Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [99]
The night, summer, perhaps just a few hours before the sun might rise.
Might.
He wonders if he’ll ever see another storm. Another summer.
Another dawn.
Those damn words.
“Your flesh will remember the name even if your mind forgets,” Dash had told him, and he had still thought it was a game when Dash had said it. “The name gets in your bones and in your heart. Just by hearing it once. But the words are harder to remember. They don’t want you to know the words because it binds them. So, listen very carefully. Listen. Each time I say them, repeat them exactly back to me.”
He’s shivering. Sweating. Nausea and dizziness both within him, the pit of his stomach. Something’s scratchy around his balls – feels like a mosquito buzzing all along the inside of his legs. Twitching in his fingers. Tensing his entire body. Afraid to take another breath.
A conversation replays in his head:
“It’s not that hard. Watch.”
“I can’t. I just…”
“All you do is take the thing and bring it down like this. Think of it as a game.”
“I can’t do it.”
“Don’t think of it like that. Pretend it’s a game. It doesn’t mean what it looks like. You’ve been trained to think this is bad by church and school and your parents. And the world outside. But it is not real. It is just a game, only nobody else knows this. They’re stupid. Nobody’s going to get hurt. Least of all one of us. Least of all you or me. I would never let it happen. You’re like my brother.”
“I know. But I can’t.”
“All right. I’ll do it. I’ll just do it. Just remember what you’re supposed to do. As soon as it happens. As soon as my eyes close. Promise? Okay?”
“Okay, okay.”
“And the words. After. If it’s too much. You know what to say. You remember?”
“Yes.”
“You know how to pronounce them? You have to know. If this gets out of hand, you can stop it. The name for me, and the words to stop it. If it’s too awful.”
“I know, I know.”
“’Cause it might get too awful. I don’t know.”
“Sure. Of course. I remember how to say them.”
“And the name?”
He has no problem remembering the name. He’d like to blot it out of his mind. The name is on the tip of his tongue, and he can’t seem to forget how to say it, how to pronounce it perfectly. The words have somehow vanished from his mind.
He tries to remember the words, now. How they sound. The language was foreign, but he couldn’t read them off the bone. Especially with no light. But even if he had some light, he knew the letters looked like scribbles and symbols. They didn’t look like sounds. All he can remember is the name, and he doesn’t want to remember that.
A name like that shouldn’t be said in a church.
A New England church. Saint Something. Old Something Church. Older than old, perhaps. Nearly a crypt. Made of slate and stone. Puritanical and lovely and a bit like a prison, now. Church of punishment. Rocky churchyard behind it. He remembers the graves with the mud and the high grasses and the smell of wild onion and lavender, as if it were years ago rather than the past hour. Smell of summer, wet grass, and that fertile, splendid odor of new leaves, new blossoms.
The smell of life.
He is inside the church. In a room. The altar is at the opposite end.
Danny had the lighter, he thinks. If I get it, maybe I can at least save her.
He wasn’t sure if the shape in the doorway was Danny, or the thing that he didn’t even want to name. Not Dash. Not anyone he had ever met or known. An ‘It’. A Thing. A Creature. Something without a Name.
But it has a name. He knows the name, but he does not intend to ever say it again. He knows the name too well, but it’s the words he keeps trying to remember. The ones that are on the bone. The words that might stop it from continuing.
He tries to lick his lips, but it’s no use. His mouth is dry.
Dry from too much screaming.
Nearby, there’s a very