The Heavens Rise

“She thought you could . . . they th-thought you could m-make people do things.”

“Smart girl.”

“How—how long have you been . . . ?”

“Awake?” Marshall asked. “Is that really what you want to know?”

“I don’t kn-know what you . . .”

“You want to know if it was an accident. Like the others. The nurse. You want to know if what I did to her”—he jerked his head in the direction of his sister’s corpse—“is like what I did to them?”

“I don’t know what—”

“Yes, you do, Mr. Shire. You know. They all told you. It’s right here in your file. And now, you’d like to know if I was awake when I forced my sister to use the knife on herself and start painting.”

Shire only realized he had started to cry when his image of Marshall Ferriot wobbled and split behind a fresh sheen of tears. Snot filled his nostrils, and several sharp intakes of breath weren’t enough to clear them. And he longed desperately to be back on that sunlit bench in Freedom Park with Arthelle Williams. Or maybe walking along the shore with that father he’d ridden over with on the ferry, smiling contentedly as they watched the man’s two small children blow the sand off seashells and speculate wildly about what might be swimming just offshore. Because now it felt like that same man’s brusque nod of farewell had contained some sense of foreboding, some vague sense that horrors were waiting for Allen Shire just up the central trail of Chamberland Island. And he felt like a fool, a fool for having walked up here alone, all this way. But how could he have known? How could he have known that voodoo was real and that animals can explode before your eyes from blows struck by invisible hammers?

“To answer the question you are too afraid to ask, sir. I don’t remember what happened to my sister, or the nurse.”

“Tammy Keene,” Shire said, so forcefully he startled himself. It felt as if some trapped bubble of determination and self-will had worked its way free and to the surface of his being. His captor might be a monster, but the nurse had a name, goddammit, before some phenomenon Shire couldn’t understand had stolen it from her. “Tammy Keene. That was her name.”

The young man in the wheelchair dismissed this with a distracted nod.

Outside the glass door were three metal trash cans Shire hadn’t noticed before. He hadn’t noticed them because they hadn’t been there. And now they were lined up at the foot of the back steps, lids askew atop the animal carcasses stuffed inside. It started pouring all of a sudden, and the clouds of flies around each trash can departed like apparitions.

“Thank you for your help in the yard, Allen.”

Shire screwed his eyes shut, as if he could will himself away from this dark bedroom with the same baffling, supernatural skill Marshall Ferriot had used to make him clean up all the carnage in the backyard.

“The animals are different, you see. They can’t go for very long is the problem. Their little skulls, they just . . . give way. No better word for it. But with people . . . With people, everything is different. And now that you’re here, I can find out how.”

•   •   •

Shire was outside. He was holding a muddy shovel in his hands, his arms burning from exertion he couldn’t remember.

The rain had soaked him from head to toe.

“Katrina, Shire.”

He was standing in a five-foot-deep hole he couldn’t remember digging. Marshall was parked in the open back door. He felt the same sense of lost time as when he’d come to after his wisdom teeth surgery.

“Who is Katrina? She’s in your notes. It says, ‘Marshall relocated before Katrina.’? ”

“We got hit,” Shire answered. His lungs felt like they were seizing up as they struggled to perform deep, much-needed breaths he apparently hadn’t been capable of while Marshall forced him to dig the hole. The trash cans towered over him. The rain had stopped, so the flies were back, and occasionally several of them would land on Marshall’s blanket-draped legs.

“Hit . . .” Marshall said, with a furrowed brow and a searching, almost pleading look in his eyes.

“A hurricane,” Shire answered, and it came out like a seagull’s squawk. He struggled to get his breath back lest he risk the kid’s impatience. “A big one. Almost as big as Camille. The eye, it hit Bay St. Louis, but the way it was moving, it drove water up all over the levees and into the city. Mid-City. Lakeview. Chalmette. St. Bernard . . . The Lower Ninth Ward. There was water all through ’em. People got trapped on their roofs, died in their attics. For days it went on. Days and days.”

He was astonished to find that reciting the cold, clinical details of this cataclysm, which had shaped every nightmare he’d suffered since the summer of 2005, brought about a strange kind of stillness inside him, as if the only thing that could distract him from his present agony was the memory of a different, more distant, pain.

The kid’s stare was vacant all of a sudden, dreamy almost, and it was impossible to tell how this news was affecting him. Shire couldn’t even guess how the enormity of such a revelation about someone’s hometown would have affected a normal person who had been asleep for almost a decade, let alone a sadistic fuck like Marshall Ferriot.

“But it’s still there, right? New Orleans. It’s still there, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s . . . different. But it’s still there.”

“Good. Then they’ll still be there too, probably. Both of them.”

Who was the kid talking about? Surely not his parents; their deaths were referenced in his file multiple times. Other family members? There were hardly any left except some second and third cousins who’d never been involved with the family business. The kid had no life waiting for him back in New Orleans. None that Shire had seen any evidence of. But there was no chance in hell Shire was going to point this out to him now.

“I’m so glad you’re here, Mr. Shire. See, it’s going to take me awhile to walk again, and I’ll need plenty of help.”

The smell. A wave of the awful smell hit him from the trash cans, and it occurred to him that he was digging a repository for all the animal carcasses he’d been forced to collect, and he was digging the thing just a few feet away from the back door of the house. Marshall was making him dig the thing just a few feet from the back of the house. And if that was the case, that meant this thing he had, this power he was using, it had range. And if it had range, then maybe he could make a run for—

He held the last tendrils of this thought to him as the darkness closed in around him with silent speed.

•   •   •

He was staring down into the pit now and the trash cans were empty, their contents emptied into the grave’s muddy bottom in a tangle of stiff legs and blood-matted fur and desiccated scales. And because it truly was like lost time, the thought he’d gone under with was still right there with him, a whisper in his ear through the rain. Range, he thought. And in a flash of insight, it turned into another word. Run!

“Now let’s—”

But before Marshall could finish the sentence, Shire hurled the shovel at him and took off running.

He heard the blade strike something with a metallic thwang, but he didn’t look back. Just kept running like hell.

Then his right foot seemed to sink into open air and he pitched forward, and when the palmetto leaves didn’t slap him in the face, he knew he had failed and his sob of despair was swallowed by a darkness without time or substance or even the comforting finality of death.

•   •   •

Now he couldn’t move. The house towered over him and his entire body was wrapped in a cold, wet embrace. When he coughed, his chin struck mud.

The grave was closed and he was in it, buried up to his neck. Marshall hadn’t moved an inch. His wheelchair was still parked in the open back door, and the shovel lay across his lap. If Shire had managed to strike