Boys in the Valley(64)

Dear God in heaven, help me. Let me THINK.

Bartholomew approaches him. The voices from above grow louder.

There’s laughter.

“I’ve been whispering to him, Brother Johnson. Ben, I mean. While you were inside having fun with the others—and I heard it was a lot of fun—I was out here. Whispering. I think . . .” He turns his head, looks into the corner where Ben is huddled, then back to Johnson. “I think I frightened him. He hasn’t been saying much. I don’t think he liked what I told him.”

He takes a step closer to the large man, now sitting, much like Ben, pressed against the wall, knees drawn up. He bends, puts his hands on his knees, as if addressing a small, lost child.

“Shall I whisper some things to you, Brother Johnson?”

“Get the fuck away from me,” Johnson says, and then—in his tortured mind—the boy is not a boy, but a serpent. A black-headed snake, darting red tongue flicking at his face. Flick flick flick. No! Now he’s a goat, horned and dark as death. Johnson blinks. Now he sees a beautiful woman, smiling, buck naked from head to toe, her skin slick with blood.

Johnson moans, closes his eyes tight.

When he opens them, Bartholomew is a boy once more. A pale, bone-thin sapling of a child. Weak and malnourished, doe-eyed and insolent.

Must have hit my head on that rock harder than I thought, he thinks. There’s something very wrong with me . . . something broken in my head. Not thinking straight. I need help, yes, I need medical attention. I need to get OUT OF HERE.

Bartholomew pokes Johnson in the head. “You awake?”

Johnson slaps at the hand and sobs. “Get away!”

“Here’s an interesting fact,” Bartholomew says, pulling his hand away with lightning speed, undaunted, and wholly unconcerned about Johnson’s wrath. His body moves hypnotically side to side, his face wavers, slides and drifts, as if he’s underwater. Johnson rubs his eyes roughly, mixing blood and mud into his sockets, desperate to cease the visions. “Before you came into Poole’s service, you were a troubled man. You were . . . a married man, am I right?”

“Shut up,” Johnson says, but without much heat. His eyes are closed tight, his jaw is clenched. He mumbles whatever prayers he can remember. The bleeding crack in his head screams and burns like fire.

“Yes, married. And you had a beautiful baby boy. Isn’t that nice? Do you remember him, Teddy?” Bartholomew pauses. “Oh, do you mind if I call you that? It’s familiar, I know. Maybe I should stick to Brother Johnson, hmm? We’re not exactly friends. Not yet.” Bartholomew winks, then continues jovially, as if recounting a favorite joke. “Anyway, one night you were very drunk. I mean, you were very drunk, and you hit your wife while she was holding sweet, tiny baby William. I like that name, by the way. It’s . . . comforting, isn’t it?”

“How do you . . .” Johnson swallows, the pain of buried memories tightening his throat. “Please stop.”

“You hit her so hard that she fell backward down a flight of steps. More than ten and less than twenty, am I right? You know, the ones leading from your shitty hovel to the front door of the building you shared with the other pathetic, wretched people who lived there. She fell down the stairs, and then she didn’t move. William, also, didn’t move. Or cry. Or . . . much of anything, I suppose. Remember?”

Johnson nods. He weeps into his knees. “Yes,” he says.

“Because his head was cracked open like an egg. His brains spilling out like broken yolk. And the mother—your wife—had broken her bloody neck!” Bartholomew stands up straight, eyes wide with appreciation. “That must have been some blow, Brother Johnson. Quite the strike, I’d say.”

Johnson remembers it all. His family destroyed. The police taking him. The neighbors screaming. It was an accident! he’d cried, cried and cried until his voice was raw. An accident!

Something drops from the trapdoor, lands with a thunk in the dirt at Bartholomew’s feet. He bends over and picks it up.

It’s a claw hammer.

“So!” Bartholomew wiggles the hammer in front of Johnson’s eyes, then pulls it back. “Here we are. And we have much to do.” Bartholomew walks over to Ben, whose face is no longer buried, but now watches them both with wide, white eyes.

Bartholomew drops the hammer at Ben’s feet. “I’m going to give each of you the same choice. Ben here, if he chooses, can pick up this hammer and beat your skull with it. Beat it against your thick head until it’s nothing but broken bone and red mush. Like William’s was, now that I think about it. And here’s the kicker . . . Brother Johnson, are you listening? Believe me when I say this: You won’t lift a hand to stop him. You’ll sit right where you’re sitting now, and you’ll take it. You’ll feel every blow, hear every crunch of breaking bone as your vision grows dim and blood pumps out your ears and nose, and then you will hear the beating of your heart slowing, slowing, until you slump over . . . and die.”

Bartholomew picks the hammer up once more. Johnson notes, in some distant, distracted part of his mind, that Ben never moved an inch to take it.

“Or . . . you take Ben’s life. And you live.” Bartholomew seems to loom larger, his voice impossibly sonorous in the underground pit. “But you no longer live for Poole, brother.” He spits this last word like an insult and smiles widely. Too widely. “You live for me. You live for us.”