Boys of Blur (12 page)

Mrs. Wisdom turned and pointed at the embers in her fire bowl. “The muck is like those coals. Quiet, still, full to overflowing, waiting to erupt back into the dance of life. Millions of lives from millions of different kinds of living things have formed our black soil. Putting a seed in that ground is like throwing paper onto my coals. But plant an evil seed …”

Mrs. Wisdom’s voice trailed off. She rose from her chair, walked to the fire bowl, and stood beside it, looking out between the trees at the rain and the water.

“Charlie, honey, come here.”

Charlie limped over to her. Rain dribbled off of the roof. Spatters reached his toes and hissed quietly on the lip of the fire bowl beside him.

“The Gren are not alive with their own fire,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “They are human seeds made into vessels for an evil as old as Cain, and the mounds were used to feed them. Long ago, the Seminole pushed the Gren back into
the swamps and set twelve stones into the mounds to cut their power and cage the evil. Now only three stones remain. Two protect water. One protects the fields around Taper. Lionel tends it, but with my husband gone, he cannot hold it long.”

“The one by the church?” Charlie asked.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Wisdom. “And if that one is broken, the mounds will feed again, the Gren will grow, and Taper will be empty within the month.”

“Empty …,” Charlie said.

“Burned. Dead,” said Mrs. Wisdom. “Devoured. If Lionel had not saved the body of my Willie, it would be done already. The stone would have been shattered and my Willie would be one of the Gren. But he’s safe now, even if we are not.” She pointed straight down at the water. Charlie watched the drops pucker the surface. He watched slow rings grow and collide with each other, and then his eyes focused beyond the surface. A long stone box sat in the tree roots on the bottom, its lid looking almost within reach. Even through the rippling distortion, Charlie could see two letters carved side by side on the lid.

“So much life in my Mr. Wisdom.” Mrs. Wisdom dabbed her eyes, laughed, and then slid her arm around Charlie’s shoulders and pulled him into a soft hug. “Do you mind,
doll?” she asked. “I’m sorry, if an old lady needs a hug, she takes a hug.” She retreated back to her chair. “Now drink that tea and tell me what else you want to know.”

Charlie’s eyes were still focused underwater. Beyond the old coach’s box, there was another, and another—ghostly rectangles hiding under the rippling surface.

Mrs. Wisdom nodded. “Every graveyard for miles around is empty of its dead. The Gren would take them to a grove where their mother plants bodies and harvests muck-born sons. My Willie stole them first and gave them peace in the water. Water keeps them out of reach.”

“I want to go home,” Charlie suddenly said. “Please.”

“Home,” said Mrs. Wisdom. “Soon, love. But not just yet.”

Charlie turned around. “Why not?”

Mrs. Wisdom nodded at the mug in Charlie’s hands.

“It’ll be cold now, honey.”

Charlie raised his mug and gulped the entire drink down. It wasn’t cold at all. It was hot and sweet and nearly scorched his throat. When he’d finished, there was a heat in his gut so heavy he felt like he’d swallowed the mug itself. He exhaled and was almost surprised not to see steam.

“Why not?” he asked again. “How long have I been here?”

“Three days,” Mrs. Wisdom said. Her blue eyes grew heavy. “You can’t go home, doll, because this is the only place in the world where you are still alive.”

Natalie Mack paced in front of a wall of glass. One arm hugged a ragged gray sweatshirt to her chest. Her other hand pulled at a row of absurdly large championship rings hanging on a simple silver chain around her neck. She fingered through them like beads as she walked along beside the huge floor-to-ceiling windows in the beach house Mack had rented. She knew why she was holding Charlie’s sweatshirt. She wasn’t sure why she had put on Mack’s rings. Because she wanted to trust him?

No game he had ever played mattered as much as what he was trying to do right now.

Outside the glass, rain was attacking an uncovered pool and pelting scattered deck chairs. Beyond the pool, palm trees swayed and bent in the wind like ferns on fishing poles. Beyond them, the Gulf of Mexico thumped on sand.

Natalie forced her pacing feet to stop. She couldn’t stop her pacing mind.

One hour. A lot less given how she would be driving. That’s how far away she was if the call came. And it would come. Mack would call. He would hand Charlie the phone. She would hear her son’s voice and then she would load Molly into the car and they would fly through the rain.

Even as she thought it, she knew it wouldn’t happen that way. If Charlie was fine, Mack would bring him to her. Taper wasn’t safe right now. It was like the whole town had unhinged all at once. Every old grudge had blossomed into a feud. Every old feud had exploded into violence. She couldn’t be there with Molly. Her first two nights had proved that completely. She’d heard the gunfire and seen two buildings burning from their motel room. While Molly had slept, she’d stood looking out at the midnight fires. And she had seen
him
—Bobby Reynolds, Charlie’s father—sitting on the hood of his truck beneath a streetlight, ignoring the flaming chaos only a block behind him, staring at the motel from beneath a battered trucker cap. Smoking.

Natalie had snapped the curtains shut, gathered Molly up in a blanket, carried her daughter into the bathroom, and locked the door. Her fingers had been shaking when she had called Mack. Bobby had been gone by the time Mack had arrived.

