Paul shook his head.
She offered the tears on her cheek another angry swipe. “I keep thinking about Dickens’ Christmas Carol.” She chuckled huskily at that and returned her eyes to him. “You ever think about Hell?”
Paul’s heart paused in his chest. When it resumed beating, its pace was quicker, as if it were running from something.
“I think Hell is something we make. We build it for ourselves, brick by brick.”
“Deidra –”
“I keep thinking that maybe that’s what this is, some demented Christmas Carol, with me as Scrooge. Those things are ... they’re showing me what Hell will be like, trying to get me to change my life or ...” Paul could actually see the pain in her eyes. “... appreciate what I have. The last ten years without you ... that’s been my Hell.”
A hot tear ran down his own cheek. “You wrote and asked me to forgive you.”
“Just about a million times.”
“I do forgive you, Deidra.”
She looked at him again, and he saw the ache abandon her eyes to longing. “Right now, my heart is screaming for me to run over there and kiss you. My lips recall what it was like and my body remembers the feel of you. You ever hear stories about people losing their foot ... and they can still feel it there? All these years ... I’ve felt you.” She chuckled, but her tears strangled it until it sounded harsh and pained. “How pathetic am I? All these years ... I’m still waiting for you to make the first move. But, you’re never going to make it, are you?”
“Deidra, don’t –”
“Don’t love you? Been there, tried that.”
He looked at his shoes, hands in his pockets, longing to hold her. “I just wanted ... I forgive you. I don’t hate you. But we’ll never be just friends. We can’t be.”
She nodded. “I know.”
He turned to walk back to his Jeep; the gentle slope to the road suddenly seemed like a mountain.
“Paul?” Deidra called from behind him. “Will you hold me? Just to say good-bye?”
He stopped, swallowed hard. The request wasn’t a shock. In fact, at the back of his mind, he’d wanted to be the one who’d made it. But it wasn’t right. He felt too much like a cheater as it was, coming out here to be with her, even if he had Mary’s blessing to do it, and to touch her now ... seemed somehow wrong. Maybe he was just afraid it wouldn’t stop with a farewell embrace. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“It’s just a hug.” She made steps toward him, her face solemn and trembling as she held out her arms. “Please.”
Paul made no effort to stop her as she curled her arms around him. Her eyes fluttered closed, and, when she squeezed him, he removed his hands from the holsters of his pockets and placed them on her back. He smelled the sweet, floral scent of her hair; felt the cool rain of tears on his neck. His hands moved up and down her spine, felt the silk of her dress, felt that she wore no bra beneath it. At that moment, God help him, he wanted her. In his chest, his heart was being drawn and quartered, a section of it pulled to his love for Deidra, to his life with her that never was. Marriage. College in California. Walks along the beach. Redheaded children who’d inherited their mother’s quick temper. It would be easy to get involved with her again, right now, here in the grass. Part of him begged for the chance. But a greater portion of his heart was pulled back to his wife, to his family. In the darkness behind his eyes, he saw Mary smiling on their wedding day. He remembered the births of his children, heard their laughter. The thoughts filled him with warmth, like coming home from the office on a snowy day. And then his heart stopped its tug-o’-war and swung wholly in Mary’s direction. Walking away from Deidra now was the right choice, the only choice. He stiffened, halted the movement of his hands on her back. It was time he got back to his mother’s house. It was time he went home.
Deidra pulled away from him, but not completely. It reminded him of the day they performed The Rainmaker. He’d forced himself to let go of her, and she hadn’t been able to totally break contact. Her eyes searched his, then she asked, “If you had to make one wish, right now, what would it be?”
That I never met you sprang into his mind, but that wasn’t the truth. He had a wish, had made it silently in his heart for a decade now. After a moment of contemplation, Paul finally gave it voice, “I wish we’d never played that fucking game, that we all lived happily ever after. Every one of us.”
“That’s been my one wish too.” She smiled, stretched to softly kiss his cheek, then turned and moved back toward the cornfield.
