It stank.
Carrie knew this thing had come from her, she knew it was a thing that would eventually grow up to be a person, but it wasn’t really a person yet, was it? No. Not really. Although sometimes, when it was babbling to nana or pop-pop, its little voice peeping, she’d felt a small twist of something…jealousy maybe or curiosity? She wasn’t sure. She’d look at its bright little blue eyes and turned up nose and think that it was pretty cute, getting cuter all the time, actually.
But still.
It was also a giant pain in the ass.
She yanked the tank top down over its head, struggling it over its belly and snapping the catches at the shoulders. She went back to the bathroom and wet a cloth and scrubbed the line of vomit from its face.
Christ it looks like it’s been in a car accident, she thought.
A car accident.
An idea formed in her mind: a tragic accident, her picture in the paper, a hot newsguy coming out to interview her, riding in a limo at the funeral…everyone’s attention on her as she…what was the word? As she grieved. She could put it on Facebook too. Probably she’d have even more people flocking to her page.
Because her baby got run over by the car. She’d seen it on the news before; it happened all the time. Kids were always getting killed by their own mother’s minivans and that’s what the stories always said–tragic. It would explain the dislocated shoulder, too, and her parents wouldn’t be able to get mad at her for it.
Yes, so tragic.
A tragic accident.
She popped the front door open and looked out, checking both ways, making sure none of the neighbors were out. It was hot this late in the morning. The hottest day so far this summer. And humid. Her hair was going to be a mess, but she’d just have to try and get a brush through it before the first news vans showed up.
Brian struggled and moaned foggily as if caught in a bad dream.
“Shhhh, baby,” she said, her voice soft. She didn’t look down at the rag-tag bundle in her arms. “Gonna be okay, baby.”
He moaned again and she checked left and right once more and then stepped out onto the porch. There was a good screen of trees and bushes between all the houses. As long as no one came out, she’d be all right.
She trotted to her car–a Dodge Stratus her parents had bought for her and that she nastily referred to as a Dodge Lack-of-Status–and lay Brian in front of it, on the blacktop between the car and the garage. She stepped back and tilted her head. Hmm. That might not work. It just looked–wrong somehow. How about if she…
Brian struggled and his eyes cracked open; two wet slits in his face.
“Mama mama,” he said, his voice fractured and whispery.
The pain was still immense, but now the nausea was starting to overtake it. He felt the fire of the blacktop baking into his shoulders and legs and he tried to right himself, struggling to keep his dislocated shoulder still. Vertigo sent the world reeling up and over him. His mama was dragging something, his Big Wheel, taking it past him, the plastic wheels gritting sharply on the driveway.
“Mama mama,” he said again, whispering, not wanting her to go away, beginning to cry and then her hand was on his face, cool and comforting. Caressing.
“Shhhh, baby, go to sleep. Just sleep Bri-Bri and mama is gonna get you all fixed up. Don’t cry.”
Then lifting him, lifting him away from the fire. And his arm was a sheet of agony but her taking the fire away was so good and then he felt cool, hard plastic at his back. He squinted his eyes open once more and the handles of the Big Wheel were before him, red and set at a jaunty angle, gold streamers flashing in the sun. But he didn’t want to ride his Big Wheel. He wanted to lie in the bed. He wanted nana. He wanted pop-pop.
He put his good hand out and pushed the Big Wheel handle, trying to push himself up and out of the seat.
“Mama,” he said and grunted with pain as the handles turned and he lost his grip and plopped back down on the plastic seat.
A roar filled his mind and at first he thought it was the pain from his shoulder or from his belly coming to get him, made alive with magic. His chin rested tiredly on his chest and when he opened his eyes the first thing he saw was the dragon on his tank top, green and grinning, upside down with a million teeth and it looked like it was getting bigger and bigger, blowing a hot, choking cloud over him and he coughed and the tear in his throat bled again and the dragon’s eyes were huge and black and then filling with a bright burst of red fire, and his last confused thought before the bumper overtook him was:
The dragon is getting me…!
