The Grammatically Negligent – and hilariously grumpy – Review

Writing this was difficult.  The whole of 1929 has sort of dragged, and I’m going to have to go back and fix it when I’m all done.  But we’re almost done.  A lot happens in this chapter (Finally dammit!) and I’m actually fairly happy with this part of it.

In other news I wrote this chapter to improbable music (Vienna Teng songs) but somehow it seemed to work.  One of these days I’m going to list what I wrote each chapter to, but right now is not the time.  Now is the time for sleep.  Lots of it.

Chapter Twenty Four
Guilt

My friend Alan – Elijah told you about him – once told me in his flat in London that I was a woman without a conscience. In Boston he told me, after everything that had happened there on the Dark Roads, that it was the first time in my life that I had ever felt guilt. He was wrong of course. I am many things, but one of them isn’t a sociopath. There are things that I’ve done tshat I regret. There just aren’t many of them. But the first time that I can remember feeling guilt was here in New Orleans. When I think of Santos, I feel guilt.

Perhaps I shouldn’t. It is, after all, not my fault what happened to him. Santos was an adult, and the decisions he made were his own. Would he have made them without me? No. But that is an accident of fate, and not an accident of my being there.

I am justifying it of course. I might not have been responsible for the actual decision but I paved the way for him. I was permissive, and for a man who likely hadn’t seen much in the way of permissiveness (from his religion, from his father) the idea that he could do anything must have been intoxicating. And whatever this was, his telling me that it could get him to talk to the dead must have been impossible to turn down.

His father stood in my doorway a storm on his face. I did not fear for my life. He was a priest, and he was a good man. But this was his son, and I while I knew he could never hurt me, I feared for what I would have to do to him should it come to that.

“There is a monster underneath the church.” I was still shaking but I wouldn’t show it. Part of me wanted to leave this place, and leave whatever had come from below free reign. There’s always a part of me that wants to shirk responsibility for things like this. But I owed a lot to this Pastor. And I owed a lot to Santos.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me everything.” And so I did. Not everything of course. What I have told you is far more comprehensive, but I had no intention of justifying my Godless nature to a man of God. But I told him of what lay below the church, in the grave that had been made there for the people of the town when it had almost destroyed itself. I told him about the doorway and about what we saw buried there below the world.

It wasn’t on the Dark Roads back then. It was buried, yes, but it wasn’t lost. Not yet. And then I told him about the Black Angel.

For a long time we sat silently watching each other. “You are telling me my son is responsible for…” He couldn’t even say it. I couldn’t blame him. “You’re telling me I have to perform an exorcism on my son?”
I looked into his eyes and I feared what I saw there. “No. I’m telling you I don’t know anything yet. But I will.”
“Get out.” He told me. “Get out and never come back.”
I got out. But I came back.

“Here. Drink.” She put down a glass full of rum before me and I drank after a moment. Drinking seemed to be Vivian’s answer to everything that ails you, or at least the first step. When I had shown up, she hadn’t even asked. She just knew. Vivian was never stupid, and she knew the murder that had happened in the town. And given her warning she knew more than that. That was why I had come to her.

“We have to find him Vivian. I’m afraid he’ll kill again.”
She looked down at me where I sat, and shook her head. “He’ll kill again. Or his body will.” She spoke in her soft accented voice that was beautiful, but now troubled. “Because he is not what he was.” Her eyes met mine, “Ask what you will.”

I drank down the rest of the rum, and pushed the glass away. Alcohol couldn’t save what troubled me. “We went below. Where you told us not to go, and we…Santos found something there. There was a doorway. It wasn’t hard to find. A place like that, with all the unremembered dead, it remembers. And we followed the memory. There was a place there, hidden away. And Santos found something there. A black angel. I don’t know more than that. I haven’t been back, but he has. And I fear for what he’s done.”

She sat down across from me and stayed silent for a moment. Then she poured some rum out for herself. “The boy is dead. Or he’s lost to us. We are not getting him back.”

“Vivian, you know what was down there. You must tell me.”
She cradled the rum for a moment, then put it to her lips and drank. “This thing. Thing black angel. It is murder. It is death. It was born out of murder and violence and it is what it knows. And it is old. It haunts this place. You have heard the stories of what has come before. The first settlers of this place woke it before, and this town was almost lost. They drove it out. Set this whole town on fire, and closed up the earth on top of it. We built a church where it lay because they thought something that evil could not stand in the face of God.”

I remember back in London when I met Alan, I would tell him (and this was years later, when I wouldn’t remember what had happened here), “Everything has a spirit Alan. The world has a memory, and every act of kindness, and every act of life, and death is remembered. And when these memories are strong enough they are born into life.” What Vivian had told me wasn’t something I hadn’t known before. I would have been close to ninety years old back then. I didn’t live to ninety without knowing a thing like that.