Paul stood by his Jeep, hands moving back into the safety of their holsters, and watched her walk away. “Where are you going?”
She nodded at the corn. “Out there.”
“What for?” he asked, his voice cracking.
“Remember what I said about this being A Christmas Carol? I’m tired of ‘Christmas Yet to Come.’ Maybe, if I walk out there ... our wish will come true. This will all have been a nightmare ... I’ll wake up next to you ... and I will never, ever let you go.”
“Deidra ... that’s –”
“Crazy? Then it’ll prove once and for all that I’m a total nutcase.”
“I can’t let you go out there.”
She smirked. “Like you could stop me.” She turned then, lifted her open hand to him, her fingers waving slightly. “Come with me.”
The invitation took Paul by surprise. He wiped his sweaty face with his hand, like trying to pick up a spill with a wet paper towel. To walk into that field was insanity ... and yet, he found himself wanting to go with her. He could feel something out there in the corn, calling him toward a place where the game could finally end. He thought he actually took a step toward Deidra, toward the field, but he may only have imagined it.
“No,” Paul said at last, shaking his head.
“Why not?”
“Why ... ?” Because it’s foreseeable that we’d get ourselves killed, he wanted to say, but he suddenly thought Deidra already knew that. “I’m married,” he told her. “I have children. I have a life.”
“And I don’t.” The tone of her voice was odd.
“I didn’t mean –”
“You’re right. I don’t have a life.”
Her fingers played with the chain around her neck again, with the charm he’d given her. He knew what the tone in her voice was now. It was understanding. Understanding of what, however, he could not say.
“I was here earlier today,” she told him. “I hiked out to that shed, the one where we hid that night. You remember?”
Paul nodded and his mouth went dry.
Deidra walked up to her car, reached inside the driver’s side window to retrieve something, something tightly wrapped in newspaper. She turned the package over and over in her hands before moving back across the grassy incline, holding it out to him. “Here.”
“What is it?” Paul slid his hands from his pockets; suddenly aware he still held his half of the charm. He clinched his fist around the golden half-circle to hide it, but it was too late.
Deidra saw the necklace and smiled, her glistening eyes locked with his. “You kept it. I knew you’d keep it. I just knew it.”
“Here.” Paul swallowed, took the package from her hands and tucked it under his arm. It was flat, whatever it was. He grabbed her by the wrist and put the charm into her open palm. “I don’t need it.”
“This isn’t like the game, I didn’t give you something of mine.” Deidra’s voice crackled, her eyes dropped to the charm, disappointment weighting the corners of her mouth. When her gaze returned to him, there was no doubt anymore about that look of understanding in her eyes. She knew something. “It’s yours.”
Paul took the package from under his arm and studied the newsprint. She’d used this morning’s paper. He could see a story about tonight’s reunion staring back at him. After a moment he gave her a questioning look.
“Remember the night before the game?” she asked. “The night we made love for the first
time?”
“Of course I do.”
“You put your script into your backpack at the foot of my bed.”
He nodded, not seeing where she was going but wanting her to get there quickly.
“The next morning, when I went downstairs to call the school, it was sitting on the kitchen counter.”
Paul’s stomach sank, but he didn’t know why.
Deidra smiled as if she did know, then she wiped away the last of her tears. “After you open it, go home to your wife. If she still wants you, fine. If not, just know that I do.”
The terror Paul felt was a white-hot poker in his gut. “What is it?” he repeated.
“Proof,” she said with genuine gravity.
“Proof of what?”
Deidra pointed to the corn. “That the game’s not over, that they want us to go out there and finish it.” She was silent for a moment, thinking it over, then she said, “I’m remembering things about that night. At first, I thought they were just nightmares, like all the ones I’ve had ever since the game, just patchwork ghosts sewn together from scraps of fantasy and discarded memories. But they’re not. They’re skeletons in the closet of my brain finally starting to rattle their bones. Our skeletons.” She motioned toward him, then back to herself. “Yours and mine. Like it or not, Paul, we’re a team. We belong together. You’ll see. You’ll see it and come with me.”
