The Paradise Prophecy

would be whisked away to the Land of Nod and the pleasant dreams it promised.

So much for that idea.

7

HARRISON, LOUISIANA

Edith Stillwater’s last few words had stuck with Batty for the rest of the afternoon and most of the night.

She was right. The absence of God notwithstanding, Batty was a pitiful soul. Stranded in self-imposed purgatory here in this house, his only companions were the thick, earthy smell of the swamp and a humidity that wrapped itself around him like a warm wet blanket. No friends, no loved ones. Nothing but the Louisiana sky.

“It’s hotter than the Devil’s drawers,” his mother used to say on nights like this.

She would sit on this very porch, fanning herself, her deck of blue Bikes spread out before her, her face scrunched up in concentration as she stared down at the array she’d laid out on the table. More often than not, there was a client sitting across from her, eyeing her anxiously, waiting for her to finish her reading, wondering if she’d be able to pull at least one small splinter of hope from those cards.

His mother tended to give it to them, even if she had to lie. She was a woman prone to sympathy, cared too much about other people, a trait she carried with her until the day she died.

She’d been gone now for a good fifteen years and this house was the only thing that Batty had left of her. A big old Southern monstrosity with columns and balconies and a fairly advanced case of swamp rot.

The place had been in his family for generations, and Batty was born here, in one of the bedrooms upstairs, his wizened old mamere playing midwife as his mother pushed him out into the world in what everyone in the family agreed was probably the most difficult delivery of the latter twentieth century.

Batty was born with an attitude, an eight-pound ten-ounce bundle of XY chromosomes, who, according to Gramma Jean, looked just like his daddy. He was never sure if this was supposed to be a compliment or an insult, or who it might be aimed at, but since Winston LaLaurie had spent most of his life in and out of jail, Batty had a feeling she wasn’t trying to be kind.

Nowadays he was doing a pretty good job of living up to his heritage. Not the jail part, of course. Not yet, at least. But now that he was without a day job to go to-the one thing that had given him at least a semblance of legitimacy-he had officially become the most useless human being on the face of the planet.

A pitiful soul, indeed.

There’s nothing worse than a man who can’t hold on to a simple job. And nothing more disgusting than one who sits around feeling sorry for himself.

But then he had his reasons, didn’t he?

He may have been born with an attitude, but he’d had it beat right out of him the night Rebecca died.

From the time Batty was three years old, he’d sit on the front porch while his mother read the cards for friends and neighbors and strangers who sometimes came down from New Orleans or as far away as Baton Rouge, rich and poor alike.

Everyone in Terrebonne Parish knew Patsy LaLaurie had The Vision and they all wanted to see what she saw. Batty had been proud to watch her work, knowing that half of what she did was designed only to make these people feel good. Not in a calculating way, not simply as a means to make money (although she never refused a donation), but because she didn’t want a single one of them to walk away with fear in their hearts.

What good could it possibly do them?

“I can only feel what’s coming,” she’d once said to Batty. “I can’t change it. So why make another human being suffer if they don’t have to?”

Batty understood. Mostly because he could already feel what she felt. The thing his mother and grandmother called The Vision had been passed on to him. Nothing more, really, than a heightened sense of awareness. He felt things, smelled things, dreamed things and sometimes saw things that others couldn’t. And he knew that there was enough darkness out there to scare the living daylights out of even the toughest old fart.

He remembered seeing Landry LeBlanc, a big, oafish bully of a man, cry like a baby when Mother broke from her usual routine and told him he had cancer. She did it, she later said to Batty, because she wanted the old fool to get his butt to the doctor in hopes he might at least slow down the inevitable, make his last days tolerable.

“Idiot spends most of his time winding his ass, scratching his watch and telling everybody it’s daybreak when the sun’s going down. But that don’t mean he deserves to be in pain.”

Batty missed his mother. Always would. And if that made him some kind of mama’s boy-as the kids in school had so often reminded him-then so be it.

Setting his glass on the porch rail, he picked up the bottle of Tullamore he’d been nursing and poured himself another couple fingers of liquid. The irony of his preferred method of emotional medication was that he didn’t really like booze. Not the taste of it, at least, which was something akin to kerosene mixed with rubbing alcohol.

But then he didn’t drink for pleasure. And he had very serious doubts that there was anyone alive who actually did, no matter what they might claim. Alcohol-especially whiskey-was anesthesia, pure and simple. Designed only to kill the effects of the knife when it cut too deep.

And for Batty that knife was hitting bone right now.

“You take life too damn hard,” his mother had always told him. Usually after he came home from school, covered in cuts and bruises. He’d never made it a secret that he had The Vision, too, and that made most of the kids afraid of him. He’d had to learn to use his fists to defend himself and had endured his share of verbal taunts.

That was where his nickname was born. The schoolyard. For the first few years of his life, most of the kids had called him Seb. But because Sebastian LaLaurie was the crazy kid with the crazy mom, a punk named Harley Wilks had started calling him Batty and it stuck.

He had resisted at first. Threatened to pummel anyone who repeated the name. But that only egged the other kids on, and over the years, he finally grew to accept it. Even thought of it as a badge of honor.

Yes, he was the crazy kid with the crazy mom.

So what are you gonna do about it?

But Batty really came to love the name when he met Rebecca. The way it rolled off her tongue with that sweet, subtle accent of hers. She was a Baton Rouge girl who showed up on the steps of Nassau Hall, ready to prove to these Princeton know-it-alls that even a late starter like her could kick some serious academic ass.

She stole Batty’s heart the moment he met her. The moment she repeated his name back to him, those dark eyes smiling as she said it.

It didn’t hurt that she’d had The Vision, too-although she’d been light years ahead of Batty on that account. Light years ahead of his mother, for that matter.

And he sometimes wondered if she’d known even back then the dark road she was destined to travel.

Batty sighed, knocked back his drink and set the glass on the rail, staring out at the warm Louisiana night, thinking he’d better get to bed before he turned into a blubbering old fool like Landry LeBlanc.

He didn’t have cancer, but what he did have could be just as debilitating. And despite this current, rather sickening display of self-absorption, he wasn’t about to go down easy.

He still had some fight left in him.

He just hoped it was enough.

Batty’s bedroom was on the second floor.

Properly anesthetized, he stumbled to the bed and plopped onto his stomach, tucking his arms under the pillow as he lay his cheek against it.

He was about to pass out when he felt something digging into his left forearm. Something hard and pointy, about the size of a pepper corn.

He fumbled for it, got it between his fingers, then reached to the nightstand and turned on the light. It took a