The Heavens Rise

1

ATLANTA

MAY 2013

The patient in Room 4 was named Marshall Ferriot and he couldn’t dream.

Instead he experienced vivid eruptions of memory that came from the center of what he perceived to be his person. After the terrifying fall that landed him at death’s half-open door when he was only seventeen, he lost all sense of his physical body.

Only rarely was he given some sense of the passage of time and, when it came, it was always accompanied by the jarring realization that his home was a dark, purgatorial place where dreams and memories, all those aspects of human beings people consider to be intangible, took on discrete wavelengths before they were stripped from those human souls they once defined.

In these moments, he could feel himself dragging against a current of souls broken down to their raw constituents—a quantum flow of hopes, nightmares and memories—and it made him feel like shark bait being towed through open sea. While he had no sense of his limbs, he knew he was still too fully formed to be worn down and passed through this pulsing refinery of the spirit.

Then, a moment of stultifying blackness would arrive, stealing the passage of time, an intermittent distortion that turned a march of ten years in the conscious world into an endless tape loop of revelations lost, rediscovered and lost again.

Sometimes he could hear the nurses. Their whispers and their shouts would come in at equal volume and, with them, a dim awareness that they spoke of him often because they were afraid of him.

But, for the most part, Marshall Ferriot’s consciousness fluctuated steadily between vivid memories of the time before his fall and a terrifying awareness of his paralysis at the edge of death.

And the memories were growing stronger. They had come to include rich sensuous details that suggested an awakening of some kind might be close at hand. But first they carried him back to New Orleans, the city of his birth, and to the swamps of Tangipahoa Parish and a place called Elysium, where he’d been granted his first and last taste of a beautiful girl with cat-eyes and honey-colored hair, a girl whose very name filled the remnants of his soul with sustaining rage.

Niquette Delongpre.

2

NEW ORLEANS

APRIL 2005

Her motivation was revenge, he was sure of it. And that was fine with him. At seventeen, Marshall Ferriot prided himself on being a young man who could recognize opportunity when it arrived and, with the fiery end of the passionate romance between Niquette Delongpre and Anthem Landry, opportunity arrived at Marshall’s doorstep with bells on.

He had wanted her since they were sophomores, after her breasts had swelled to fullness over the course of one summer, after her walk had acquired a swaying, adult confidence, probably ’cause she’d given up her virginity to that stupid fathead she’d fallen head over heels for the minute he’d transferred into their class. Since then, Marshall Ferriot had spent hours watching Nikki glide gracefully through the hallways of Herschel B. Cannon School, all the while wondering what the skin around her nipples tasted like, or how much pressure he’d have to bite down on them with before she let out a pained yelp that would curl his toes with pleasure.

He’d concocted a few plans over the years, most of them intended to get her white-trash boyfriend kicked out of school and sent back to Jefferson Parish where he belonged. But it was clear the two of them were too much in love to be driven apart by such a meager separation, so Marshall had even thought about cozying up to that little homo she was best friends with, maybe letting the guy give him a BJ or two if he promised to do Marshall’s dirty work. But Ben Broyard, pipsqueak that he was, always looked at Marshall as if there was a stink coming off of him, as if he could detect the dark thoughts Marshall nursed about people who made him angry and thought they were kind of stupid, even if they did involve knives and rope.

What Marshall had been waiting for was a golden opportunity, a sign that the stars had aligned on his behalf, and it didn’t come until the last months of senior year. There had been plenty of girls to occupy his time along the way, of course. There were the real girlfriends, the ones befitting a young man of his stature and breeding, classically pretty, with first names that were more often used as last names for men—Chesley, Whitney, Preston—girls who never let him go below the waist unless he got them shitfaced on Zima. And then there were others. The ones who could keep secrets. The band geeks and the computer dorks. The ones so grateful for any kind of attention from a guy like Marshall they’d let him use things like beer bottles and staplers.

