running, the bouncing beam marking her path toward to the driveway. He could hear the jangle of the keys she’d already pulled from her pocket, could see her furiously wiping her other arm across her shirt, too frightened of him to stop and see how many of the crawly little things from the pool were still clinging to her.

  He was still hoisting himself out of the pool when the 4-Runner’s engine sputtered to life and the headlights swung out into the swamp’s darkness and disappeared.

  He wiped his arms in the darkness for a few minutes. But he didn’t care. And he didn’t care that she’d just abandoned him either. No, what mattered most to him, what would cling to his soul most forcefully about this night in the days to come, was the realization that he’d allowed her to escape, a realization that now felt as overpowering as discovering you had cancerous tumors all through your body.

  I decided not to kill a woman because it sounded like too much work.

  Finally he forgot about whatever the pool was full of and just stood there, letting the water run down his body and onto the flagstones. And what steadied his breaths, what chased away his memory of her flashlight beam bouncing off in the direction of her 4-Runner, was a new series of images that came to him unbidden.

  Nikki Delongpre was staring up into his eyes as he held her to the mud a few feet away from where he stood now. One hand was around her throat, the other was drawing a paring knife up the length of her torso, slicing the flesh over her breastbone, drawing a red thread past the breasts she had refused to reveal to him. In this vision, Nikki did not scream or cry out or beg for him to stop. Rather, she gazed right into his eyes as a flowing, crimson seam opened in the center of her chest, her stunned, moist-eyed expression radiating a silent, awestruck recognition of his newfound power.

  He was not a sick man. A sick man would have craved the sound of her screams, and those did not figure into this little fantasy of his. In fact, he was immensely proud of the cleanliness of this vision, of its lack of common violence, of his own ability to be perfectly content with just this focused display of pure physical dominance and its flowing, unstoppable result.

  • • •

  He tried to apologize, but she wouldn’t let him.

  In the days that followed, before he made a decision that changed everything, she vanished wherever he appeared, out a side door in the locker room, into the warren of rooms behind the theater during lunch. The injustice of this began to bore into him more deeply than her rejection of him out in the swamp. It was as if she’d sensed the bloody fantasy that had coursed through him as she’d run for her car and was determined to let him simmer in it. Not just simmer. Drown altogether.

  He blamed her for the deep throbbing ache in his jaw that alerted him to the fact that he’d been gritting his teeth for an hour. He blamed her for the sickness that had come over him later that night, even though he knew those disgusting little crawly things in the pool were probably to blame. (The chills and the nausea had gripped him while he was still in the car on the way home with his father. Of course, his dad hadn’t pressed for an explanation; he lived in such
terror that his only son would turn out to be a bone smoker, Marshall could talk his way out of anything with even the vaguest story implying he’d been alone with a member of the opposite sex.)

  And then came the final and most crushing blow.

  They were back together. Nikki and Anthem, Cannon’s most perfect couple. After all the work Marshall had done, trust had been restored. How was it even possible? As he lay awake at night, seething with rage, those footsteps up the oyster-shell driveway toward Elysium’s darkened pool seemed like the last few seconds before an Olympic diver hit the water at a contorted angle, the chance of a medal rippling out away from him as he plunged under the surface. But the moment he couldn’t wash from his mind was the last words Nikki had said to him before fear had gripped her entirely.

  Watch out for snakes.

  • • •

  The Delongpre residence was a two-story Greek Revival on Prytania Street, just a block from Lafayette Cemetery. The second-floor porch was big enough for a swing, and a high wrought-iron fence protected the front yard. But the driveway, an expanse of red brick, was open and exposed to the street, and that’s where the family’s hunter-green Ford Explorer sat with its cargo door half open, the dome light sending a soft spill of light over its leather cream-colored seats.

  Half a block away, Marshall sat behind the wheel of his father’s BMW, watching Millie and Nikki Delongpre load their overnight bags and groceries.

  In the locker room at school, he had overheard talk of a party, a birthday party for Nikki’s mother. But it wouldn’t just be a celebration of Millie Delongpre’s forty-seventh. It was also the first social occasion Anthem and Nikki would be attending together following their reunion, their official coming-out-after-coming-apart party. So far, there had been no sign of the man of the hour, no glimpse of Anthem Landry’s cherry-red F-150 pickup truck. Maybe he was meeting them tomorrow. At almost nine o’clock, the Delongpres were certainly getting a late start.