Risen (49 page)

"Maybe." Then silence, followed at last by, "I don't know."

"If there's something you want to tell me, now's the time. Otherwise, it's very late, and once the news breaks about Mr. Duffy, I expect I'm going to have an extremely busy weekend."

"What do they know, Reverend?" Curtis blurted out the words. They had been wanting to come out for some time, all night long. They were what had drawn him to the church, to Reverend Small, in the first place.

"Who?"

"The dead. What do they know?"

"The answer to the ultimate question," Small said. "They know God."

"No, I mean, about...before. About, when they were dead. Do they know what happened to them? To their bodies?"

"What are you asking me, Curtis?"

Curtis hung his head. He studied his piss-damp pants, his shoes, the floor.

"I...I guess you'd say I've sinned."

"We all sin."

"No, not like this. It's just, I didn't think anyone would...I didn't know...." He couldn't have looked up to save his life. "Late at night, alone in the morgue. Sometimes...sometimes when a body would come in, a woman, I'd...I'd pleasure myself."

"You'd masturbate?"

"Yeah. And sometimes, a couple of times, I did...more."

Reverend Small sighed. "Oh, Curtis," he said, and the words hung in the air like stale smoke.

"It's bad, I know. I know that now. But back then, I just thought, what's the difference? They're dead, they don't know."

"And what they don't know wouldn't hurt you."

"Huh?"

Reverend Small stared at Curtis, his brow knotted. He let Curtis stew in the juices of his confession for long minutes. "What do you want me to do for you, Curtis? Pray? Absolve you of this sin with a few choice phrases? I can't do it. I don't have that power."

"Am I going to Hell then?"

"It's no small sin you've committed. Defiling the dead
—
!"

Curtis looked up, tears streaming from his eyes.

"You gotta do something, Reverend. You gotta help me!"

Reverend Small shrugged helplessly.

"I'll do anything! I'll say a million Hail Jesuses! I...I can't go to Hell!" Curtis looked at the black smear in the fireplace that had been the spider. "Anything," he said. "Anything at all."

After long moments Reverend Small spoke so quietly that Curtis had to strain to hear the words.

"There's one possibility," Small said. "It lies well beyond the bounds of orthodoxy, but it's a chance. I hesitate to even bring it up. It poses a great risk to me."

Curtis beseeched him with his eyes.

"Have you ever heard of Saint Iglesias?" Small asked.

Curtis shook his head "no."

"He's a patron saint. Mind you, I do not personally believe in patron saints. I'm a Methodist, after all. But still, the borders of religion are porous. One faith leaches into another. Cosmologies overlap. The hand of Man is evident in all belief systems. Who is to say which
—
?"

"What are you getting at, Reverend? If there's a chance...."

"Of course." Reverend Small leaned closer to Curtis. "You need forgiveness, not from me, not from God, but from those you've sinned against. You must seek forgiveness from the dead."

"Whatever it takes," Curtis said.

Reverend Small moved slowly as if burdened by a great weight. He walked to a chest and hesitated before opening a particular drawer. After a moment of silent prayer, he withdrew a black candle, crudely molded, still bearing imprints of the hand that had crafted it. He returned to the fire and set the candle on the table in front of Curtis.

"This candle," he said, "was formed three hundred years ago. The wax was rendered from the body of Saint Iglesias himself and mixed with his ashes. Iglesias, you see, is the patron saint of those who have sinned in word or deed against the deceased. If you are to be forgiven your sins, it may be of help to you."

Curtis stared at the portentous lump of wax before him.

"Your problem is that you must communicate with the dead," Small continued, "those whose bodies you defiled, and beg their forgiveness. You can't do that from this plane of existence. Do you see what I'm driving at, Curtis?"

Curtis shook his head.

"I mean, you can only seek this forgiveness after your death. Unfortunately, the wrath of God is swift. Upon your death, your soul will be, well...."

"Sent to Hell, do not pass Go, right? And this candle can stop that?"

"Supposedly. For a time. What you must do, Curtis, upon the moment of your death, is...you must light this candle, the candle of Saint Iglesias. As long as it burns, your soul will be spared the fires of Hell, and you will be presented with the spirits of those you've offended. You can beg their forgiveness. If they give it to you, your soul may be spared. If not...."

"But it's a chance, right?"

"A chance."

"Can I touch it?" Curtis asked.

Small nodded.

Curtis picked up the candle and turned it over in his hands.

"Where'd you get it?" he asked. "Shouldn't something like this be, you know, in a museum or someplace?"

"I told you, this offer comes at some risk to myself. You're right. A sacred relic of this antiquity, for it to appear in the hands of a small town Methodist preacher...I'm not without my own sin, Curtis. To possess such an item is an enormous temptation. Let us just say that I was presented with an opportunity, and I will have to pay in the Hereafter for taking advantage of it."

Curtis considered the candle, playing the scenario in his head. How would he know when the moment of death was on him? "What if something happens?" he said. "Like, what if I'm hit by a truck or something? How am I supposed to light a candle if I'm layin' dead in the middle of the street?"

Reverend Small sank deeply into his chair. "I think you know the answer to that," he said.

"You mean I have to kill myself."

"While the candle is burning. While it burns, you won’t die, not before meeting those you offended. "

"How long I got? "

"As long as any man. The shame would be if you died tomorrow, unrepentant. Death does not make an appointment. John Duffy, for instance, thought he was lying down for a short nap and…." Reverend Small opened his hands.