But Nikki Delongpre, she was the prize. The ultimate. Everybody agreed; there was something different about her. Like the fact that she’d been the only freshman ever to make varsity cheerleading, and then had ditched the squad a few months later because, as she told everyone who asked, she thought she was too young to have an eating disorder. Stuff just didn’t get to Nikki the way it got to the other girls at Cannon; she wasn’t a gossip, she rarely drank. And until Anthem’s betrayal, she was rarely swept up in some tearful drama over something somebody might have said about her three weeks ago. Marshall had overheard two teachers talking about her once and their words had seared themselves into his mind. While the first asserted the Delongpre girl had a wisdom beyond her years, the second—in the same kind of superior tone Marshall’s mother used to discuss the moral failings of Democrats—asserted that Nikki was a perfectionist, and if she was ever going to really grow up, she would have to stop planning her life and actually begin living it.

And there it was, the opening. The way in.

He could show her how to start living.

When he asked her out the first time, she made him meet her at some ratty coffeehouse over in the Faubourg Marigny that was full of hippies and fags. And even though the whole thing made him feel like some cheap man-whore, the way she was keeping their meeting a secret from everyone on their side of town, he knew better than to complain.

And there was no getting her to talk about the great betrayal that had ended her three-year relationship to Anthem Landry, but it didn’t matter. The story was common knowledge by then anyway.

Poor Nikki. She had planned her entire life down to the last detail, without giving any thought to the type of man she’d selected to make the trip with her. Davidson College had been her school of choice: North Carolina was just far enough from home to get them away from her boyfriend’s sprawling, overbearing family, but not so far that they couldn’t fly home for every holiday. The problem, of course, was that everyone except for Nikki knew that her boyfriend didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Houma of getting in, not when he couldn’t be bothered to memorize anything besides old Saints scores. But Niquette Delongpre—planner and perfectionist, daughter of one of the most respected maxiofacial surgeons in the country—wouldn’t be deterred by her boyfriend’s rejection letter. Obviously, Anthem should move with her to North Carolina anyway. Get a job to support himself, maybe find a community college and gets his grades up to where he could reapply. Anthem’s response, heard by most of the Cannon campus during lunch, “You expect me to fuckin’ pump gas all day while you sit in a classroom talking about poetry?”

The lawns outside the cafeteria had certainly paid host to worse lovers’ quarrels. But a few days later, the news broke that after consuming half a bottle of Southern Comfort, Anthem Landry had somehow wound up in the arms and accommodating mouth of a doe-eyed junior, Brittany Lowe, who was well known among her male classmates for having tiny, unobtrusive teeth. That’s what the girl said, anyway. Anthem denied the charge with shouts, and more than a few tears, to anyone who would listen. Nikki chose to believe the worst.

And for Marshall Ferriot, that was very good news. Especially when you considered the story was a complete lie. Turns out Brittany Lowe was willing to do pretty much anything Marshall wanted her to do, as long as he supplied her with a bottle of Vicodin out of his mother’s medicine cabinet.

Despite his success so far, Marshall knew better than to speak ill of the man in question to Nikki’s face, even if he did think the guy was a worthless piece of Lakefront trash. Anthem Landry came from a family of riverboat pilots and those assholes were the worst, a bunch of drunken slobs who had bought all kinds of political power in Baton Rouge so they could keep the entire port hostage with their ridiculously high salaries. He should know; his father ran one of the most successful cold storage companies on the Gulf Coast. Men like his dad kept the city running, his family always said, while lazy niggers threatened to take the whole thing down.

And what the hell kind of queerbait name was Anthem anyway? It chapped Marshall’s ass that the guy never caught any flack for it at school. Let Marshall belch in the wrong direction and he’d end up with some stupid nickname he couldn’t live down for months.

Of course he didn’t say a word of this to Nikki.

Instead he started talking about his desire to travel the world, to make big bucks in a city like New York and Chicago after he graduated from Duke (which was, by the way, not too far from Davidson). He thought he was being subtle, but maybe he wasn’t. After three more coffee dates, Nikki’s smiles started to seem a little indulgent. But she listened to him ramble on, and then, finally, just when he feared he might have lost her, she invited him to Elysium.

3

ATLANTA

MAY 2013

They moved the patient out of Room 4 when animals started dying outside his window.

The squirrels came first, a slightly disjointed row of them that appeared in a single day, just a few feet away from the window ledge: furry tails limp and snakelike, chests sealed to the patchy lawn with dead weight. Two of the three nurses who gathered at Room 4’s window that afternoon blamed the live oak tree nearby; some sort of awful fungus must have laced itself all through the branches overhead, then Alvin and his poor buddies took a few nibbles and plop, plop, plop.

