The Old

Mercies

Part One

My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak. I call you—are you there? I have returned. I am here again.

-The Red Book

The sky was turning black. It had been blue so recently, and now the wind rose, and the door from the kindergarten opened and Mrs. Wyle called, “Come on in, kids. There’s a tornado! Come in. Hurry!””

All of them began to run into the school, but Seth turned around and there was another door and a house, and why had he not seen it before? He knocked on the door and when it opened, Owen was looking down at him, and at that moment Seth realized he was a child. Owen said, “Get in this house right away. There’s a storm coming. Can’t you see it?”

Seth came in, and Owen shut the door. Seth went into the wide living room. The windows were curtained, and Owen said, “No, no, not there. In the bathroom,” which was in the center of the house. Seth followed Owen, and then went in.

“Mustn’t shut the door,” Owen said. “Mustn’t shut the door or we’ll never know when the storm is ended. “

“Where should I go?” Seth asked, surprised by the smallness of his little boy voice.

“Hide in the bath tub. You don’t want the storm to smell you. Better take a bath.”

The little boy nodded and turned the stops, and warm water fell over him. The wetter he was, the clearer the sky became. When the sky was clear, Owen said, “That’s enough, little Seth. Run along now.”

“I love you, Owen,” Seth said.

“I love you too. You know that, Seth. Sometimes I’m gruff with you, but you know I love you.”

“Did Mom and Dad love me?”

“Why don’t you go to church and ask them?”

Seth nodded and went down the hallway, opening the front door of the ranch house Owen had never lived in, and found himself in the west transept of an enormous church filled with people milling about. It was a college chapel, but he couldn’t remember where, and it was the size of a normal church or bigger, so calling it a chapel was misleading. The ribs of the ceiling arched above. The nave, painted in gold and saints and angels, looked down on him. On the altar white candles burned and Kyle, his shaggy haired father, said, “Seth, you’re here. You were almost late.”

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“Don’t sweat it, little man. You know what you could do for me? Go in the kitchen, and get me a cup off coffee.”

Seth nodded and walked across the front of the church, past the altar, not crossing himself, and into the large white kitchen where the women sat drinking coffee. Birds were singing on the window ledges. The kitchen hadn’t been cleaned in ages.

“How do you stop from killing yourself?” the first woman asked. “Life is such a pile of shit, how do you not just end it all?”

“Fuck the world and fuck people,” the other one said, “I just use lots of cocaine and feel that it will get me through.”

“Drugs is the only thing that helps me.”

“What the fuck do you want:?” they asked Seth.

“He’s got a nice cock on him,” the other woman said.

Seth realized he was naked. And an adult. Had he taken his clothes off when Owen had told him to bathe? No, but that hadn’t happened. As he tried to remember exactly when this had happened, he also knew he should be either embarrassed or pleased, but somehow the embarrassment or the pride did not quite reach him, and he said, “Can I get a cup of coffee?”

“You can get a snake for an egg and a stone for bread,” the redheaded woman said. She got up, went to the refrigerator, gave him a snake and then gave him a stone, and the blond woman said. “You’re naked. You can’t go back like that. Here’ put this condom on.”

Back in the church, he came to his father with the snake and the stone, and Kyle smiled at him and said, “Thanks, son. Go up to the altar before everything starts.”

Seth nodded and walked up to the altar and he thought, “I’ve done this before. I should know what’s about to happen.”

The priest was chanting while the altar boy swung incense:

“Lamb of God,

you take away the sins of the world.

Have mercy on us.”

The congregation sang it back. No one seemed to mind that Owen was up here with Seth. Laid out on the altar, the four candles on either side of her was his mother, her white dress covered in blood. He knew it was his mother because the two sides of her head split open and bloodied were his mother’s face, and between them the crablike many eyed face said, “You’re finally here. Maybe you can stay. You should have come with us that day.”

The congregation sang in a stately unison:

“You should have come with us that day!”

“Seth, son!” Kyle called.

Seth turned around. His father was so handsome, taller than him, younger than he was now, small traces of his Black blood in his deep complexion and broad nose, in the thick curl of his shoulder length hair.

“Look at this!” Kyle called. “You missed it before.”

Just like that, the two tons of automobile leapt onto the altar and slammed into Kyle pinning him to the wall, his oranges splashing along the church wall, and Seth leapt into consciousness in his bedroom on the house on Bryn Mawr.

He was awake now, trembling and awake, but while he tried to leave his bed, all around him, the newly wakened him, the walls transformed into that church again and the murals of saints transformed, the angels shifting into demons, the saints sprouting several eyes, arms and tentacles, their mouths opening, their skins flipping inside out, the heads of the dead coming through the wall. Above his bed stood Kyle, smashed as any bug, his head crushed but still talking.

