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In this chapter: After the reappearance of Malmacchío at Daniel’s funeral, Everett is desperate to find the only other witness to his betrayal, retrieve the book containing his secrets, and pick up the pieces of a lost love.
Every Year, Rain is a serialized supernatural thriller. This is Chapter Three. Click HERE to start at the beginning.
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“Every Year, Rain”
Cate Heck hadn’t been a guest at Daniel and Chandra’s wedding, and crouched in the bushes, wielding the wedding planner’s black binder as a shield against the rain, she’d looked like a shadow. The shuttering lens of her Sony DSLR had alone betrayed her location. Binding time immemorial.
I’d stood behind Daniel beneath the dark quilt of a sky, feeling like some forsaken son of God. Barely had the first peal of thunder heralded the storm when the diluvian waters washed over us. It hit Chandra like the first gasp after a long-held breath—her shoulders flinched, and her face attested indomitable joy. Shuchick. The shutter of Cate’s camera was like the cocking of a freshly loaded gun.
The wedding couldn’t be stopped.
Chandra’s face glistened as she said her vows and raindrops the size of cherries pelted the wedding party. Shuchick. Her rain-drenched dress clung all about her, and Chandra gathered its folds to one side as she ducked away from the outdoor altar, trailing her groom to the pavilion. Bound till death to Daniel. Shuchick. Later beneath the pole tent, they danced—the bride, the groom, the guests. The soggy ground foamed darkly beneath their steps, and I'd watched until Chandra sashayed toward me, doubled over as she pulled me from my chair, then cha-cha’d us back towards the center pole. Nick and Daniel whistled and clapped in approval. Beneath my fingers, the wet patterned lace felt like damp dead leaves trembling to life with the shifting of her waist.
She leaned against me with steady, even breaths, put her mouth close to my ear, and said, “See, that wasn’t so hard,” then grinned as Daniel twirled her out of my hands. Shuchick.
All the while, the rain stampeded in gray streaks just beyond the tent, carrying off the past—everything that didn’t belong to this newly baptized life. It was the flood that swept me away.
In the graveyard, Chandra was haloed by her father-in-law’s black umbrella. She brushed the rain from her forehead as she approached the mound of dirt that would separate her from Daniel forever. When Chandra crouched beside the grave, her knees slid past the hem of her skirt, and she pressed the fabric against her thighs with one hand and scooped a fistful of soil in the other. Frozen there, she clutched the dirt as though it were a treasured possession and relinquishing it would be an unsurvivable outrage. The clump of mud disappeared into the grave with a muted thud.
I wanted her to look away. She would not.
Her father-in-law took her by the shoulders, ushered her back from the abysm, and wiped at the muddy traces of her palm. The earthy residue spread hand to hand as he strove to brush it away, like a contagion of grief sticking in the creases of his own palms and fingers even as the water began its work of dissolution.
As the ceremony concluded, my mind couldn’t formulate anything meaningful that might ease Chandra’s grief, haunted as I was by the sight of Cate’s ruined cheeks in the funeral parlor. I couldn’t stop wondering if she were crouched among the cars that castellated the lone cemetery drive or insinuated somewhere amid the sea of black umbrellas, the long, glassy eye of her camera peering over a mourner’s shoulder, perceiving even my innermost thoughts. Knowing and remembering what I’d nearly succeeded to forget.
The shuck of shovels cut through the crowd like gasps for air as the gravediggers began filling the grave. I looked around again for Cate, or Malmacchío, but they had vanished from the funeral parlor as easily as she had eluded my memory. Her greatest skill, it seemed, lay in disappearing.
Under Nick’s umbrella, Sam leaned against his chest, a black fur coat draping her shoulders. Nick’s eyes were hidden behind his sunglasses, but I could tell his smirk was meant for me.
“Sam says she can read your mind,” he said.
His wife shot an elbow against his ribs and cast a reproachful look at him. Her face was impossibly white in a landscape of dark fur and black dresses and all the charcoal smears that composed the dreary sky.
“Oh yeah?”
“You’re not such a mystery,” said Sam. “Give her time. It’s the respectful thing to do.”
“He may look like a bum but give Everett more credit than that. He didn’t fly all this way just to swipe Daniel’s wife at his funeral.”