But Arthelle Williams wasn’t sold on this scenario. It would have been five plops in all, and not a single one of the squirrels had landed on its back. Was that even statistically possible? The thought of there being statistics related to random squirrel deaths made her laugh so hard her breath fogged the glass.

She volunteered to go outside and take a closer look. It was a marvel, she thought, that her coworkers could empty a bedpan without so much as a wince, but the idea of getting within a few feet of a dead rodent turned them into squealing little girls.

They watched her from the window as she poked at the furry carcasses with a stick. There was no sense in pushing Marshall Ferriot’s wheelchair to the window; he wouldn’t be able to see any of it anyway. The boy hadn’t seen a damn thing for eight years. But the new girl, Emily Somethingorother—the little blonde who’d watched too many TV shows about hospitals on her daddy’s flat-screen and was always asking them silly questions about their mission—was so upset about the dead squirrels she hadn’t managed to peel her hands from her mouth for the entire time it had taken Arthelle to walk outside. Tammy Keene, the other nurse who’d discovered the gory scene, finally gave in to the girl’s histrionics and curved one arm around Emily’s shoulders while she gave Arthelle a pointed look that said, If I’d wanted to deal with children today, I would have stayed home and looked after my own.

“Some of these new nurses,” Arthelle had said to Tammy earlier that morning, “they make it hard to tell who the patients are.” The joke hadn’t been one of her best. If they had been working at a real hospital, it might have earned her a cackle or two. But here at the Lenox Hill Long Term Care Center, it was always possible to tell the nurses from the patients, because none of the patients could walk or speak. A high-end vegetable garden; that’s how Arthelle had heard more than one visiting physician refer to the place. And it was a pretty apt description: a place for the rich to stash their brain-dead invalids until pneumonia or a virulent infection did them in for good. Of course, the brochure didn’t word it quite so succinctly.

Arthelle dropped the stick she’d been using to prod the carcasses when she realized the other end had sunk into exposed brain matter. The squirrels hadn’t tucked their heads underneath their bodies as she’d first assumed. Their skulls had been smashed in. By what exactly, she had no idea. If it had been a tool wielded by a man, the blows were amazingly precise. The poor guys weren’t that big, and the rest of their bodies were undamaged.

Not smashed. That’s not right either. Exploded.

Childhood horror stories about seagulls being killed by Alka-Seltzer pellets swirled in her head, but it was the stomach that got blown out in that scenario, wasn’t it? Not the skull. Not the brains. And from their respective poses, it looked like the squirrels had been crawling straight for the window when the event in question had reduced each of their heads to little mounds of gore. And it didn’t look as if it had all happened at once. Some of the poor little guys . . . well, they looked fresher than the others.

There was a perfectly logical explanation, she was sure of it; gruesome, to be sure, and a very valid reason to get the hell away from the furry little devils and report the whole mess to security, but logical nonetheless.

God knows, they didn’t need any more weirdness around Marshall Ferriot. That was for sure.

Spend your day working around mannequins and you were bound to believe one of them had turned its head in your direction when you weren’t looking. This was normal, and to be forgiven. But it was also to be contained and dealt with responsibly. This was the lecture Arthelle gave Tammy Keene, Emily New Girl and the other nurses who had joined them for dinner that evening at one of the malls in Buckhead. The squirrel slaughter was common knowledge by then, and Arthelle figured the last few women who had invited themselves along were after gruesome details, not comfort food.

For a moment or two, it seemed as if her lecture had worked. Arthelle’s fellow nurses responded with bowed heads and the dull clinks of spoons hitting cast-iron skillets as they all devoured their macaroni and cheese.

“He killed them.”

It was Emily who’d said it, of course; Emily, with her doe eyes, and that squeaky, cartoony voice Arthelle just knew was an act designed to get men to take care of her. Little Emily New Girl, her head full of childish ideas that would never provide her with a grown-up life. And even though she looked away quickly from Arthelle’s fearsome glare, the sight of it wasn’t enough to keep her mouth shut.

“He can make you do things . . . he can. If you look into his eyes, he can make you . . . And when it’s over, you don’t remember doing any of it.”

No one said anything until the waiter brought the check.

