Emerald Hell

Chapter 8

Jester sat in shadow with the demon's secrets.

It had been too late to take a skiff into the swamp, with the moon already beginning to rise, so they'd decided to wait until sunup. The Ferris boys lived in a two-room shack not far from the house where Brother Jester had been raised by his own brutal father, another man corrupted by bitterness, ignorance, and corn liquor. They were terrified that Jester would murder them in their sleep, and they tried to appease him any way they could. They offered him food, wine, and the tramp down the lane, and even their sagging, fetid mattresses although Jester hadn't slept under a roof in twenty years.

Jester hadn't slept in twenty years. His mind periodically wandered away from his body, and the body occasionally rested.

They gave him a torn blanket spattered with old bloodstains. It was a child's blanket and featured a cartoon bird character. He folded it and laid it on their sagging back-porch step and sat there looking into the lush vegetation of the woodland that eventually cascaded into the marshes.

Held within the folds of their black wings, the shadows of angels brought with them the secrets of the sleeping demon, aflame with hellfire. When the shadows dropped the mysteries, puzzles, and contradictions at Jesters feet, the dark preacher poked through them with the toe of his shoe, struggling but incapable of understanding.

A Russian who would not die. A loving foster father, a hard man of justice. A once-evil but eventually repentant mother. A prince of Sheol. Enormous unholy beasts with the faces of pigs, frogs, and dogs. Brutish shamblers that burned from the touch of iron or innocence. Griddle cakes. Horseshoes. Holy water and the bones of saints.

Brother jester took off his hat, cleaned the brim with his handkerchief, and put it back on.

Children. Inhuman, horrific in nature, but blessed. Calling to God and those that aid Gods will. And the Holy Spirit giving favor.

A great tree of life, perhaps the very tree of knowledge still bearing fruit in the garden of Eden, away from mankind's transgressions.

Those were only the few images he could easily grasp. A greater number of them were visions and scraps of infernal knowledge that tore into his mind. They went behind his small human brain and settled at the back of his skull where his immortal rage sat perched, waiting to eat.

There were words and legacies. Anung Un Rama. The Crown of the Apocalypse. A name of destiny shunned and nearly lost so that it no longer held its greatest meaning. This secret somehow reminded him of his own forgotten name.

The power inside Jester rose up on its own accord, rearing in pain and exhilaration. Sweat burst upon his brow and he began to shudder, his pulse snapping hard in his neck, his heart hammering.

His hate was the hate of all men who twisted in faith and doubt, incapable of examining themselves too closely. He felt even closer to the demon now, understanding how they were both set on destined courses long before their births. They had become diverted and subjected to the will of others. To the endeavors of men and the testaments of Heaven and Hell. They had walked both paths, even if neither of them could fully remember who they'd once been.

Jester's arms were thrown open, his head pressed back as his mouth widened and the sparking black motes of arcane energy bled from his tongue, nostrils, ears, and eyes. His vertebrae popped and crackled as his spine straightened, and he started to rise into the air. His body hung like the form of Christ broken upon the cross.

Perhaps this was meant as tribute, perhaps only mockery. He began to laugh in his pain and fury-loving his own agony because it made him recall those who'd sinned against him, and reaffirmed his purpose in this world-until his mad laughter swept across the woodland and he slowly spun in midair above the demon's mysteries.

From the center of the churning secrets a great stone hand reached up and caught hold of jester's ankle.

The dark preacher screamed in fear. His avenging rage struck down like a lightning bolt, scorching the ground, but the enormous fist would not release him. It began to draw him back to the earth. When he touched soil again, jester dropped to his knees, exhausted, his clothes smoking. He was still grinning, but his eyes spun in terror. He knew more about what waited for him out in the swamp, and what would stand between him and his Sarah.

He sat on the dead child's blanket again and gentle fingers plied the worn threads at the shoulder of his frock coat.

The ghost of his murdered wife-the wife he had murdered-said, "Don't you let any harm come to my daughter."

She spoke in a voice that was somehow her own and yet had become much more since her death. She was filled with a strength and peace and light. The dead did not fret. The dead's concerns were only for love. She did not bear him any ill will, and she sometimes came to him with that repose and serenity which calmed his rage and the menacing intensity within him. She had power too.

"I won't."

"Sarah can't give you what you're hoping for. Neither can her baby."

He didn't shift to look at her. He hardly ever did. The face of her ghost was the face of the wife of the man he no longer was.

Yet it could still make him think of mortal, dreadful things. "You don't know what I'm hoping for."

"A'course I do. You still lookin' for family. The one you gave up for God."

"Doesn't that mean I deserve something?" he asked. His ruined voice was too awful for anyone living to note the whine in it, but the dead could tell. "Giving up all I had in worship to the Lord?"