* * *
The Devil knew little of true grief in The Litany, only self-pity and vaulting self-worth. What little he could glimpse was through the damned, those already earmarked by God, Himself for punishment. The damned understood very little of true grief. They saw things only in terms of themselves, like infants grown obnoxious with too much age and size. They shit and shit and waited, legs akimbo, for the world to clean them up. And they did get cleaned up, eventually, but most likely not in the way they thought it would happen.
God, Himself decreed that they would be cleansed by fire.
The Devil rolled again, more blood coursing over the tortured contours of his body, dripping and puddling, burning, consuming over and over without destroying the legion of damned. He swam to brief consciousness, aware of The Litany and Carrie’s miniscule part in it and wondered briefly why this crime–noxious as it was but still unoriginal, mundane, even–should catch his attention so, should disturb his sleep.
Carrie’s contribution to The Litany held glimpses of the deep grief of her parents, as seen through Carrie’s eyes, and she did not understand their grief. She saw it, and realized she was the cause of it, or, more to the point, the monster’s death was the cause of it, but she was annoyed by her mother’s near catatonia. Her father’s withdrawal from the world.
It siphoned so much of the attention away from her.
* * *
She’d done everything right. Called 911, been hysterical, cried when the ambulance and police arrived. She had sobbed, but had been unable to produce tears, no matter how much she tried to think of upsetting things: getting acid in her face and becoming ugly, getting fat like her mother, getting wrinkly like her father. Nothing produced actual tears.
In the hospital, where they tried to untangle the monster’s mangled body, her mother had come in and found Carrie sitting in a corridor, picking at her nails, waiting for some doctor or other to come out. A police officer stood opposite, leaned against the corridor wall and watched as Carrie examined herself, a small moue of disgust crossing her features as she tried to dig the blood from under one perfectly shaped fingernail. The cop crossed his arms over his chest as a disturbing certainty whispered into his cop’s mind.
Carrie’s mother paused, the scene before her like a slap, realizing two things at once: the cop thought Carrie had something to do with Brian’s death and so did she. In fact, she was sure of it. The realization took her heart and first squeezed it with merciless strength that took her breath away and then clad it, burning and smoking, in thick steel, making it impervious, shielding it for the days she saw were coming. She felt the extra weight in her heart just as surely as if there had been actual bands of hot metal binding it.
Through the funeral and then the rumors, the investigation and then the arrest, she’d kept her heart clad. She’d kept her doubts to herself. She’d helped her husband along and let her friends comfort her until the rumors became so rampant that even the best of her friends couldn’t ignore them and then they, too, pulled away. Even that was a relief of sorts. A weight lifted.
Then the lawyer had appeared at the door.
Thomas Evigan was a good lawyer. He could have been great, but his intentions were not to be a great lawyer, his intentions were to be a great politician. Political office was his ultimate goal.
He’d defended legions of people, some innocent, most not, but had had very little true exposure as of yet. He watched the case of the girl who ran over her little boy with great interest. It remained somewhat local news, due to the fickle nature of news consumers, but he thought he could make it more than that. He looked into the soulless eyes of the pretty young mother when they flashed her booking photo and in those Gila orbs he saw something he recognized: he saw someone much like himself. With one of his most important attributes.
Misguidedly, Thomas Evigan thought of his self-centered narcissism as ambition.
He saw a matching ambition in the eyes of Carrie Walsh. And he thought, if she was game, then he might be able to get from this case what he’d been needing for some time: headlines. Publicity. People wouldn’t care who he represented as long as he looked good while he was doing it.
He read about the case and mulled over the details. For the police, it was a slam-dunk. They had everything they needed to convict. They weren’t even putting the big dogs on it, that’s how confident they were. But the one thing they didn’t have, the one thing that he could use, build upon, was that she had never confessed.
He’d found her parent’s address and met with them.
Then he met with Carrie and devised THE STORY as he felt she should tell it.
It was at this point that he–unknowingly–joined The Litany.
BOOK TWO
The Devil Woke Up
The spark of Thomas Evigan joined the spark of Carrie in The Litany and when they met, they flared so strongly that the Devil woke up.