I let Nick’s comment lie as we returned to the cars. None of that mattered unless I could get my hands on Malmacchío’s book and destroy it, expunging any record of whatever thoughts and deeds were writ therein. Even that accomplished, Cate knew where I’d been the night Daniel’s death had begun. She and the book were the beginning and the end—and as hidden as I wanted those nights to remain. She was the only one who knew where that fateful throne lay.
“Damn this rain though,” I said.
“It’s the curse,” said Nick. “Colemans is in town.”
“No kidding.”
Of course the carnival was in town. It’s where we had started the night all those years ago. Cate a mystery even then. The carnival had been her suggestion, and she’d arrived dressed like some monochromatic prophetess of Death. There were few places I associated with Cate Heck, and Colemans Carnival was one of them.
“We should swing by,” I said. “Might be a nice way to get our minds off things. You got plans?”
Nick opened the car door for Sam, and she put her hand on the frame and paused before getting in.
“You’re inviting us to Colemans? That’s not much of a distraction, Everett. Anyway, maybe you should sit with this moment a while longer.”
“Or,” Nick added. “You could have some actual fun. We’re having a little repast tonight at Brent’s. Informal. Just sharing old stories. Something to remember Daniel by. You’ve probably got as many memories with him as anyone.”
Brent and I had never been each other’s biggest fans. In the high school locker room, Brent was the kid whipping towels at unsuspecting behinds in the shower. Something in my expression must have revealed my misgivings.
“It’ll be fine,” said Sam. “You’ll be with us.”
“Yeah, maybe. We’ll see. I’m going to try losing myself at Colemans first.”
The rain had let up and only a mist seemed to hover in the air, hazy droplets that vanished upon contact with skin and soaked into my suit and bandages. Still, as I stood under the flashing red lights that proclaimed “COLEMANS CARNIVAL,” waiting for the attendant to make change, none of the rides were running. People ambled along the midway in groups of two or three—mostly kids with black-dyed hair hanging in front of their eyes. Concession workers hung out the windows of their kiosks searching for customers, and a girl in black and purple leggings flipped off one of the game runners who had teased her over the raccoon tail that drooped behind her. She reminded me of some high school variant of Cate Heck, whom I could easily imagine brooding about the gravel walkways and leaning against the rain-slick fences that cordoned off the swings or the Scrambler.
It’s not the things that time transforms or buries that shock my sensibilities, but the few artifacts left untouched. The same gray sky floating above. The same damp hanging in the air. The constancy of Colemans testified that it was I who had changed. A different body limped through the midway than had so many years before.
The fun houses were laid out in the self-same rows, and I half-expected to see Cate peering from a railing or revolving in a spinning tunnel as each came into view. At the end of the midway, Arabian Knight’s sibilant hydraulics hissed. The empty platform swung around, hesitated at its peak, then swooped down like a pendulum blade. The ride operator squinted up from within the scrunched hood of a blue polyester windbreaker, studying the sky. The clouds pulsed with brief fulminations of light.
Seven years ago, Daniel and I had stood in line for Arabian Knight with Cate, joking about the rain. The carnival had been in operation for a hundred years and it was a mystery why they kept setting up in our hometown. Every year, rain—from the moment they drove in the first stake until they tore everything down. It was Colemans’ curse, and it spanned back as long as I had been alive, likely preceding my lifetime by at least twice as many years. The rain would come, and the town collectively shake their heads and mutter, It’s the curse, but no one had ever bothered giving an origin to the imprecation. There was no tale of some carny’s misdeeds with the daughter of a gypsy woman, no body discovered drowned in the stream that ran behind the gravel lot, nor any plea from a distraught mother invoking the heavens to deliver recompense. It was a general curse. More unlucky than anything. It was a curse to the children attending as much as to the carnival owners.
It was the first week of April, we’d quipped.
Cate had smiled slyly and said she had something to show us after the ride.
"Hey, suit!"
I glanced around until my gaze locked with Arabian Knight’s operator. Above the dangling drawstrings of his hood, the carny’s eyes glared out of a face, sun-browned to the color of tanned leather, unusual for New England only two weeks out of winter.
"Take a ride," he said. "Whaddya say?"
"Don't have any tickets."
“Who needs tickets? You look like a guy who could use a pick me up. It’s either you or nobody."
"You sure?"
"All this rain, I’m losing my mind," he said. "Hop on. If you don’t mind getting your pants wet."
