Chapter 5: Naomi

Three days before he burst into flame and fell into the river, I found Bernie Lutz in the barracks with tears in his eyes and red in his cheeks. My first thought was he’s finally broken. That long and terrible April had done him in and his mind had finally cracked and shattered and scattered.

     And when he saw me, those weren’t the tears of madness or despair in his eyes - they were child’s tears, if I’ve really degraded to describing the essence of tears.

   “Swansea,” he said, wiping his eyes and cursing under his breath. “Sorry, I didn’t -"

     “No, it’s quite all right, I’ll just-”

     “Don’t tell anyone, sir, I-”

     “I won’t.”

     “It’s not the war, sir.” He said, firmly. For once in his life, that stupid grin was gone. Here before me sat pure, uncensored Bernie. He looked smaller, somehow, without the smile. “I’ve not gone soft, if that’s what you think you’re seeing. I can fight good as any man here.”

     You can’t, I remember thinking. The moment the tears start flowing and your heart beats through your skin, you’re as good as dead. You’re a black trail of smoke in the sky waiting to happen.

     That’s what I told myself, anyway. Pilots don’t hesitate. Pilots don’t think. Pilots don’t rationalize or rake their emotions or wonder if their mothers will cry when it’s all said and done. Pilots act. And Bernie Lutz, as far as I could tell, was in no state to act.

     “I really am sorry, sir,” he went on, not caring that I’d already condemned him in mind, not caring that the pilot Swansea had already resigned him to death a thousand times over. “I’m not afraid to die or anything like that. It’s just…” He shook his head and laughed a bitter laugh. “Sometimes you just cry, you know? The tears just come and you don’t know. The day before the papers came, y’know, the day before the Archduke in Austria took the bullet in his belly…I cried then, too. It’s like when there’s a storm coming and you can’t help but feel it. There’s moisture in the air and the weathervane’s spinning, but you don’t see the rain. Not yet, anyway.”

     “If you’re waiting for a storm,” I said coolly, “look no further. We’re spitting and dancing and flying around in the heart of it. Don’t worry about tomorrow. It's already happened.”

     “I know that, sir,” he said. “It’s just…my weathervane’s spinning, is all. It’s spinning and spinning and I don’t know why.” He hiccuped, wiped the wetness from his pink cheeks and swollen eyes. “Sometimes it just gets bad, you know? Sometimes you just know things. Sometimes you just feel it, you know?”

      I didn’t know. Not then anyway. Sometimes I picture Bernie in that tent, crying his silent cry and I wonder if things could have been different. I wonder if I could have done something, said something, acted some combination of acts that would have halted the gears in motion. It keeps me awake more nights than not.

        Anyway, here’s what happened with the flaming corpse.

      “Ia! Ia!” he chanted, wrapping his fiery fingers around the iron bars. They melted under his touch, like milk curdling at a thousand hours a moment. “Fthaggua fhtagn! Ia! Ia! Fthaggua fhtagn!”

     My hands were still cuffed behind my back, which wasn’t at all conductive to our present dilemma. The Constable rattled off five more shots into the thing that had once been Parish, and all I could do was watched as the bullets tore at him, made him dance, made him angrier and angrier with every bleeding cut. Parish snarled, churning his tarry, blackened teeth like an animal gone mad. And all the while, he kept on.

     “Ia! Ia! Fthaggua fhtagn!”

     The bars melted before him like gates parting before some fiery king. Matthews grabbed at my elbow and yanked me behind her as she scurried back out of the cell block, the chants of one Richard Parish (“Ia! Ia! Fthaggua fhtagn!”) chasing us in our wake. She led me out a back door and into the pouring rain, even as the sound of gunfire and what-the-hell’s erupted from the station.