After all the theft and lies, greed, murder, hate, all the cheating and using, the molestation, beating, and the killing, the torture and self pity, the Devil felt the musings of Thomas Evigan as he studied pictures of the little boy Brian alive and well and then studied pictures of the sad corpse in yellow terry shorts and friendly green dragon tank top and saw in them the code, the key, the path to his rise, his rise to fame, and the Devil rolled onto his side and sat up, groaning. The damned groaned beneath him like an echoing, sycophantic chorus.
Bent with the weight, the unbearable weight of The Litany, and this new thread which somehow weighted it to breaking, the Devil leaned his head into his aching, pulsing, bleeding hands. He felt the weight of The Litany as he’d never felt it before and it drove his head further into his hands and he rocked it–giant, misshapen monolith that it was. He rolled his head from side to side and leaned further forward, his great elbows grinding against his great knees and a slightly less viscous fluid flowed over his hands, thinning the blood and he leveled his hands before his eyes and saw what he’d never expected to see: tears.
He blinked his burning eyes and a fresh cascade of saline heartbreak washed over his face, hotter even than his flammable blood.
The Litany continued, Thomas Evigan meeting with Carrie, telling her The Story as he wanted her to tell it: that Carrie’s father had poisoned the baby with iodine, that Carrie’s mother had run the baby over, that Carrie, herself, had been horribly abused by both parents as she was growing up. Carrie told Thomas Evigan that she hadn’t been abused at all, that in fact her parents were weak, weak pushovers. Thomas Evigan reiterated to Carrie that she had, indeed, been abused, that was why she’d appeared remorseless after her baby was killed. That was why she had lied to cover for them; she was afraid of them, in fact. Thomas Evigan could already see the dramatic headlines. He pictured this remorseless bitch on the stand, crying, grieving the loss of her own childhood and the loss of her beloved baby. It would be on the news every day. In the papers every day. On the internet every day. And along with it would be his name, his face, ubiquitous. He thrilled at the idea, his hands closing unconsciously on the pictures of the mangled baby Brian, crushing them in his closed fist. Crushing further the sad, badly used toddler’s body taking up a mere third of the cold morgue table.
Carrie mulled it over, weighing her pride against being in jail. She hadn’t minded jail so far, it was not that bad. There were many women in there for hurting or killing their own children or allowing them to be hurt or killed by family, boyfriends, friends. She balked at making it seem as though her parents had got the best of her. She wanted this lawyer to prove it was an accident, a horrible accident, so she could post more on her Facebook about how terrible the ordeal had been.
She’d posted from the hospital, the day Brian had…died…she’d posted: “2 sad 2 beleve my sweet baby boy takn 2 soonnnnnnn!”
The response had been immediate and overwhelming: messages to “stay strong” and “God needed another angel!!1!” and “RIP Brian! Sooooo sad!” and Carrie began to feel a swell of satisfaction that so many people were reaching out to her, thinking about her, wondering about her. And then someone posted on her wall “God, that’s awful, what happened?” and Carrie posted a reply. “worst thing evaaaaaah!!!,,,I killed my own sweet baby Bri Bri,,,ran over him on accident,,,am soooooo sad,,,if only he hadn’t been riding his big weel and not listening 2 me bcause I had told him 2 stay in the house,,,don’t know how I can ever get over this terilbe accident,,,but I know that gods will was 2 have Brian with him and god wants me 2 b strong,,,will post more later 2day and 2morrow,,,every1 stay tuned,,,XXOO Luv u all!”
She’d reread her new status over and over and it almost brought tears to her eyes. She was being so brave. But after she posted, a lot of the messages stopped coming. She was puzzled, but then decided that probably everyone was just waiting to see what she would post next. It was very dramatic–like a movie.
But now this lawyer was telling her to say her parents had done it. It would make her Facebook posts look stupid. Embarrassing.
“We can say my dad tried to poison him, but we have to say that I ran him over by accident,” she’d said, staring intently at Thomas Evigan. He was very handsome. She wondered if he was probably going to fall in love with her. It would make the story even better, plus lawyers were rich and she’d love to be a rich lawyer’s wife. She figured that they could have two kids, two beautiful children, and she’d be good to them. That would kind of erase everything that had gone wrong with the monster. Erase the little mistakes she’d made. Kind of a do-over.