The carny held open the metal gate welcomingly as I climbed the ramp. But as I neared the top of the ramp, the carny narrowed the opening.
"You wouldn't happen to have a couple bucks though, would ya?"
I narrowed my eyes but pulled out my wallet.
As I flipped through the bills, a droplet of water struck my nose. Another landed in my hair. A rumble shook through the sky, and a steady downpour descended from above. The carny cursed as I thrust my wallet into my pocket and spun around, looking for a route of escape.
The few people who’d been moseying about the midway were taking shelter under the canopies of the games or running back to their cars with the collars of their bright jackets flipped up. My bandaged hands vainly tried to shield my eyes from the torrent as I stumbled down the gangplank. Every other step convinced me I was about to topple among the furrows the gray water had formed in the gravel. It was rain inescapable.
The awnings provided meager shelter from the storm, and some intrepid carnival-goers rushed towards the entrance like linebackers grappling an invisible foe. That’s when I saw Cate running across the midway, a dark top-knot of hair bouncing atop her skull. Her black dress, funereal and grim.
The rain was thick as fog, and I struggled to keep her in sight as she squeezed between the narrow fences that separated rides. She slipped into a black tent nearly hidden between a haunted rollercoaster and the house of mirrors. I forced my swollen thigh past the gap in the fencing, dragged myself toward the tent, and swung the heavy, black canvas aside, thrusting myself into a subtle darkness.
The girl jumped, nearly knocking over the lamp she’d been lighting as I entered her dimly lit sortelier. She was younger than Cate. Her features were sharp. Dots of black mascara freckled her cheeks, and eyeliner enveloped her green eyes like a bandit’s mask. Her hand heaved upon her chest as she composed herself.
“I didn’t see you coming,” she said.
“Sorry. Thought you were somebody else.”
“I hate to disappoint.”
She finished lighting the lamp and moved to the other side of a round table, trailing her hands over its dark tablecloth. The glossy burn of black suns and empty moons sat in constellated refractions within the folds of the cloth’s drape.
“Have you not come for a reading then?”
“Excuse me?”
She gestured to a framed lithograph—a dark sketch of a hand balancing an eye on its middle finger. On either side of the eye, six red zodiac symbols surrounded the hand. Curving red lines marked the palm like intersecting runes. I presented my hands to her.
“I don’t suppose you read bandages.”
She shook her head.
“You mind if I wait out the storm with you?”
“As long as you promise not to scare off my customers.”
I peeked through a gap in the fabric that covered the entrance. Outside, precipitation pummeled the ground like meteors in miniature, a dwarf apocalypse through which not even the opposite side of the midway remained visible.
“I’ll do my best.”
It’s not that there’s no rain in the desert, but the monsoon seasons of late July have an infrequent regularity I can forgive. The rain makes tracks like bullet holes in the dust, whelms the hard clay, and eventually rushes like an aborning river in whichever direction the land drains. Even in those brief moments, peering out my window as the world is subtly changed, I could still see the bride—her wet hair falling loose about her face—as happy as I had always wanted her to be with me.
I glanced back at the palmist. “You always been here?”
“Of course. There is nowhere else. The passing of time is but a meaningful fiction. Every moment is present. All that has been or ever will be is fulfilled in this instant. The whole of history and all that is to come only await a witness who knows how to look.”
“Giving answers like that is a hell of a way to go through life.”
“It makes straight the pathways to fortune,” she said.
“I just mean I don’t remember seeing this booth in all my years coming to this carnival.”
She smirked. “You’ve never known where to look. I can show you. For a fee.”
The rain fell like prison bars beyond the tent. I pulled my wallet back out and held up a twenty, unsure what constituted adequate compensation. She nodded and beckoned me toward the table.
“Everybody wants my money these days,” I said, putting the twenty on the cloth. She secreted it behind an electrified oil lamp with a narrow, frosted glass shade.
“What do you want to see?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you know,” she said. “You just don’t want to say.”
She glared into my eyes as though they contained a barely legible text, time-worn and too small. Or perhaps they explicated despicable things. Her eyes glowed like green flame, and I wanted to shutter mine against her. I could only stare back, helpless as she ravished thoughts from long-locked rooms. Finally, her brow relaxed, and her eyes widened.
