Jake's Wake (15 page)

Mathias lifted his head as well, eyes squeezed shut, as if to see what Jesus saw.

“Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus, please! PLEASE look down upon me, and see that I suffer as you have suffered…” Sobbing uncontrollably now, fighting to breathe, hardly reacting as his other shoulder dislocated. “…and know that my heart belongs to you! Only you,
my blessed Savior! Know that my faith is true, and reach down with your blessed hands to save me from this nightmare!”

Mathias opened his eyes. Jake was looking at him with wonder, all the loneliness of hell etched into his expression.

“Please, Lord God! Let no demon torment me! I am your servant, and I know that with you all things are possible, Lord! Yea, as you can move mountains, you can move me from this hell! I believe with all that I am, Lord!
Deliver me, now!
”

Jake watched Mathias, head cocked as if the echoes of the crucified boy’s prayer still rang in his ears. Like he was waiting for God to smite him.

Mathias looked around, hopeful for a moment.

The moment passed.

And nothing happened.

“So…” Jake purred, “how’d that work out for ya?”

A fresh terror blossomed inside Mathias.

“Cuz the fact is, that Jesus never saved anyone. Sure as hell not a little pissant like you.”

It was the blackest terror imaginable.

Total abandonment by God.

Jake came closer, until Mathias’s blood and tears spattered his face. Something dark bloomed like a cloud of ink just behind him, sucked at the marrow of his misery, and laughed.

Mathias could see and hear her, now, too.

“PLEASE!” he screamed, one final time…

…but when he closed his eyes, there was no Jesus to be found. Just a dead man rotting on a lonely cross, withered skin sloughing off of greasy bone…

Mathias tried to scream, but his vocal cords were scoured raw. A cracked, broken kazoo sound came from his flapping mouth, even before Jake put his hands on him, and steered his face toward the monitor.

Mathias’s feet could not touch the floor, but his soul had reached the bottom.

On the screen, a rolling black cloudscape filled the space behind the cross. But it was not just an effect. He could not look behind him, but he could feel it at his back: a hunger of infinite emptiness, a hole in eternity being torn with the weapon of his pain, with the blood of his sacrifice.

The whole back of the studio had opened up on another dimension, ravenous and unspeakably vast.

And whirling in the void were motes and leaves that he knew were the souls of the dead.

The studio seemed to tilt, the cross to quiver, as if teetering on the threshold, awaiting only the slightest push from Jake to send him—and perhaps the whole world after it—into this nightmare black sky.

“Take a good look at yourself,” Jake crooned. “That’s
you
on the cross. Just like your hero. And every bit as useless to me.”

The demon at his side laughed huskily.
“I love to watch a man piss himself.”

Jake shook Mathias out of his fugue, wrenched his face around to stare into Jake’s eyes.

“The good news is, you get to see him real soon. Unless, of course, I squeeze your eyes out.”

Jake and Lorna laughed.

Mathias screamed louder.

“Yeah, fuck it. Let’s do that.”

From across the yard, the ladies could hear Mathias’s screams ratchet up higher…and the laughter of not just Jake, but a chorus of women, as well.

Christian heard it, too. Pushing with his feet and bracing his broken ribs with his good arm, he dragged himself across the floor, toward Jasper’s body. The screaming
had steeped him in despair, but the toxic laughter only made him push harder.

Eddie and Gray heard it all, too, as Eddie repaired a hinge that was torn off the wall.

Eddie froze, as the sound got even worse.

“Did I say you could stop?” Gray hissed.

Jake’s thumbs slid into Mathias’s sockets up to the second knuckle before they met bone. Blood and orb jelly squelched out and oozed down his hands, into his sleeves.

Mathias’s breathless screeching built in pitch and volume until Jake punched through the bony orbits to spear the brain, then twisted his neck with an audible crack.

Emmy broke down and sobbed when the screams cut out, and the wind resumed singing outside. Esther and Evangeline retreated into their own solitary despair. Even the giggling stopped.

Christian reached Jasper, laid his head across the dead chest in exhaustion and sorrow. Blood seeped up through Jasper’s shirt, sticking to his face.