The bird was next. It happened early in the morning and, while no one saw the event itself, everyone who was on the wing at that moment heard the loud thwack the crow made as it flew right into Room 4’s window with enough force to crack the glass in two places. And because there had been no witnesses, no one could tell if the bird’s compact skull had cracked open during the collision or just moments before.

And even though there was no evidence that young Marshall Ferriot had been disturbed by the event—or any other event that had taken place in his immediate vicinity for the past eight years, for that matter—he was moved to another room later that afternoon, this one featuring a view of a barren service alley with a Dumpster tucked at the far end.

“Somebody better pop the lid on that Dumpster a couple times this week,” Tammy Keene said after she and Arthelle had tucked Ferriot into his new bed. “Make sure the rats are doing okay.”

“Hush your mouth, girl,” Arthelle whispered. “I’m tired of this nonsense.”

Sick to death of the whole subject was more like it. The poor boy was a vegetable, for Christ’s sake. And she was coming to hate how quickly the women in her life would give their heads over to superstitious gobbledygook. Sisters, in particular. Almost every girlfriend of hers from childhood had grown up to be some crazy Bible-thumping church lady. Arthelle sometimes felt like the only black woman in the South who wanted to live a life of the mind.

There was also the fact that she didn’t feel like telling Tammy, or anyone else for that matter, about how badly she’d gone off on Little Emily when she caught the girl rooting through Ferriot’s file that morning. So some trust based at a New Orleans bank paid for the boy’s care? So what? None of it was proof that the boy was some kind of witch or warlock or whatever else little Emily was making him out to be to the other nurses.

He was a patient just like all the others and, if he gave Emily the creeps, she should stay out of his goddamn room and stop making trouble. Otherwise, Arthelle would have her ass fired.

They had a job to do, and it wasn’t to make up stories.

4

TANGIPAHOA PARISH

APRIL 2005

After they crossed Lake Pontchartrain, Marshall used his fake ID to buy them a milk carton full of frozen strawberry daiquiri and, when they were passing through Madisonville, a tiny hamlet that sits right at the spot where the Tchefuncte River slides free of Lake Pontchartrain’s northern shore, Marshall reached across the gearshift and took Nikki’s hand. For several agonizing seconds, her 4-Runner thudded over the steel girders of the town’s tiny drawbridge before she closed her fingers around his. And even though she wouldn’t look at him, he sprouted a painful hard-on in his jeans.

“Watch out for snakes!” Nikki said as they walked up the oyster-shell driveway to the property. It was the third time she’d warned him about a possible reptile encounter since they’d stepped from her car. Snakes didn’t bother him much, but they sure as hell got to her. He found himself taking note of this fact, lingering over it, wondering if perhaps he could put it to some kind of use. For her own good, of course. If I can cure her of a terrible fear, just think of the things she might let me do to her.

Like most children who’d grown up in Louisiana, she’d probably heard that old story about the water skier on the bayou who lost his balance and started screaming, “Help, I’m in barbed wire!” Only, according to the story, it wasn’t barbed wire. When the boat circled back, the friends pulled the man from the water to find him festooned with thick, black serpents. An entire school of water moccasins! Maybe if he told her that he’d found the story listed in an anthology of debunked urban legends or that, while water moccasins were certainly aggressive, they had terrible aim when it came time to bite, she might like him even more.

He followed the beam of her flashlight, which she kept angled on the mud underfoot, across the broad lawn that sat between the house and the dark, gurgling rectangle of the swimming pool. The entire property was plated in deep darkness that became impenetrable at its wooded borders, and the fact that she wasn’t leading him into the house, or in the direction of any shed that might contain light switches, sent shivers of delicious anticipation racing up his spine.

This is what you get when you work hard enough, he thought, as he listened to their intermittent gasping breaths. If you sit through enough bullshit coffee dates, if you’re a man of promise and resources, you can get a girl like Nikki Delongpre to take you to her secret love nest under the cover of darkness.

Even better, he was one of the first people to see this place in its current incarnation. The house had been finished only a few weeks before, and the contractors had filled the pool just a day or two ago. There was some kind of party planned in the next few weeks, probably a housewarming, but she got fuzzy on the details as soon as she brought it up, probably because she wasn’t ready to invite him. He’d floated some details about the shitty fund-raiser at the Plimsoll Club that his parents were forcing him to attend in a week, just enough to see if she wanted to be his date, but she’d gotten vague and distant then too.