Paul shook his head. “No. I won’t.”
Deidra closed her hand around his half of the charm and nodded at the package he held. “Then open it, Paul. Open it and go home to your wife. You know where to find me.”
He watched her walk up to the wall of stalks, watched her part them with delicate hands, as through she were stepping through thick stage curtains to start her performance, or leaving the stage after her acting was done. In a moment, she was out of his sight and the aching loss in his chest seemed to dull to a manageable pain.
Paul looked at the package she’d given him, then up at the moon, the all too familiar moon, and wondered if he could hit it from here. He drew back his arm to fling her gift into the corn; halfway through the arc of his pitch, however, he stopped himself. He drew in a long breath and exhaled just as slowly.
“Damned if I do,” he murmured, “and damned if I don’t.”
Hesitantly, Paul undid the tape and pulled open the newspaper. A butcher’s knife. He recognized it as one that had been missing from his mother’s knife block for over a decade. The blade caught the moonlight, gave him an evil wink.
Repulsed, he dropped the package. The pale reflection of Paul’s own bloodshot eyes gazed up at him from the blade. A rusty film of dried blood covered much of the cutting surface, but he could remember a time when the metal was shiny and glazed over by fresh, bright gore, could remember touching it within his backpack and telling himself it was just his canteen.
His breath abandoned him. His blood rushed to his head, beat against the inside of his temples as if he were something it needed to escape; a burning building, a sinking ship. A chaos of whispers filled his ears, a wall of white sound that brought with it memories he’d locked away from everyone, including himself. Movement, a shadow, no more than a flutter really; it registered in the corner of his eye, moved toward him from the corn. Paul wanted to scream, could feel it bubble up the well of his throat, but what escaped his mouth was a husky rasp. He fell back against the Cherokee, slid down its side until he assumed a kind of fetal position on the ground, his gaze focused on the knife ... on the blood.
His body may have left the dense fog of the cornfield ten years before, but his brains were only now clearing it. They hadn’t played the Wide Game. They had been played. He’d been a pawn on a chessboard, a toy soldier in a war fought for the amusement of obscene fates, and these murderous memories they’d hidden from him were their trump card finally played.
He closed his eyes and images flashed in the darkness, horrible slides illuminated by a flickering, piercing light within his brain. Faces. They washed over him in a sudden glut, as if a mighty dam erected in his mind had burst violently open, drowning him. Nick Lerner’s face as he lay dying on the wooden spikes Paul and Deidra had buried in the ground. Patrick Chance’s face as Paul cut into it with the butcher’s knife and pulled away his scalp. Dale Brightman’s face as the knife disappeared into his eye. Dale had found the cornhusk dolls, dolls Deidra made from her Miami Indian research. And, finally, Deidra’s face, glistening in the bright sunlight as she helped him strap Dale to the wooden cross with chains they’d taken from the Hunton’s barn. These moments were dream-like, surreal, and yet he knew they had not been created by his mind but recorded by it. They had happened. They had all happened.
Now Paul was certain that he wasn’t alone. There were others out here with him, looking, laughing, descending.
Closer.
Closer.
Paul reached over and scooped the knife from the grass, held it out to ward off his attackers. As he looked around, the shadows leapt back, but their whispering remained in his ears.
“You killed them,” the unholy chorus sang. “You killed those boys ...”
“You made me,” Paul found himself saying, the words scalding his throat.
They laughed at his misery. “Did we?”
He lowered the knife, wished he’d died in those fields, in his car crash ... wished he’d never been born at all. He didn’t know if the demons had taken over his body as he slept, had forced his hands to do their will, or if he’d done it all on his own. It didn’t really matter. Either way, it had been his hands that had killed.
“End it,” the demons urged.
Slowly Paul turned the knife on himself, its bloody point aimed at his heart.