He reached into Jasper’s front trousers pocket. Pulled out a lighter and flicked it.

In the darkness, at least he had light.

More, he had fire.

Jake pulled his red thumbs out of Mathias’s eyeholes, shook the blood off, admired his handiwork.

What a good boy am I
, he thought.

The swirling blackness behind Mathias swirled like water down a drain, turned back into green paint on a wall. Jake’s afterglow faded as well.

“Well, you better hope you can do better than that,”
jeered
Lorna, right behind him. Always at his back, whispering, twisting knives…

“Oh, fercrissakes…”

“You can’t even keep the Door open…”

“MOM, GOD DAMN IT…!”

And just like that, he was taken back…

Suddenly, Jake was back at Lorna’s place: a ramshackle white-trash redneck pigsty, circa 1973. Lorna’s eyes were all too human then, but pickled in whiskey and malice.

She sneered down at the whimpering twelve-year-old Jake, slapping him repeatedly. She was only half dressed in her filthy lingerie. Behind her, an ugly man was putting on his shirt.

“You make me sick, you piece of shit! Spyin’ on me, when I’m doin’ my business?”

“I wasn’t, Momma! Augh!”

She slapped him some more. Looked contemptuously down.

“Yeah, that’s why you got your pants down, in my closet, with your thing stickin’ out. I guess you couldn’t find your homework.”

“Momma, no!”

“My God, y’all are disgusting,” the ugly man said.

“And you just paid to fuck me. So get outta my house. My boy’s got a cock twice as big as yours, and he’s only twelve years old.”

The ugly man went out the door, muttering, slammed it shut behind him. Lorna looked down at Jake with a horrible knowingness.

“Oh, honey. You just wanna know what it’s like to be a man. I understand that. My own daddy popped my cherry
when I was eight. I was way too small. But you, you’re nice and large.”

Her face moved closer, more intimate and frightening.

“Momma, no…”

“Time you figured out that men are scum, and women aren’t no better. It’s just the way of the world, Jake. Ugly and dumb. But my God, you feel nice.
”

“Momma…”

“Time to show you how it’s done.”

Jake opened his eyes; and if he could spare the fluid, he might have shed a tear.

It was painful to think about his past, his hellish fucking childhood. Painful to be faced with the forces that molded him: his perspective on the world, and on women in particular. To be thrown back there was to remember how horribly twisted he was, right from the root.

And to remember how hard he’d had to fight.

To become the man he was today.

Resurrecting had been weird enough; but strangely, that was hardly a surprise. Not nearly as surprising as dying: something he’d always known was bound to happen, but never accepted as his fate.

But why, in his moment of triumph, did he have to be hounded by
her
, of all people? By Lorna, who had mercifully drunk herself dead by the time he turned twenty? Who had existed only in his nightmares and deeply closeted memories for the past twenty years?

But maybe that was the problem.

When he came back, he brought them all back with him.

It was an enormous responsibility, being the Resurrected One. The one upon whom the entire bleak fate
of future history depended, and around whom it all revolved.

But in his dreams, and his heart, he had always been that man. The power-giver. The power-taker. The alpha and the omega.

He could only guess that she was here to serve, and to obey, just like the rest. That as his powers bloomed, her own would recede to an acceptable background noise.

But try as he might, he could not deny that he was flustered: first by the fag and his yapping mouth, and now by this bitch, and
her
yapping mouth. It undercut his intensity, his assuredness, his dominion.

And that was not acceptable.

When the black door had opened, he had felt it inside him. Felt its power. Felt its power as his own. Known that he was the key, and that sacrifice was the twisting motion by which it was unlocked.

What he needed was more sacrifices, now. How convenient that the house was crawling with ’em.

And when he needed more, the whole world awaited.

Jake took a moment to look around the studio, reground himself in the here and now. After his broad-daylight vision of Lorna’s house, the harsh play of spotlight and shadow was almost like nascent, incipient blindness.

He took in the solid walls, ceiling, floor, and its forest of TV gear. He took in the crucified boy, with the three screaming mouths in his head.

