Inheritance: A Novel Part 35

Martin Henninger turned to face the boy, and the boy started to scream loud enough to fill the whole house with his fear. Paul watched the boy scramble up the stairs to his room, a.s.s over elbows, just like he remembered. He would be up there for the rest of the night, hugging his knees and shaking.

But it was the adult Paul that got the real shock. His father was standing inches from his shoulder, eyes still turned up into his skull, and there was a humming noise coming from somewhere deep down in his throat. Paul gasped and fell back, and for a second he was unable to catch his breath.

He said, "Daddy, holy-"

But the shock faded fast. What took its place was a vaguely familiar giddiness, like the thrill he used to feel just before he took the field back when he was playing football. He was nervous, but not scared.

He recognized the word struggling to take shape in his father's humming. The word was build.

Build it, Paul. You know how.

And he did know how. He knew exactly what to do.

Paul went down to his truck and got some baling wire from the cab. He wrapped the baling wire around his fist and went into the yard and gathered together a bundle of sticks.

Upstairs, he put the sticks in a pile on the floor between the bed and Rachel's boxes of paperbacks and sat down Indian-style in front of them. For a moment he was confused, unfocused, but then he realized that he was trying too hard to make something happen. He stopped, took a deep breath, and let that part of his mind go. He put his hands down into his lap and thought about breathing.

In and out, in and out. Just let it come.

And it did come. His head rolled back on his shoulders and his mouth fell open and his hands started to move on their own.

A hot breeze touched his face and he opened his eyes. He tasted dust. He was standing on a limestone outcropping, looking down over a vast desert plain of caramel-colored sand and scraggly vegetation. The ground shook beneath him. In the distance, a wall of static energy rushed towards him, eating up the desert and the sky at a speed almost too fast for his mind to absorb. Miles of desert disappeared in seconds. The entire summit of the sky melted into a roaring, frenetic static. The wall stopped just beyond his reach, and he stood like a primitive man at the foot of an advancing glacier, looking up at the ice walls of its world-destroying face.

He stepped forward and put a hand into the wall. Light and energy slipped through his fingers like sand. He turned his hand over and stared at the grains of light pooling in his palm and all at once he saw the pieces of the puzzle coming together, the big picture forming into a coherent whole. He saw his father unable to cross over, unable to hold the door open between his world and Paul's. He saw Magdalena Chavarria in her home, small and alone before a force she had never truly understood. She was scared, confused, terrified by the things Paul's father had made her do. She was working against him, doing everything she could to keep the doors between the worlds closed.

And Paul could also see into the years ahead. He could see himself as his father had described him, a lodestar to men, a light to s.h.i.+ne into the corners of even the darkest minds. He saw himself as a latter day Jeremiah, a prophet turning a hard eye on the destruction of one world and the birth of a new one.

He was aroused by the destruction. But he was not without love for what was lost.

All things in balance.

When Rachel walked in the door to the apartment she was aware of three things more or less at the same time. The first was the unbearable heat of the place. It was like stepping into an oven. As soon as she opened the door she got a blast of it in her face and she thought, The air conditioner's out again. G.o.dd.a.m.n this place.

The second thing she noticed was the curious stick lattice next to her bed. It was a beach ball-sized collection of oak twigs lashed together into a shape that seemed to defy any readily discernible purpose. They jutted away from each other in odd directions, like an erector set put together by a brilliant, but insane, child. Had she encountered it in a museum, she might have thought it a weak example of modern art, some vaguely humorous attempt to merge the abstract sculptures of Charles O. Perry and Bathsheba Grossman. But here, in her apartment, it seemed grotesque. And a little frightening.

But the third thing she noticed was really the thing that tilted her over the edge. It was Paul, in his jeans and a loose t-s.h.i.+rt, his hair all over the place as though air dried after a shower. He was s.h.i.+ning. There was no other word for it than that. Looking at him, she could see a glow coming off his skin. She thought of Claire Danes in the movie version of Neil Gaiman's Stardust, light emanating from her skin. Though unlike Danes, it was not beauty that caused him to s.h.i.+ne. He was s.h.i.+ning from love and joy and pride, but it from violence, and the end of things. The apocalypse s.h.i.+ning forth from the face of a man.