But none of that mattered in this moment. He was here! Elysium!

She dropped the icy milk carton onto a lounger he could barely make out in the darkness. They were standing on flagstones now.

“Let me get some cups, turn some lights on,” she said, already turning for the house.

He took her gently by the arm and held her in place.

“Don’t leave me . . .” he gently whined.

Her laughter was more breath than anything else, and he couldn’t see her face, just that she had bowed her head slightly to keep their mouths from meeting. Lights meant more chatter, more feelings and more bullshit. The dark promised him the taste of her neck, the heft of her breasts and the heat between her slender thighs.

“It’s too dark,” she whispered.

“What are you afraid of? Snakes?”

“Seriously. Don’t even . . .”

But in her rush to make this point emphatic, she’d lifted her lips to within inches of his, and he seized the moment. Their connection was instant, moist, her mouth yielding, her body going limp as he curved his arms around her back. She was as hungry for this as he was. At least it seemed that way for about three minutes, and then she started to stiffen. He needed to make another move, and fast.

He lightened up on the kissing, allowed her to breathe for a second or two, but he kept his arms wrapped around her as he walked them closer to the pool’s dark edge.

“You don’t have to be afraid of anything,” he whispered. “I’ll protect you from all of it.”

Then he hurled them into the pool.

The water was so cold it hit them with the force of an anvil, and only then did Marshall remember what she’d said about its being fed by some kind of artesian well. But he kept her locked in his embrace, even as she coughed and cursed him and sputtered.

“I’ve got you . . . I’ve got you . . .” he said over and over again, and after trying to pull away from him, she finally relented. When she held to him with fresh childlike desperation, he realized it was her total fear of their dark, rippling surroundings that had sealed her body against his. She would rather cling to him in the freezing cold than dog-paddle a few feet through water she couldn’t see the bottom of.

And so he went back to work, with more force now, attacking her neck, peeling her soaked shirt up above her stomach, palming her breasts and then kneading them, and the whole time he kept waiting for her bone-rattling shivers to come to an end, for the warmth of desire to fill her as it was filling him. But she kept shivering in his arms, no matter what he did to her. And when he went to lift her shirt up over her bra, when her arms became caught halfway overhead inside her soaked sleeves, he realized she wasn’t helping, she was resisting, trying to pull her arms free while kicking herself away from him at the same time.

“Hey,” she said, and her voice was as cool as ice, without a trace of desire in it, and just this simple word told him she was feeling none of what he had just felt. None of the desire, no loss of control.

There was a deep, resounding thud against the stone nearby. Marshall felt it in his chest, then he felt it in his outstretched arms, and realized he’d been the cause of it. In the darkness, he could just make out the white’s of Nikki’s eyes. He had taken her by both shoulders and slammed her head into the side of the pool.

“Marshall,” she said quietly. But there was a trembling edge to her words that sounded like both a question and a challenge. Just by saying his name she was asking him how much further he was going to go. That Nikki Delongpre, nothing gets to her. Not even concrete. But he had gotten to her, all right. She was terrified. Paralyzed, hardly hysterical, but terrified nonetheless. And for a moment he thought about doing something to her, something really bad, something he’d never done before. But she wouldn’t keep it a secret, not like the other skanks he liked to play with. And if she wouldn’t keep it a secret, that meant whatever he did would have to be . . . final.

“Marshall, I’m going to get out of the water now.” Soft, gentle and condescending, like she was talking to a man with a gun. And wasn’t she, in a way? After all, he was taking stock of certain things, like the fact that she’d kept everything between them such a secret. Had she even told anyone she was out there with him? How far away was the nearest neighbor? A ten-minute boat ride?

Too much work.

That’s what it came down to in the end.

He allowed her to slide free of his grip and hoist herself up onto the flagstones. As soon as her feet were on solid ground, she grabbed for the flashlight and wheeled on him. “You son of a—” but the words died in her mouth when she saw what the beam had landed on.

The pool was full of them.

At first he thought it must be some kind of plankton, or maybe even sawdust left over from the construction. But these things weren’t the color of wood, they were the color of skin, and they were everywhere, clustered together in beige clumps that looked like shredded human flesh. And they were drifting through the water with determination, driven by currents he couldn’t feel.