He took in Lorna, who would not stop laughing.

“Time to show you how it’s done,” he said.

From the back of the house, Gray and Eddie could hear Jake’s booming footsteps as he stomped out of the studio and thundered down the hall.

“NEXT!” he bellowed, so loud that it seemed to shake the portraits above the fireplace. Or maybe it was
just the storm. At this point, it seemed impossible to tell whether there was any difference between the two.

Gray continued to supervise—middle management with a gun—while Eddie packed quick-drying putty into the door frame, where the upper hinge had torn out.

Eddie trembled and averted his eyes as Jake strode into the living room.

Jake laughed. “Not you, Don Quixote. You got a job to do.” To Gray, he added, “Bring me that little Bible girl, quick. I’ll hold the fort.”

Gray dropped his cig on the carpet and ground it out as he crossed the living room and slouched out the back, leaving Jake and Eddie alone beside the open front door. The wind, gusty and curious, flowed into the room and swiped at the fire, driving it back into the embers.

Eddie focused on the job at hand, the stubby putty knife that might as well have been a Q-tip, for all the good it might do him. The words
putty in your hands
flittered through his brain, and he was stung by how hideously apropos they suddenly were.

“Hallelujah, and praise Jesus!” Jake brayed in his ear. “Your work here is almost done.”

Eddie said nothing, but he visibly flinched. It made Jake smile, and step closer.

“That really bugs you, doesn’t it? My whole ‘Praise Jesus’ thing. I watch you, and I can see it just stick in your craw.”

Eddie set down the putty knife, his back to Jake, said nothing.

“You’re thinkin’, ‘Isn’t it enough that this rotten bastard is ruining the life of the woman I love? Why does he have to drag poor old Jesus through the mud, while he’s at it?’”

Eddie looked up at Jake, his face as carefully blank as if he were getting lectured about the chlorine levels in the pool.

But staring into those eyes, he saw something he did not expect. Beyond the bloodlust, beyond the horror, beyond the formaldehyde stench and looming danger, there was a deep well of sadness in the monster’s expression that Eddie found truly satanic. Eddie always thought the Devil must be very lonely.

It was the look at a man in desperate need of confession.

Eddie found that he could not look away.

“Now I could tell you,” Jake resumed, “that my daddy was a traveling preacher. A Holy Roller. And that he fucked my momma for twenty bucks, a blessing, and a jug of corn liquor, and never came back. Never even knew I existed.”

Eddie listened, giving up nothing.

“And I could tell you that I ran away from home when I was sixteen, to find that son of a bitch. And when I finally tracked him down, he was this nasty old drunk, in a trailer at a farm show outside Wheeling, West Virginia.

“But God damn if he still didn’t have his congregation, just waitin’ to hear what batshit craziness he’d spout off next. And damned if he still couldn’t make the women wet.”

Jake looked away for a second, shook his head and whistled: a weird mixture of heartbreak and grudging admiration.

But when he looked back, the admiration was gone, replaced by a smoldering, wounded rage.

“And I could tell you that I when I told him my story, he called me a liar, and took off his belt, and whipped me with it until I wound up having to beat that motherfucker half to death…”

Eddie tried to maintain his emotional neutrality; but the fact was, it really was a horrible tale. And it made perfect sense, in the context of Jake.

Perhaps weirdest of all, Eddie could tell that for once Jake was actually telling the truth.

Suddenly, all the years of wondering how this guy had become such an absolute piece of shit clicked into place. And while it did nothing to excuse his crimes, it went a long way toward explaining them.

Jake caught Eddie thinking, and nodded his head as if to say
yep, that’s how it happened.

Eddie found himself nodding along.

“But that’s not the point of my story,” Jake said.

He leaned in, confiding, as if they were almost friends: the boss sharing a hot stock tip with the help. And for a moment, Eddie was almost sucked in.

Then he eyed Jake’s thumbs, hitched casually in his big black leather belt.

Which was caked in blood and bits of skin.

“The point is,” Jake continued, “I learned a lot that day. But the biggest thing was…well, let me put it this way…