"Paul?"

He blinked, then looked at her. "Hey, you're home."

"Yeah," she said. "Are you...okay?"

"I'm fine."

"What are you doing on the floor?"

He nodded to himself. He said, "I made this today."

"Yeah, I noticed. Um, what did you do today?"

"Just this."

"Oh. Did you sleep?"

He didn't answer.

She said, "It's hot in here. Did the landlord call today?"

"No."

"Oh. You didn't happen to call him, did you?"

"No."

She waited for more. She hoped for more, something to break the weirdness of the moment.

Nothing came.

"Paul?"

He almost snapped his answer at her. "What?"

The suddenness of it surprised her. She stepped inside and put her purse on the bookshelf near the door. The s.h.i.+ne in his face was going away, but she could still see it, and he was still sitting on the floor. He wasn't looking at her.

"Did you think about what you want for dinner?"

"No."

"Oh, okay. Do you want to go someplace? We haven't been to dinner in a while."

"I don't care," he said. "I'm not hungry."

"Oh."

He rose from the floor and dropped into his favorite recliner. She crossed the living room and sat on the edge of the bed. She hadn't planned on discussing this so bluntly. Her idea of how it would go was more subtle. She would come in to the apartment and get dressed into something more comfortable, jeans and a light blouse maybe. They would sit next to one another on the couch. She would hold his hands in hers. She would say something like, "Paul, I've been thinking about this all day, and I have to tell you, I just don't believe in ghosts. I don't know if you do or not, but I know that you've told me you've seen your father. You've told me he's killed somebody. That black boy in the train car. I'll be as honest as I can be and say I don't believe that. I'm not calling you a liar, but I just don't believe the dead walk beside us. I don't believe they hurt people. But that doesn't mean there isn't some other explanation. Tell me everything. Maybe together we can figure it out."

Her days were spent filing billing statements at the dentist's office where she worked. It was mindless work. She could turn off all but one percent of her brain and still look like the best bill-filer in the business. Normally she thought of anything else but work. She and her friends laughed about their stupid husbands or their thoughtless boyfriends or books they were reading or patients who deserved the toothaches they got because they were such a.s.sholes, but all day long she had been thinking about that speech. She had worked it out, more or less word for word, hoping it would be enough to get Paul talking. Sometimes he was so hard to get talking.

But now, in the face of his complete disinterest in her, all that came out was, "Paul, can we talk about what you told me? You know, about your father?"

He said, "You know what, I am kind of hungry. Make me some fried chicken."

That caught her off guard. She said, "What?"

"Fried chicken. You know, a little egg, a little flour. You fry it up in some oil."

"Um, yeah," she said. "I know."

"Good. Make me some chicken."

"O-okay," she said. "Sure, Paul. Anything you want."

He turned away from her.

She said, "Paul, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-"

"Just make me the f.u.c.king chicken," he roared. He stood up and glared at her. When she didn't move, he waved her off with a disgusted flick of his hand. "G.o.dd.a.m.n it, Rachel. It ain't that f.u.c.king hard. You complain about the G.o.dd.a.m.n air conditioner. You complain that I never take you out to eat. For f.u.c.k's sake. Do me a favor, would you? You wanna f.u.c.king complain? Go outside and tell it to the wall so I don't have to f.u.c.king listen to you."

Rachel was so stunned she couldn't answer him.

He gave her another disgusted glare, then crossed to the little closet next to the bathroom door and took down a fresh uniform.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"I'm goin' to work."

"Paul, it's not even six thirty. You don't have to be at work until-"

"I'm going to work," he said.

And then he shouldered his uniform, took up his gun belt and boots, and walked right out the door.

Rachel watched him go, speechless.

Chapter 16.

Paul stood beside a junked Buick in the vacant lot next to Magdalena's house. From where he was he could see her moving around inside through one of her kitchen windows. She was pacing her floor, grinding her hands together, looking like someone who has realized too late that they are in far over their heads.