"If you done it for payment you ain't done it from your heart or soul. You done it for the wrong reasons and blame Heaven for your own mistakes."

"I did it for love,"Jester argued, "but I expected my wife to stay true to me."

"I made my mistakes too, but there ain't nothin' wrong in a woman needin' love. We gotta die alone but that don't mean we need to live alone."

"I do," he told her.

"You ain't alive."

She called him by his Christian name then, and the urge to look into her eyes was so great that he nearly turned to stare at her. But the selfish shadows twined around his body and held him tight, his face toward the endless glow of the bog where he'd find his daughter and grandchild.

His wife who was now one with Glory said, "You been dead near twenty years gone and too foolish to draw water from the pool of the hereafter."

"Leave me," he told her, and with nothing more than a hot breeze working across the forbidding earth, she did.

When the sun broke through the pines Jester rose from the slain child's blanket and entered the shack. Empty jugs of moonshine and bottles of wine littered the floor. He found the Ferris boys both still asleep.

Their dreams were laid bare to him. Duffy relived the moment of murdering their mother and father, which filled him with a fierce pride and some small vestiges of guilt. Over the years the corn liquor had worn the slight twinges of shame almost entirely away and allowed him to grin as he slept. Thinking of how his mama had screamed and their daddy had sneered that moment, as if they'd always been expecting it. Maybe they had. Duffy was only eleven, but big and strong for his age. Same with Deeter, who was ten.

They used freshly whittled ax handles they'd stolen from the dry goods store. Broke Daddy's arms first, then Mamas legs next, then took turns taking a swing at first one and then the other, counting off so they'd be all even Steven. One-two, three-four, five-six, seven-eight. Got up to thirteen-fourteen before Farrell Ferris managed to drag himself from the shack and into the brush, where his sons followed him and watched him thrash among the thistles and catclaw briars. Deeter had gone back for the shotgun and used it to shoot Pa's big toe off. The flat harsh noise of the boys' laughter carried on into the deep sunset afterward, punctuated by a gentle but dramatic dripping, as if a spring rain had just risen over the woods.

The fervent mind of Deeter Ferris played on the rape of a nameless woman they'd caught four years ago after she'd turned off the highway hoping to buy some gator skins to make into a pair of boots for her husband. She was just driving slow through Enigma hoping to run into somebody who might be a gator killer. Damn near everyone was, but she just so happened to run across the Ferris boys, sitting out in front of Coover's garage while Coover finished reinforcing the suspension on their pickup in case they got into any more chases with the law through the hills while they were driving moon.

The boys took her back to their place and sold her a fine bull skin. No trouble on their mind that day, just enjoying the feel of her cash money in their hands and the gorgeous sight of her. Full-breasted, bleach-headed, the stink of the city on her like a musk. Then she went and fouled it up by talking about her husband, who sounded like a right fine boy until she got to the part about him being a correctional officer in Chadabunk School for Wayward Youths, which was where the Ferris brothers had been sent for nine years after the murder of their parents.

They reckoned if her husband was anything like the guards who'd brutalized them while they were there, then he was one self-righteous, billy club-wielding, ungodly perverted sumbitch who not only didn't deserve himself a fine pair of gator boots, but didn't justify having a right fine full-breasted, bleach-headed, musky wife neither.

She kept asking, What's the matter? as they tugged the gator skin out of her hands and took her purse away and Duffy got out her keys and drove her car away around back, and Deeter took her wrist and gently tugged her into the house. What's the matter? What's the matter? His muscles tightened and ached with remembering those words and how they'd soon contorted into screams.

Jester woke them with some reluctance, sharing in their joy and madness, and said, "It's time."

"Where we goin'?" Duffy asked.

"Into the swamp now. To find my Sarah."

"Pregnant girls in there, they likely gator bait already, bloated and ripening in some mud hole."

"No, they're alive, and we'll reach them tonight."

"And that big ole red fella?"

"If he stands in my way he'll suffer for it."

"We gonna need a skiff," Deeter said. "Ours got sunk the last big rain."

"You were drunk," Jester said, "and spilled moon on yourself while smoking a cigar you stole from a traveling soap salesman. You burned yourself and jumped in the water and the boat sank."

The Ferris boys watched him, the hinges of their jaws throbbing and the cold fear in their eyes, the way it should be.

A minute later Duffy scratched at his soft, golden stubble.

"Plume Wallace got one down in the bottoms that he keep tied outside his shanty, over by Scutt's Landing. He's always on the lookout for crawfish."

"He ain't gonna like us takin' it. And he's got a shotgun."

Duffy opened an unpainted closet door and withdrew a twelve-gauge pump. "Well hell, looky there, so do we."

"Reckon I never liked that old boy much anyways."

"Let's go," Brother Jester said.