“There is a rattling bone that’s shaken dry in desert wind. The finger of a long-forgotten king. The womb of Solomon, though beautiful, he won by power and through death. Howling at a northern moon, a dog as red as clay comes to uncover and unseal. The bones exhumed, while gnawing on a desiccated thigh, it drags them to a tidal stream. A river coursing east. As all the living move toward death, the dead draw near to life. The ministering waters flow. Thighbone refleshed.
“You seek the one without a home. A woman with a different face. To hide the past. One is found beneath the moon. Another sleeps with the disgraced, who rest on knives of shattered glass.”
I waited for her to continue. I sensed a cryptic truth within the words. Sensed that she also saw behind the veil as Malmacchío had. There must have been more. But she didn’t speak.
“Is that it?”
“That’s twenty dollars’ worth,” she said.
I pulled the rest of my cash from my wallet and extended the bills to her.
“Where’s the woman with the different face? What are the knives of shattered glass?”
The girl raised her hands as if I’d pulled a gun.
“I don’t do turn-by-turn directions,” she said.
“Weren’t you just bragging about all you could see? Look again!”
“I see, but only through a darkened glass.”
“Look again. Please.”
She made a steeple of her fingers, closed her eyes, and let her forehead rest between her index fingers and thumbs. The rain had died down to a whisper. Each breath moved her like a dreaming dog. She opened her eyes.
“Continue to search, and all will be revealed.”
She stood and walked to the entrance where she swept the curtain back from the tent and let the gray light flood in.
By nightfall, my thigh and the backs of my hands were throbbing, and I was down to the last of my painkillers. Runoff water glimmered beneath my headlights as I pulled along the roadside ditch in front of Brent’s house. A few cars sat under the carport, but I’d beaten Sam and Nick there and didn’t fancy inviting myself in without them.
I reached for the glovebox where I had stored my near-empty Excedrin bottle and some fresh gauze. Shaking the bottle produced the lonely clink of a single tablet, and I forced the lid off and tipped the bottle toward my bandaged hand. The pill bounced out of my awkwardly cupped palm and fell between the seat and the center console. The tiny bulb shining from the open glovebox had no dominion over the shadows that filled the car, and the pill remained hidden somewhere in the recesses even with the interior lights switched on. It would have been better to have abandoned the pill as lost. The space under the seat was too tight for my bandages. With the damp gauze unwrapped, my blistery skin sagged in flimsy strips. The sides of the console grated like sandpaper as I fished my hand down among the brackets, and when I pulled it out from beneath the seat, a flap of skin hung over my knuckles and tore away as easily as wet paper.
I’d just finished wrapping the dry gauze when Sam and Nick’s car rumbled down the hill and into the carport. Some song was trailing to an end from within the vehicle as I walked up the driveway, aching with every step. The swelling in my thigh was supposed to have gone down. But then, I was supposed to be resting. Supposed to be keeping my bandages dry. Not hiking through the woods and pushing wet cars in the mud. Not chasing phantoms through rain-swept carnival grounds or going to parties hosted by guys I’d hated in high school. When I reached the trunk of his car, Nick killed the engine, and their doors popped open.
Nick gave me a once over, shook his head.
“I don’t know why I expected you to look any different.”
“You sure it’s alright I’m showing up empty-handed?” I said.
“We’ve got you covered.”
He tilted his head toward Sam, who lifted a bottle of red over the car’s roof and waved her hand underneath it like a gameshow girl presenting a prize. They had the goods. I was just the bum sleeping on their couch, and I still had the muddy pants and rumpled suit jacket to prove it.
Sam and Nick didn’t have to knock; they just strolled through the front door and into the brightly lit living room where they were greeted by the same cheers that had heralded my presence on the dance floor with Daniel’s bride. I came in behind them looking like the undead and to much less fanfare. Sam sidled over to the bar with her bottle of wine, and Brent leaned over the bar from the kitchen side and took the bottle and kissed her cheek.
And there, on the counter beside them, a notebook leaned against the wall for all to see. Its pale, leathery surface was worn and singed in spots as though it had been left near fire. All that it contained was bound with three knotted strings along its spine. Brent laid the book on the counter, flipped it open, and looked up at me with a subtle grin.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “Look who’s still waiting for the cat’s paw to drop.”
This story continues in Chapter Four…
Why Rages the Ghost
Everett attempts to prevent an old rival from revealing Malmacchío’s book to a room full of party-goers while simultaneously attempting to get closer to Daniel’s widow, Chandra.
Keeping me intrigued!