The Heavens Rise by Christopher Rice Page B

there are far easier ways to kill yourself, aren’t there?”
    “I guess . . . yeah . . .”
    “I didn’t, Mr. Shire. I didn’t try to kill myself that night. What happened was something else altogether. The same thing that’s happening to you.”
    “I don’t under—”
    “The bank sent you? Daniel J. Stevens—he’s the trustee?”
    Shire felt his lips moving, but there was nothing coming out. Nosound, no breath. Marshall looked up from the papers in front of him, and maybe it was just a trick of the fading sunlight, but he looked surprisingly calm and patient for a man who had just returned to the world after eight years of darkness.
    Shire nodded; it was the best he could do.
    “And he sent you after us because she took me out of some place called Lenox Hill?”
    Shire nodded again. His Adam’s apple felt like a cue ball inside his throat.
    “Why?” Marshall Ferriot asked.
    “Wh-whad d’y do . . . you . . .”
    “Why did she take me out of Lenox Hill, Mr. Shire?” he asked with what sounded like strained patience.
    “One of the nurses, she tr-tried to k-kill you.” This earned the young man’s undivided, wide-eyed attention. “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 walkingalong 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