“Do it.” The whispers were now insistent, demanding. “Do it! Do it! Doit!Doit!Doit!Doit!Doit!Doit!Doit!Doit! Doit!Doit!Doit!Doit!Doit!Doit!Doit!”
Paul closed his eyes, felt their icy hands rush in to hover over his chest, waiting for him to bury the knife in his flesh, waiting to claim his heart ... his soul. That was the only way they could have him, the only way he could really be theirs. He saw Schongauer’s engraving flash once more in his mind, saw the creatures all around St. Anthony, pulling at his skin, tearing at his flesh. In a moment, that would be Paul.
At last, Paul Rice found he was able to scream.
Twenty-Nine
Somehow, he managed to get into his Jeep and drive.
He navigated the dark and winding roads without seeing them. The interior of the Cherokee seemed to dissolve around him and Paul found himself standing once more in the corn, his mother’s butcher’s knife still clutched in his hand.
The Miami girl stood next to him in the row, naked and streaked in color, her eyes dark pools into which he wanted to dive. She reached out and held his shaking hand, her voice insistent, “The spirits call out for their sacrifice.”
And then she transformed; her skin grew dry, cracked, appeared more cornhusk than flesh. Her body split down the center, peeled back to reveal Deidra’s nude form hidden within. Paul’s mind accepted the vision with surprising ease, as if it had always suspected the deception. The look on Deidra’s face wasn’t one of fear, but the same odd look of understanding he’d seen before she’d given him the knife. And then she uttered something strange, something he’d never heard before, “Mondamin is here.”
As if on cue, the demons took turns in his ear, reminding Paul how Patrick looked after Deidra pushed him onto the skewers, how the boy had screamed and called out. Paul remembered it clearly now. Patrick had cried for help, had called out for ...
God.
In a moment of clarity, like a master chess player, Paul saw his escape move. He drove to St. Anthony’s and bolted across the parking lot, looking up at the church as hope and terror danced in his heart, the knife – Deidra’s “proof”– held in his fist. The demons told him it was best to just end it, best to turn the knife he’d used on so many others on himself, but he couldn’t do that.
He w
ouldn’t do it.
To do that would be to lose, to admit defeat.
Paul leapt up the steps and reached out for the large oak doors. A crow swooped down at him, stabbed his hand with its beak, drew tiny rivulets of blood. He slashed at the bird and it fell dead to the concrete, spilled its contents like an opened piñata. Paul looked around, waiting for the entire flock to swoop in and devour him utterly.
What’s a flock of crows called?
And finally, his mind permitted an answer: It’s a murder, Paul. A murder of crows. Murder!
He pushed open the doors and ran into St. Anthony’s. A breeze blew past him, extinguished many of the candles, threw the chapel into partial darkness. Father Andrew stood at the altar. Paul looked down at the knife, saw it stained in fresh blood – the crow’s blood, blood from his own wounded hand – and he hid between the dim pews. If the old priest saw the manic look in Paul’s eyes, saw the wild gray mane of his hair and the blood on his knife, his salvation might run out the door.
That would ruin everything.
Father Andrew ran to the entrance, and Paul worried he might have run out without hearing his confession, then he heard the priest’s shoes on the tiled center aisle, coming closer.
Confession is good for the soul.
“Amen,” Father Andrew shouted, as if answering Paul’s thoughts.
It occurred to Paul that Deidra had been right: he was still playing the Game. Only now, he was playing to win.
The truth shall set you free.
Father Andrew passed by him on the way to the altar, open newspaper still in one hand. Paul rose up, curled his left arm around the old priest’s chest and held the knife –
The proof of his sins!
– up for the old priest to see.
“Bless me, Father,” Paul cried out into the holy man’s ear, his voice panicky, shrill, almost like a woman screaming. “Bless me, for I have sinned.”
“Please ...” Father Andrew muttered back. Paul heard fear in his voice as well. “... put down the knife and we can talk about this.”