     “They can’t kill him,” I declared stupidly as our shoes sloshed in the rain-soaked mud. The clouds had finally burst above Abraboca, drowning the night in a clamor of thunder of darkened clouds. “Guns won’t work. We can’t -”

     Well, what can we do, Captain Proactive? You’ve got flaming corpses running around and people dying left and right and what are you doing? Running around in the rain with your hands cuffed behind your back.

     There were screams now, shouts and curses and death rattles galore. The Abraboca Police Department would be a graveyard by morning, and so would the town if they couldn’t -

     If you can’t what? Put it together? Figure it out? Find the rhyme behind the random, the order behind the chaos? One more. He said those exact words. One more. And then something about the stars sinking into the sea.

     The darkness swallowed us. I didn’t know where I was running or whether or not I would get there. I didn’t know whether or not to expect a thousand Richard Parishes to come creeping out of the muck, skin crackling and eyes on fire and hellfire sermons spitting out of the tar-soaked mouths.

     And when the screams had faded and the songs of madman tongue given way to the patter of rain, the Constable and I found ourselves heaved over and coughing at the edge of the Atlantic with the waves crashing against our feet. She was crying, I think, and there’s nothing in the world that could have broken my heart more.

     We stood there for the longest time, and I suppose I’ll never know exactly how long we stayed like that. Two grown adults standing on the beach, coughing and sweating and chasing away bad dreams. I watched Matthews all the while, though I’m sure our eyes never met. She was a lion gone limp, a fire turned to ash. The way she’d shot Parish, the look in her eyes, the way she’d made every wrong turn at every wrong junction. I felt stupid for not figuring it out earlier. Guess that comes with the territory of having the emotional gradient of a rock.

     “I’m sorry,” I said. The Amusement Mile stretched out a few dozen yards away, a skeleton against the dark grey sky. It’ll never reopen, Bernie Lutz whispered into my ear. Summer is never coming back. Now comes the winter of your despair, John Swansea. Now comes the snow and the fire and the darkness that never ends. The thought occurred to me that this was where it happened - this was where Naomi Fisher washed up, black as a burnt chunk of meat and dead as the Archduke in his mob of admirers. “I’m so, so sorry. I know what this means to you, I do. I know what you lost, and nothing I can do will -”

     For a moment, I was sure she had half a mind to turn the gun on me right then and there. The fire was back in her eyes again, the same fire that had burned when she first set foot in Abraboca.

     “You think you know so much,” she spat at me. “You think you’ve got me all figured out and -”

     “The eyes didn’t match,” I said, and let the words linger in the rain-drenched air. When she made no move to respond, I went on. “Both brown, not blue. That should have been my first clue. The detective’s clue, I guess. But I’m not a detective, not really. I’m not even a hero.”

     “Then what are you?”

    “I’m a pilot,” I said simply. It felt good to say it again. “And pilots see. Pilots listen.” My voice cracked, and to this day I’m not quite sure why. “Pilots don’t miss much.”

     “And what haven’t you missed, Mister Swansea?”

   You’ve missed most of it, Bernie whispered. You’ve been chasing a ghost, John Swansea. Poor little Naomi. No birth announcement. Not adoption papers. Half her life a blank page on a map. The girl who showed up for teacher’s picture and died promptly thereafter. The truth has been staring at you in the face this whole time. Don’t see with your brain, Swansea. See with your heart. What does your heart tell you here?

     “That not so very long ago, you were a mother.” The words came to me even as I spoke them, and more than ever the truth of them fell on me. “And then, when Naomi washed up on this beach, you weren’t.”

     It rattled in the air. The Constable’s face was a slate made of marble, and I couldn’t tell whether she was working up the courage to shoot me or had died right there on her feet.

     “You were what? Fifteen, sixteen at the most.” It had been right in front of me all that time, but there it was. “Old enough to know what you’d gotten yourself into. So you stepped out. You made the hardest decision of your life and you let her go. The Fishers may have been family, but they were never mummy and daddy, were they? That was you. That was always you.”