Curtis thought, looking back and forth between the candle and the fire. He imagined himself inside that fire, burning for all eternity.  Or, if his aunt was correct, he could live forever in the glow of God’s precious love. Eternal damnation. Eternal bliss. When he thought about it that way, it didn’t seem like such a hard choice.

"What do you think?" he said at last. "Hanging?"

"I imagine that would do, " said Reverend Small.

***

Reverend Small received the telephone call from Curtis's aunt early the next afternoon. Curtis did not generally rise early, so it had been several hours before she discovered the body. Small wrote down the address and said he'd be there shortly.

He found Curtis hanging from a drain pipe in his basement apartment. He was tied by the neck with a length of electrical cord. On a table nearby stood the black candle, burned halfway down.

Small wondered if it had begun to sputter out even as Curtis struggled in the grip of the noose. Had he watched it flicker as he gasped his last breath? Had he felt an indescribable fear as the promise of eternal damnation closed in on him? Reverend Small smiled at the thought.

He pried the candle loose and inspected the bottom. The sticker was still there, the one that said "Handmade by Laurie." He had wondered at the time if leaving it there wouldn't clue Curtis that the "sacred relic" was a flea market candle Small had purchased the previous Halloween. It was a chance he had reveled in taking, an essential moral component of his
modus operandi
.

When Curtis came back at midnight, they would have a good laugh about it.

"You don't look like a drug dealer," Lila said.

"Secret of my success," Pascal said, which was a partial truth. The whole truth behind the remark was that his face, so ordinary as to defy description, and his body, lean but muscular, gave him a presence that seemed grown from the wholesome, Midwestern earth itself. But it was his energy that completed the façade. Pascal was no sallow-faced lurker in the shadows. He raced from drop to drop in a cherry red '65 Mustang ragtop he'd restored himself. His cheeks bloomed with the sunburn he'd picked up from some early season skiing at Vail (where he'd also scored a kilo-brick of mediocre cocaine that he would cut even further and sell by the gram to the local cokeheads).

It was coke that brought Lila and Pascal together in the stubbly field outside of Anderson, but it was Lila's t-shirt that aroused his fascination.

"Nice shirt," he said.

Lila tugged at the hem of the shirt and gazed at the monster-in-a-hot-rod design as if seeing it for the first time.

"This?" she said. "It's just something I found in the garage, in a trunk of my dad's stuff. I thought it was kinda cool."

Kinda cool
, Pascal thought.
She doesn't know what she has. An original Stanley Mouse, pristine, from the 1963 Winternationals in Pomona. Hand airbrushed. Worth five hundred bucks,  easy.

"I guess my dad was kind of a car nut."

"Tell you what," Pascal said, "I'll give you a discount. Eighty-five for a gram, you throw in the t-shirt."

Lila didn't think twice. She shrugged off her windbreaker and peeled off the shirt with all the self-consciousness of a baseball player adjusting his cup. Her top was bare. Her breasts were firm and her nipples could have poked out the eye of a cowboy.

"Deal," she said.

"You want a shirt? I could give you mine."

"I just want my gram."

Pascal handed over the cling-wrapped coke and tried hard not to grin from ear to ear.

"Your dad got any other old stuff like this? Posters, or...?"

Lila had already turned her back and was striding toward her car. She held the windbreaker in one hand and shot Pascal the finger with the other.

***

The first thing Lila felt when she died was a sense of relief that the worst headache in her life had disappeared. She woke up just past midnight in her bedroom, refreshed in a way she couldn't recall ever feeling before. Then she remembered Seth.

She had met Seth on the other side. Seth had brought her back from the dead. They'd had a conversation of sorts although she couldn't remember the exact words. He had seemed very knowledgeable about her father's collection, which she had always regarded as a bunch of old junk. Apparently it had some value she hadn't been aware of.

She loved Seth, she realized, and she wanted to help him in his work. She wanted to help by bringing more people to the other side.

She couldn't stop thinking about Pascal. In the clear light of resurrection, Lila began to realize how badly he had ripped her off.

It wasn't just that Pascal had sold her the cocaine that took her life. That probably wasn't even his fault. Nobody knew what they were getting these days, and no one could predict that a single gram in the nose of an experienced user would lead, now and again, to sudden death. These things happened.

It was the t-shirt. She had thought that the whole business was his way of catching a glimpse of prime female boobie, which was okay because it was why she'd gotten the boob job in the first place. She figured the surgery would pay for itself in a couple of years, one way and another, and a discount on drugs would move that timeline forward by at least six months.

But what if it didn't have anything at all to do with her tits? What if the shirt had really been worth something?

Lila decided to consult the source of all earthly knowledge. She powered up the computer she hadn't used in months and logged onto the internet.

***

Pascal didn't enjoy the thought of meeting Lila at his apartment, but she had promised to show him the contents of her father's trunk and wanted to do it someplace safe and out of the weather.

He felt like doing a line while waiting for her, but he restrained himself. He wasn't like the town cokeheads. He could take cocaine or leave it. He was strong in that way. He had to sample the goods he sold, of course, and he reveled in the strength and clear-headedness that coke brought him. Skiing in Vail had been fantastic, lit up, despite the low-grade artificial snow that dusted the slopes so early in the season. Racing downhill, impervious to the chill, skiing was the most exhilarating thrill that Pascal knew. Even hang gliding had been too languorous to give him the rush he craved, though maybe under the right medication....

Lila's knock was firm and measured. Pascal had hoped it would be panicky, that he could play it cool and draw out the negotiation and count on her addiction to sell him the stuff cheap. He realized too late that he was wearing the Stanley Mouse t-shirt and cursed himself for a fool. It never paid to appear too eager.