Then darkness descended over him as Nikki took off running, the bouncing beam marking her path toward to the driveway. He could hear the jangle of the keys she’d already pulled from her pocket, could see her furiously wiping her other arm across her shirt, too frightened of him to stop and see how many of the crawly little things from the pool were still clinging to her.

He was still hoisting himself out of the pool when the 4-Runner’s engine sputtered to life and the headlights swung out into the swamp’s darkness and disappeared.

He wiped his arms in the darkness for a few minutes. But he didn’t care. And he didn’t care that she’d just abandoned him either. No, what mattered most to him, what would cling to his soul most forcefully about this night in the days to come, was the realization that he’d allowed her to escape, a realization that now felt as overpowering as discovering you had cancerous tumors all through your body.

I decided not to kill a woman because it sounded like too much work.

Finally he forgot about whatever the pool was full of and just stood there, letting the water run down his body and onto the flagstones. And what steadied his breaths, what chased away his memory of her flashlight beam bouncing off in the direction of her 4-Runner, was a new series of images that came to him unbidden.

Nikki Delongpre was staring up into his eyes as he held her to the mud a few feet away from where he stood now. One hand was around her throat, the other was drawing a paring knife up the length of her torso, slicing the flesh over her breastbone, drawing a red thread past the breasts she had refused to reveal to him. In this vision, Nikki did not scream or cry out or beg for him to stop. Rather, she gazed right into his eyes as a flowing, crimson seam opened in the center of her chest, her stunned, moist-eyed expression radiating a silent, awestruck recognition of his newfound power.

He was not a sick man. A sick man would have craved the sound of her screams, and those did not figure into this little fantasy of his. In fact, he was immensely proud of the cleanliness of this vision, of its lack of common violence, of his own ability to be perfectly content with just this focused display of pure physical dominance and its flowing, unstoppable result.

He tried to apologize, but she wouldn’t let him.

In the days that followed, before he made a decision that changed everything, she vanished wherever he appeared, out a side door in the locker room, into the warren of rooms behind the theater during lunch. The injustice of this began to bore into him more deeply than her rejection of him out in the swamp. It was as if she’d sensed the bloody fantasy that had coursed through him as she’d run for her car and was determined to let him simmer in it. Not just simmer. Drown altogether.

He blamed her for the deep throbbing ache in his jaw that alerted him to the fact that he’d been gritting his teeth for an hour. He blamed her for the sickness that had come over him later that night, even though he knew those disgusting little crawly things in the pool were probably to blame. (The chills and the nausea had gripped him while he was still in the car on the way home with his father. Of course, his dad hadn’t pressed for an explanation; he lived in such terror that his only son would turn out to be a bone smoker, Marshall could talk his way out of anything with even the vaguest story implying he’d been alone with a member of the opposite sex.)

And then came the final and most crushing blow.

They were back together. Nikki and Anthem, Cannon’s most perfect couple. After all the work Marshall had done, trust had been restored. How was it even possible? As he lay awake at night, seething with rage, those footsteps up the oyster-shell driveway toward Elysium’s darkened pool seemed like the last few seconds before an Olympic diver hit the water at a contorted angle, the chance of a medal rippling out away from him as he plunged under the surface. But the moment he couldn’t wash from his mind was the last words Nikki had said to him before fear had gripped her entirely.

Watch out for snakes.

The Delongpre residence was a two-story Greek Revival on Prytania Street, just a block from Lafayette Cemetery. The second-floor porch was big enough for a swing, and a high wrought-iron fence protected the front yard. But the driveway, an expanse of red brick, was open and exposed to the street, and that’s where the family’s hunter-green Ford Explorer sat with its cargo door half open, the dome light sending a soft spill of light over its leather cream-colored seats.

Half a block away, Marshall sat behind the wheel of his father’s BMW, watching Millie and Nikki Delongpre load their overnight bags and groceries.

In the locker room at school, he had overheard talk of a party, a birthday party for Nikki’s mother. But it wouldn’t just be a celebration of Millie Delongpre’s forty-seventh. It was also the first social occasion Anthem and Nikki would be attending together following their reunion, their official coming-out-after-coming-apart party. So far, there had been no sign of the man of the hour, no glimpse of Anthem Landry’s cherry-red F-150 pickup truck. Maybe he was meeting them tomorrow. At almost nine o’clock, the Delongpres were certainly getting a late start.