After that, she had been willing to move to the beach.

How things could get so crazy in such a small town, Natalie had no idea. And Charlie was stuck in it. Somewhere.

Natalie turned away from the window. Behind her, Molly had pulled a shaggy white faux-fur rug onto one of the three white leather couches and nestled in on her back. She had a small plastic zebra in one hand. Her other hand was empty, but it was still managing to carry on a conversation with the zebra. They were talking about Charlie. All three of them—the hand, the zebra, and Molly—were in agreement. If Charlie were here,
he
would sneak out with them to play in the rain and everything would be better.

Natalie crossed the room and slipped onto the shaggy not-fur beside her daughter. Her arms slid around small ribs and squeezed. She pressed her face into her daughter’s hair. She inhaled life. She wanted to count every breath, every quick beat of Molly’s heart that she could feel against the inside of her arm. She wanted to thank that little muscle for every single one of those small thumps.

Molly and her hand and her zebra chatted happily, ignoring the grown-up and her very wet face.

Natalie’s phone rang.

“I don’t understand,” Charlie said.

“You’re alive,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “Here. But only here, among my trees. If you left, the farther away you got from them, the more that Gren poison in your leg would grow,
the hotter your fever would burn, until …” She grimaced. “You
were
dead when I found you. Cotton had managed to get you to the first of my trees even with that awful knife through his shoulder. He had one arm around you and one arm hooked over a cypress root, poor love. He died shortly after.”

Charlie’s feet stopped. Mrs. Wisdom tugged on his arm, but he didn’t budge. Cotton? Dead? Knife? Charlie remembered being in the water. He remembered Cotton coming to help him. And then he saw it, the Stank drawing that long bone knife and raising his arm to throw.

“He’s breathing now,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “But not well. C’mon, honey. I’ll take you to him.”

The narrow bridge was slick with rain. Charlie’s eyes were on the water as they walked, watching pale stone coffins ripple and warp beneath the surface.

“The great trees drink of the deepest muck magic,” Mrs. Wisdom said as she walked. “They drink, are filled, and overflow. Just breathing their air does wonders. Many times, I nursed my Willie’s wounds in this place, as my mother nursed my father’s. By the end, when Willie’s old heart finally stopped, he had so much swamp life stored up inside, it practically erupted out of him. Lio said a tree sprang up in his grave overnight. Did you see it?”

Charlie shook his head.

“Well, I’m glad it did,” Mrs. Wisdom said. She led Charlie around the base of another large tree. A floating dock
bobbed at its base. A strange canoe was tied to it. The boat had been hollowed out from a single log. It was long and sleek, and waxy smooth even where blade tracks textured its sides.

“Lionel carved that canoe for Willie,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “It isn’t the easiest thing to pull two drowning boys into, but that boat and an old woman did the trick. And it’s quicker and quieter in here among the great trees than anything with a motor.”

Mrs. Wisdom steered Charlie up another curling flight of stairs that wrapped around the trunk of a massive cypress tree. At the top, she stepped aside and gestured for Charlie to go first. He limped into a room bigger than his old school’s cafeteria. The walls were railed instead of completely open. Three long tables formed a U in the center of the room around a large fire pit full of ash-seething embers. On the other side of the tables, more than a dozen cots were arranged in rows.

Above the fire pit, hanging from two hooks, was a severed arm. It was large—crudely torn off at the shoulder—gray, and muscled. The fingers were contorted. A hooked bone spike, sharp and pointed like a giant talon, was strapped to the back of the wrist.

“Welcome to my heriot,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “Complete with a Grendel’s arm, as distasteful as it is. Once, when I was your little Molly’s age, courageous men and women
laughed and feasted here. Now …” She sighed. “You ever read
Beowulf
, love?”

Charlie stared at the arm’s painfully bent fingers, at the naked sinews jutting out of the shoulder. He shook his head.

“Cotton probably has,” Charlie said. “Why do you have that arm?”

“Charlie, honey, that is the weapon and the arm of the Gren that struck you three days ago. Without it, I could not begin to stem the poison it planted in your flesh. The darkness that lashed your ankle would even now be swallowing up the last sparks of your fire.”

Charlie shivered. The gash in his right ankle felt suddenly very … 
open
.

“But how?” He looked at Mrs. Wisdom. “Who?”

She smiled slightly. “Bless Lio for his courage and his blade.” She walked between the tables and stopped at the edge of the fire pit, sniffed in the arm’s direction, and then turned back around. “The stench of every Gren is a little different, just as their soul rot is a little different. The Gren feel only hate and envy and rage—every other part of their human souls has been devoured. They are their own poison, and they are woven into everything they might care to make—most usually crude and cruel weapons. Their touch, even their stench with enough time, plants their particular curse in the soul—where no doctor could ever
see it. A wound from their hands is much, much worse. When they draw blood, the victim has very little time.”

Charlie moved between the tables beside the old woman until heat rippled up against his face from the fire. Up close, the arm wasn’t really gray, it was just coated with dirt, dried to dust above the fire.