Off to the west the sky was the color of rust and copper. Dust tails curled over the cracked and wrinkled street. Paul had the sensation of standing outside himself, almost as though he was floating above his body, watching what happened with a drugged disinterest. He wanted to pull himself loose from what was happening, but it was so hard. He felt so sleepy, and it was so easy to just float and watch and not fight.

Inside the house, Magdalena was moving from the living room, towards the front door, and out of sight. When she reappeared, she went to the window in the kitchen and looked outside. She was definitely expecting something.

"Time to go," a voice inside his head said.

Paul slipped over the hurricane fence that surrounded Magdalena's backyard and walked through her herd of goats on his way to the backdoor. Male goats p.i.s.s on each other's heads as a show of dominance, and the urine smell was strong here. These were Angora goats exactly like the kind his family had raised, though the pen these goats were kept in was much smaller than the one his family had used on their farm. The goats had eaten all the gra.s.s from the ground and there was a muddy pit in the middle of their pen. They had been rolling in the pit, and the goats that watched him cross the yard to the house were crusty with dried mud. He cooed at them to keep them quiet, looked around to make sure no one was watching, then knocked gently on the door.

He had heard Magdalena moving around inside, pacing the hardwood floors of her living room, but when he knocked that noise stopped. He reached out with his mind and was surprised by what he could see. She was in there, her fingers touching her lips, her eyes darting this way and that like a mouse in a room full of sleeping cats, and he could see it all as clearly as if she had been standing right in front of him, no door in between.

He knocked again.

When she didn't answer, he jumped the fence and crossed to the kitchen window that had given him such a good view of her before. She was standing there, watching the backdoor in exactly the same pose as he'd seen her in his mind. He knocked on the gla.s.s with the backs of his knuckles and watched her jump. She stared at him through the gla.s.s, and though there was recognition on her face, it was like her feet were nailed to the floor.

Paul glanced towards the street. Earlier, there had been a two- or three-year-old little boy out there, playing with an empty beer bottle in a weedpatch yard. Now, there was an ancient looking heroin junkie staggering down the sidewalk. He couldn't see the kid.

He turned back to Magdalena and said, "Open the door."

She nodded and made for the front of the house.

He tapped the gla.s.s again with his knuckles and said, "The backdoor."

"Oh," she said, and turned around and went to the back of the house.

A moment later, Paul was standing in her living room.

She was a nervous wreck. She paced and muttered and squeezed her hands together like she was trying to scrub them clean. Paul sat on her couch, leaning back casually, one leg crossed over the knee of the other, watching her. With every step she took he felt his feelings hardening towards her. More and more of his father was seeping into him, taking control of the situation, and as that happened, Paul began to lose interest in what was about to happen to her.

"You said you could answer my questions," he said. "You mind sitting down to do that? You're making me dizzy."

"Oh. Yes. Yes, of course."

She pulled up a chair and sat down in front of him. She wore a purple blouse and brown pants with a frayed and muddied hem, like they were too long for her. Her face was round and splotchy with pencil eraser-sized blemishes. Deep crease lines were etched into the corners of her eyes. Her lips looked gray. Paul supposed he could still see traces of the girl in the red dress that had come to the Mexican motel room all those years ago, but only with effort.

"The last few days have been hard on you," he said. Not a question.

She nodded. "Yes, very hard."

"It shows in your face. When I saw you at the funeral you didn't look this way."

"Much has happened," she said.

Paul picked at a loose piece of skin at the corner of his thumbnail. He said, "You told me you had answers. What kind of questions am I supposed to ask you?"

"You have had the visions, yes?"

"A few, yes. I know how you know my father, if that's what you mean."

"You know that I was raised by my Abuela, my grandmother."

"The woman with the rattlesnake. Yes, I know."

Magdalena sounded alarmed at that. "You have seen her with the snake?"

"In a dream, yes. I saw her. She was trying to hand me a live snake. She was speaking a language I didn't recognize."