     Silence filled the empty spaces between the bullets of rain. The waves stopped kissing the shore and elected instead to bite at it. Wind cut at me, and more than once I felt myself wavering under the weight of it. The storm had broken. By this time tomorrow -

     Well, assuming there was a tomorrow. I guess I couldn’t, could I?

     “We need to get moving,” I said, charting a course in my head. The world was going to hell, and the downpour of rain and the crackling whips of lightning cutting across the sky in the distance weren’t helping. But anything was better than staying here. If I was going to die, it wasn’t going to be on next to a bloody theme park with my hands cuffed behind my back and the ghost of Bernie Lutz singing in my ear. “We’ll alert the authorities. The army. Whatever you have to do. Call in Scotland Yard or, well, whatever the hell it is you have here.”

      “The Police.”

      “Yeah. That.”

    The Constable sighed and wiped the rain from her face. It wasn’t all rain, I thought. Then she said, “Here, let me take those off.” She took the cuffs off and let them fall where they may. There would be no simple arrests tonight, no cease-and-desists, nothing simple enough to be fixed by a hangman’s noose or an electric chair.

     We stood there where the water and land came together, I rubbing my wrist and the Constable her pride. Our soaked clothes shriveled and clung to our bodies. The constable was skinnier than I thought she was. Younger. I thought of a girl, lonely and afraid. Young and stupid, with a belly full of regret and a world that looked at her and saw nothing but sin. I ran a hand through my greying hair and shivered.

     “Emma sent me letters,” said Constable Jennifer Matthews, after a long and terrible quiet. Her voice was barely above a whisper, and I had to strain to hear it over the pang of the rain. “She was always so kind. She wanted me to know how she was doing, how her schooling was going and whether she was making any friends or learning any new songs in church. But there were bad things in there, too. They were worried. The Fishers, I mean. They said that Naomi had cried a lot. Not very often, not every day. But when she did…” She laughed a bitter laugh. “They say she howled. Do you have any children, John Swansea?”

     I have nothing. No one. “No,” was all I said.

     “We all think ours will be different. Special. We think they’ll rise up like dragons and conquer the world. Because they’re ours. How could they not? But then you wake up one morning and your boss tells you that some girl washed up on the beach in Abraboca. Some girl, he said. Just like that. And then the world goes sour and nothing means anything anymore.”

     One more. Parish’s slimy voice echoed in my skull. Just one more and the night will fall and the stars will sink into the sea and oh, how we’ll sing.

     “It does, though,” I said. The gears were turning in my brain, the stars aligning overhead, the clocks all striking twelve. “Why? Why tell me that, Jennifer? That exact sentence, those exact words.”

     They cry because they know. Somewhere, deep down in the pit of their stomach, they know what’s coming. Blame it on gods or devils or angels or the magic f*****g pixie dust that runs through their guts. They always cry. They cry because they know it’s too late. Bernie cried the night before that thing ripped him to shreds, Naomi cried, too, and the last one -

     My heart stopped.

     “One more,” I said out loud. “That’s what Parish said. Those exact words. He was so sure. So confident. Because the last one was right here. The last rose waiting to be plucked.”

    “You’re not making any sense, I -”

    “It’s the children, don’t you see that? It was them, it was always them.” My brain was screaming. In the darkness of Abraboca, all hell was about to break loose. “These demons, these things. They killed Bernie. They killed Naomi. They’re like parasites, and maybe some people some people are just -” Blessed? Gifted? Different? “Some people are just special. Maybe they’re, I don’t know, magic. Touched by an angel. Jennifer, I don’t believe in God. But I do believe in what I see, and what I see it f*****g insanity everywhere I look. So magic children? Sure. Why the f**k not?”

     I turned towards Abraboca, my heart racing and my mind on fire. The darkness was palpable, like oil that has spilled into the air. Somewhere out there, a fire was burning. Somewhere out there, the last flower was about to be plucked.