“So busy, but listen, I need some help. Do you think you could help me? I need you to give me a ride tonight.”
Hope. Yes, there was anger and hesitation and fear and confusion, but more than anything else, hope, and he was full of willingness to forgive me for everything — for teasing him and misleading him and telling him about my sex life with my sixteen-year-old boyfriend — if only I would be his friend again and let him do me a favor. “A ride where?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you. Can you pick me at my house at about eleven? I’ll be waiting outside.”
“Listen, Mason, I don’t think I can do that. It’s, I don’t know, crazy.”
“Why?”
“Because it is, that’s why. What would I tell Roberta?”
“Tell her you are doing me a favor,” I said. “She
This was precisely the sort of thing that left him so utterly rudderless, and he needed a moment to formulate a reply. “What about your mother?” he asked. “Can’t she take you?”
“My mother. Please,” I said, which both ended that line of inquiry and provided absolutely no information.
There was a prolonged silence and then, finally, “I’ll be there.”
Where I wanted to go was the cemetery, the Jewish cemetery, because Jews did not embalm their bodies. I told him where and I told him why, and he drove me. He tried to make conversation, to keep things light, to ask what I was up to, but I was not in the mood for talking. He even asked me about Ryan in the hopes of rousing me out of my stupor, but it was of no use. “Mason, what is going on?” he asked at last.
“I’m hungry,” I said.
“Then let’s go out to eat,” he said, excited. There would be food and drink and we would have a little too much and I would touch his arm when I talked and he would feel light and giddy and young and full of potential and he would forget how unhappy he was.
“Not that kind of hungry. I need to eat real food. There was a funeral today. There’ll be something fresh.”
“Mason,” he began.
“I told you,” I said. “I told you the first time we met what I was. I know you didn’t want to listen, you didn’t want to believe, but it is part of who I am, and I have to eat. If I don’t, I will die. Is that what you want?”
“Let me take you home,” he said, putting a hand on my arm, daring to initiate touching for the first time, to thrill at the feel of my skin, of my warm flesh, of the roundness of my arm. He loved me. He really did. “You need some sleep, and you’ll be fine.”
I jerked away from his grip. “Are you my friend or aren’t you?”
“You know I am,” he said.
“Then come with me. Help me, and if you want, you can join me.”
“Join you?”
“Take my hand. You can be like I am.”
He stared at me. “Are you quoting Blue Oyster Cult?”
“I’m alluding to Blue Oyster Cult,” I said. “It’s not the same thing. But I am also offering us a way to be together.”
“Why me?” he said. “Why did you choose me?”
We all have our blind spots and our weaknesses, and this was mine. This was the question to which I’d never formulated a response, and I should have known it was coming. I should have seen it as inevitable, but I slipped up, and now I had to think on my feet. I could not hesitate. I could not appear to be fabricating something, and so I told him the truth. “I saw you at school, picking up Neil, and you were what I wanted. I knew you were. You were like a perfectly ripe piece of fruit ready for picking. And so I picked you. Now you are mine, if you want to be.”
He stared at me, daring to hope that what I said was true, that I could somehow make him something else, that he could walk away from his life and have a reason, a necessity, to become something else. Even if it meant becoming a monster, was it worth it? Was becoming something unspeakable too high a price to pay for becoming something new? Pete had already had a taste of what it would be like to live outside the realm of the acceptable, he had desired the forbidden, he had flirted with becoming an outcast, and all of those things had seemed wonderful and welcoming and sweet, and that was why he followed me into the graveyard.
I stared at him hard, daring him to turn away from me. “You said you’d do anything for me. You said that. Did you mean it?”
He nodded.
“Then it’s time to show me.”
Of all the things he did that night, following me inside was the hardest. To enter a graveyard at night was a thing so strange, so against every instinct, that it made the rest that much easier. We trudged across the vast expanse of markers and monuments. The air was warm and pleasant, and the half-moon provided us with just enough light. Somewhere in the far distance, the cemetery’s lone security guard sat in his little room, watching his little television, oblivious to our trespass.
I’d scouted ahead, so I knew where to find the fresh grave with its loose soil and the shovel sticking out like a toothpick in a plate of hors d’oeuvres.
“Dig,” I told him.
He stared at me. “You want me to dig up a grave? Why?”
I smiled. “Because you want to know what’s at the bottom. You’ve always wanted to know, haven’t you? What do I want with you? What am I after? There’s only one way to find out.”
He looked at me, unable to believe he was here, in this graveyard, truly considering something so insane as digging up a dead body. “You could simply tell me,” he said.
I shook my head, sympathetically, not at all unkindly. “No,” I said. “That’s not how it works. There’s only one way to find out. You can dig, or you can never know.”
That was why he picked up the shovel and thrust the blade into the loose soil. That was why he worked with calm, steady, untiring effort while I sat on a nearby gravestone and painted my fingernails black.
When the grave was dug and the coffin was open, it was his turn to watch, and he did watch. He looked on while I ate. I did not need to remove my clothes, but I did that for him, to give him something to consider, to ponder, to enjoy while I engaged in an activity that he must at first find revolting, and later find something else entirely. And when I’d had my fill, I took the shovel and removed the top of the corpse’s skull and handed him a beautiful cut of the freshly dead and yeasty-smelling brain. I stood before him naked, my breasts streaked with dirt and blood, holding the flesh out to him like a supplicant making an offering to her god, and he took it and bit into it and his knees became weak.
“Wow,” he said, dropping down onto the grass as he chewed thoughtfully. “It’s amazing. I can — I know what she was feeling, I know what she thought, how she made sense of things. I know what it was to be her.”
I stood there and looked at him and smiled. “I know,” I said, “that’s how it works. You just know.”
I watched. I watched him know what it was like to be that deep inside someone’s head, to understand a stranger’s life with intimate certainty. I looked at him and smiled, and wiped my mouth with the back of my naked arm. Pete had been amusing, and he’d been useful, but I could see it might get tiring soon enough. And when it did, well, something might happen to Pete, and then it would be time for me to find out what he’d been thinking all this time …
SAINT JOHN
By Jonathan Maberry
SAINT JOHN WALKED through cinders that fell like slow rain, and he found twenty-seven angels hiding behind the altar of a burning cathedral.