“Look at me, son!”

He opened his mouth full of broken teeth. “Look at me.”

Seth screamed until the images faded, and he was left soaking in his bed, trembling from the dreams that never went away.

“You know this can’t go on,” Owen said that morning.

On the other side of the table, Seth ate his cereal while Owen sipped his coffee, and before him, black as graphite, stretched the blade of the Sword, its hilt silver and black, the rich grain ot the steal glinting in the morning.

“I hoped the Sword would help,” Owen said.

“I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to touch it. After what happened to Eve.”

A small smile passed over Owen’s mouth and, turning the page of his morning paper he said, “Yes, that was unfortunate. But no, nephew, anyone who is allowed to touch the sword can touch the sword, but anyone who is not…” Owen shrugged.

“But back to what I was saying. You cannot keep sleeping with the sword in your room and still be protected. Your dreams have grown too powerful. They overwhelm you.”

“I think they’re just bad dreams.”

“Bad enough to put bags under your eyes,” Owen said. “And it they’re only bad dreams, then why are they still present when you wake? If they are merely bad dreams then why do I see them when I come into your room to quell them?”

Seth blinked, wide eyed, at Owen.

“Do you?”

“I do. Your dreams have become too powerful. You cannot neglect your family heritage. It is time to begin your training.”

Seth received this news with much glumness and he hung his head a little, not knowing how silly he looked as a grown man with a fringe beard in dress shirt and vest, sulking.

“When do we start?”

“Oh, we don’t start,” Owen said. “It’s Lewis who will teach you. You will be his Adept.”

“When did you all agree to this?”

“We’ve never spoken of it,” Owen closed his newspaper. “But we will discuss it when he and his most interesting lover come to dinner tonight.”

Lawrence Malone left the office early. The sky was grey and it had been grey all week, with the first twinge of winter in it. Fall was on them and no denying it. And this wasn’t Vermont or one of those places where there seemed to be weeks of orange and yellow leaves on a red fire. The leaves went from green to brown to gone, and now Laurie was making his way through the wind of the windy city, a wind which never ceased to strike hard, and taking the long walk out of the Loop toward Saint Patrick’s.

He was aware he was early, and maybe he even wanted to be early, to see more than he had seen of Mass in a long time. Back in the Nineteen Sixties, he’d almost thrown a fit over Vatican Two, over the Mass changing from Latin to English and then all the different changes in the English until Chris pointed out that Laurie was hardly a devout worshipper, and going to church was just him trying to relive his past. The living people who were actually worshipping had the right to change their worship. Laurie knew that in his heart, but it had taken thirty years for him to feel solemn about “One Bread One Body” as he had once felt about Tantum Ergo Sacramentum. It had been a whole period where, hypocritically he admitted, he had disdained congregants in shorts and tee shirts and jeans, girls with long hair down their backs uncovered by a mantilla. It had taken him a long time to see that the essence of the thing had not changed, that his church was still his church, the sacred still sacred.

“That’s your first growing up,” Chris had told him.

“What?”

“Your first growing up. The world always changes, but then there is such a huge change, so many changes until, as a long lived blood drinker, you can’t recognize the world anymore, then you begin to see that it’s still the same, that it hasn’t really changed. It will happen a lot to you as the years pass.”

He entered the vestibule as the priest was coming down from the altar in his white robes trimmed in gold thread, and the cantor began to sing. The people in pews were coming up to receive communion, and as the first people came to the priest, Laurie entered the church proper, crossing himself at the holy water fount, and then genuflecting and kneeling in an empty pew. Above him the organ thrummed, and some of the congregants sang with the cantor:

Those who love and those who labor,
follow in the way of Christ;
Thus the first disciples found him,
thus the gift of love sufficed.
Jesus says to those who seek him,
I will never pass you by;
Raise the stone and you shall find me;
cleave the wood, and there am I.

He knelt and rose and sat with the congregation for the short rest of the mass and crossed himself at the appropriate times. It would have been disrespectful, more to the people than to God who likely didn’t care at all, not to participate, and then, when the people were leaving, as soon as the priest had passed him, Laurie sat down in the pew, legs splayed, and watched the arch over the altar and the procession of saints painted on it, Saint Patrick with his four leaf clover, Saint Bridget in her habit, Saint Ita and Saint Brendan looking a little like Saint Francis but with more hair. But then he stopped looking and just took a breath. He thought of kneeling, but that was pretentious. It was while he was sitting like this, that he became aware of Lynn standing over him, and said her name before he turned to look up at her.

“That was eerie.”

“Not really,” Laurie gave her a smile. “I couldn’t think who else it would be.”

“If you’re deep in prayer, I’ll leave you alone, but if you’re not, then…?”

She shrugged.