Beverly was built on a place with a history of violence. The original Americans knew it. The first settlers in Beverly knew it. And now I knew it too.

“It promised him his mother Vivian. Santos let it possess him.” And I prayed that he didn’t understand it’s true nature before he did. “And these spirits you speak of, aren’t known for their intelligence.”

“The young ones aren’t. This is not a young spirit. This is an old thing. An ancient thing. Likely even it doesn’t remember how it was born.”

I took a deep breath. “All right then. How was it stopped before?”

And Vivian told me the tale.

They burned the town, but they bound the spirit under the church. Whether the place had any power because it was a church is irrelevant. It had power because they believed it did. They razed the town to remove it’s presence, all except where they buried their dead under the iconography of the church. There the pastor bound it and banished it. And in it’s place the built the town again, starting with the church.

Spirits like this feed, like everything else. This thing fed on death and destruction. It knew it in the same way that Elijah knows roads and driving and I know sacrifice. This thing was old, but it was not at full strength; it had just awoken. And we would have to put it back to sleep.

Vivian went with me to the church. It was almost night, and the evenings had gotten cooler. The town must have watched us in fear, the devil woman and I walking through the streets, towards their house of worship. We were convinced that the hardest part of this would be convincing the pastor to help us. At least I was. I think Vivian had her doubts. I think she has her doubts still.

To this day I don’t know what Vivian told the Pastor. When we arrived, the sun was just setting, and she told me to wait in the parish while she went to the rectory. I waited with the stone angels and the stained glass for what felt like an eternity. I was frightened I realized.

After some time Vivan returned, with this strange expression on her face, like she had seen something that had horrified her. It was strange to see her in a church. I don’t think she’s been back inside one since that day.

“He wants you to come.” She told me. “He says you should not be inside this place.”

I managed a weak smile at her, and followed her back out, leaving the stained glass and the angels behind me.

There’s this strange half light that I’m sure you’ve seen when twilight comes. The sun is not quite asleep and the light is still gasping. That kind of light can play tricks, and the shadows are everywhere and nowhere.

The rectory itself was lit by candlelight, and Vivian’s hand grasped mine as we walked closer. Something was wrong; but when I looked to her she wouldn’t tell me. “You must see for yourself.” She said. And I was afraid.

I climbed the steps up to the door with my heart in my throat. Vivian walked in first, without knocking, and I walked in behind her. There were candles everywhere, and the scent of burning wax pervaded the house. Sitting at the lip of the stairs was the Pastor, his head dipped in prayer, and little whispers escaping his lips praying that God would forgive us all.

He looked up as we walked in and he looked like a broken man. “Upstairs,” was all he said, and it sounded like a growl. I looked to Vivian the question I wanted to ask, but she just shook her head. The pastor barely moved aside to let us through. We climbed the stairs and it felt like a march to an execution. I was sick, because part of me knew what we would find up there. We would find Santos. I just didn’t know how we would find him.

And then I saw him.

He was strapped to the bed, spread eagled like some kind of grotesque kill someone had posed. The shadows of the room writhed and twisted as the candles flickered throughout the room. His arms and wrists were tied to the bed posts, a limb for each one. The book that he was almost never without sat on the nightstand next to him, open to some passage in the new testament.

There were cuts on his face that bled out onto the sheets, and his wrists were red and scoured as he had twisted trying to remove the bonds. The blood itself was almost black, as if the shadows had mixed with the blood; but that might have been the strange light of the room.

And plunged deep into his chest was a wooden crucifix.

When I first walked in I thought him dead. He should have been dead. But his chest was rising and falling, and his lips moved as if he were praying, but I knew it wasn’t that.

“The Pastor tied him up. He tried to perform an exorcism.” I hadn’t even asked Vivian to explain. But I knew why she hadn’t told me. I would have to see something like this for myself. “It wasn’t the first one he’s done. So he says. But halfway through the rite, he said Santos got free, and took the cross. Said it was the only way he could control it. Plunged it right into his chest.”

It stunned me. I’d assumed that Santos was lost, and that this thing was just using him as a shell. That it could co-inhabit…let’s just say at that time I didn’t know something like that was possible. But Santos was fighting. He’d tried to kill himself, and he’d chosen as his tool the iconography of his religion. He was still breathing. It didn’t seem to be enough.

And all of a sudden Santos gasped, and it was like he was sucking up all the air in the room. Then he was still.

But he wasn’t dead, because with his eyes closed, he spoke out into the night. “I was wondering when you’d come. Why don’t you make a man out of me. You have me on my back.” His voice was like a monsters, and more-so, because the voices was Santos’. I wanted this thing gone from the world.

I looked to Vivian. “It’s time to finish what the Pastor started.”