Laurie turned to her and said, “I don’t know if there has ever been a time when I’ve been deep in prayer. I’m deep in… I don’t know what I’m deep in. Would you fancy a walk?”

Lynn opened her mouth in some type of surprise Laurie didn’t understand, and then she said, “I was heading back to work, being good and trying to get there on time. But I feel I would fancy anything with a man that actually uses the word fancy.”

Laurie cleared his throat and said, “Should I have said—”

“Fancy is fine,” Lynn said as Laurie stood up.

“Well, what if you go back to work, and then tonight I could call on you? If you’re keen?”

“I am. Keen.”

Laurie knew he was saying strange things. He was never quite sure when his speech pattern was out of date. It was cobbled together from his favorite words in his longer than usual life. Some women liked it and some women found it strange. It was one reason many of his relationships didn’t last long. The longer they lasted the more prone he was to use words from a time long before anyone he’d dated was born.

“I… uh..”

“Yes,” Lynn said.

“Look,” Laurie said, “I’m old fashioned.”

“I’m beginning to see that.”

“And I don’t like the idea of you… Can I walk you back to your office?”

“You’re weird, you know that?” Lynn said.

“I’m sorry.” Laurie didn’t know to be offended or embarrassed. Into his head returned the memory of the woman stopping him in the middle of sex.

“No,” Lynn grinned. “I don’t think I’d want someone who wasn’t. There’s more to you than I know, Mr. Malone, isn’t there?”

“Uh, yeah,” Laurie grinned, feeling a little sheepish, not his generally in control vampiric self. “Probably.”

Then he held out his arm, “Shall we?”

Lynn linked arms with him.

“We shall.”

It’s smaller than your place, but I like to call it home.” Chris said, standing in the middle of his apartment, clapping his hands together. “Or, at least I like to call it the place where I get dressed between your place and my job.”

“I like it,” Lewis said.

Chris’s place was a turret apartment, and dark amber late day light came through shades and curtains. Old threadbare carpet, maroon and Oriental, was on the floor, and heavy bookshelves and tables were about the room, covered in dust. The closet was open and smelled of moth balls and Chris said, “That is not the usual closet.”

“Then what’s it for?” Lewis said as he entered the room. It reminded him of Narnia because there were fur coats, or at least there was fur, and Chris said, “Don’t be afraid to touch anything.”

Lewis came out with a great fur hat and Chris grinned and came to him, taking it up delicately and placing it on his own head.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” he murmured to the hat. “This was from another time.”

“I’ll say.”

“Back when I was a voyageur,” Chris said.

“A fur trapper?”

“Yes. The world was wilder, then. The French weren’t like the British, At least not here. They didn’t create America. These people who wanted to build a country and wipe out everything in its wake. When the French lived here they lived here, not ruled. They were… I was so glad to flee to them, to live in that world. And then the Americans destroyed it,” Chris said, cradling the hat in his hands, “And I still haven’t forgiven them.”

“Them,” Lewis said.

“Huh?”

“But you wouldn’t be,” Lewis said. “I don’t suppose.”

“Be?’

“Be an American. You’d be something else. I don’t imagine you would ever take a citizenship test if you’ve always been here. If you’re older than the country. And a country, a nation, it’s really just an idea. I thought it was me, you know? My mother told me once that she had never felt like an American, and I think, I feel like someone who lives here and pays taxes, but I never understood people who stood up for pledges and felt patriotic. I’ve never felt like this was my country. I don’t think many Black people do.”

“I don’t think all sorts of people do,” Chris said. “I had not told you the whole truth.”

Lewis raised an eyebrow.

“I was an indentured servant. In books it’s very pleasant. A white boy works his ship passage off for seven years and gets some land.”

“I know it wasn’t that way,” Lewis said. “That the history books lie or gloss over things.”

“I was sold into slavery,” Chris said. “It was a thing. It was how many people got from England to the Bahamas or to America. When I was sold William of Orange was King of England, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that until years later when it was history and I studied history. When I was living in it, as a lad, I was just poor, and the poor don’t know national loyalty. I didn’t care about England. I was from the March. A Yorkshire lad. That’s what I knew. Patriotism, nationalism, that’s not for the poor.

“I fled from the English. The English were the people who did this to me and they gobbled up everything. And the English made America. America became more English than England, more rapacious, more superior, greedier, destroying everything in its wake as it moved westward, tearing up all I loved, sucking up the marshes and turning them to farmland, killing Indians so that pale faced women could live, chasing out other pale faced people because they didn’t live the way Americans thought they should. I watched this city rise around me until it was part of me, but, this country? If I belong to it I belong to the land, not the governments which come and go. Maybe in another three hundred years, when all of this is gone and another land rises up, I will look back and say I was an American, but now? I cannot see it.”