The party would be held at Elysium the following evening, and when Marshall imagined the place with lanterns strung from its cypress branches, when he thought of well-dressed guests standing and chatting in the same spot where he hurled Nikki into the pool, he was filled with a silent, focusing rage that distracted him from the stapled-shut grocery bag shifting on the passenger-side floor of his father’s BMW.

If he waited in the car any longer, he would lose his opportunity.

He could still hear Nikki’s parents calling to each other inside the house when he lifted the Explorer’s cargo door by about two feet and set the grocery sack in between two Louis Vuitton satchels and a crate of Beaujolais. Then he took his car key and made three quick cuts in the side of the bag, each one large enough for the inhabitant to work its way through when it decided it was time to emerge.

By the time he was back to the BMW, he heard the back door to the Delongpre residence close with force, followed by the family’s excited laughter. Nikki was recounting some childhood story about how her father had once screwed up his fishing line and hooked a lump of her hair in the process.

Marshall slid behind the driver’s seat of his father’s BMW and waited. He waited until the Ford Explorer pulled out of the driveway and headed down Prytania Street. He waited until the red taillights turned the corner, leaving him alone with a steady, rasping sound. At first he thought it was coming from the grocery bag next to him—he had spent most of the day with the thing—but then he remembered that his gift had been delivered, that it had been tucked inside the SUV that had just driven past him into the night, leaving him with the desperate rattle of his own strained breaths.

5

ATLANTA

MAY 2013

Arthelle was at the drink machine when she heard the screaming.

She’d know as soon as she rounded the corner up ahead if the commotion was coming from Ferriot’s new room. Please, God. Let it be anything else. A rat or a mouse loose on the hall. Anything. Just let it be alive!

Things had been quiet for a week now, probably because Emily had steered clear of the boy, and there’d been no more strange animal deaths outside the center either. The only one to raise the subject of Ferriot at all had been Tammy Keene, and only to Arthelle. Tammy had two kids she had to support on her own, which meant no time to fill her head with stupid books about UFOs and doomsday prophecies; in other words, she was as eager to keep Emily in check as Arthelle was.

Emily was the one screaming, all right. She was standing outside the open door to Ferriot’s room, bent at the waist, hands to her mouth as she wailed. Other nurses had come running too. They also stumbled in their tracks when they saw the bloody footprints Emily had made around the doorway.

Ferriot was in his wheelchair, just like he was every morning, staring into space with the same slack-jawed expression that made him look like he’d been trying to remember someone’s phone number for years.

Tammy Keene was on the floor, curled into a fetal position, back to the doorway, the blood flowing from her chest forming a dark curtain across the linoleum. Arthelle hit the floor on both knees, rolled the woman onto her back and saw her wide, staring eyes, radiating nothing but shock over the fact that the box cutter she always carried on her hip when she was doing gift distribution was embedded in her chest. The other nurses started pouring into the room, but not Emily. She was still screaming.

“I told her not to! But she didn’t believe me. I told her not to look into his eyes!”

Once she pulled Tammy’s bloodstained shirt up over her bloody chest and saw the extent of her wound, Arthelle started cursing under her breath, bloody fingers trembling as she traced a gash that started just above Tammy’s navel and made a straight, gurgling line right up to where the box cutter’s blade had caught on the underside of her rib cage. The blood was everywhere. Tammy’s lips moved, but nothing came out except weak, hissing breaths. Everyone around them was sliding into action, and that was good, because Arthelle was paralyzed, stunned, trying to put it all together.

No blood on Emily’s hands or face. None at all. But the only screams she’d heard had come from Emily, not the gutted colleague the other nurses were now rushing to save. And the window was closed and Ferriot was right in front of it, so how could someone have scrambled out into the alley without knocking the poor boy out of his wheelchair?

These thoughts were assaulting Arthelle from all sides, reducing her to a quivering wreck in one corner of the room while her colleagues tried to stop the flow of Tammy’s blood, ignoring as they worked the fact that Tammy’s eyes now stared up at the ceiling with the glaze of death.

An alarm screamed. But it was the wrong one, not the steady honking of the Code Blue alarm meant to summon all of them to a patient’s room. This was the old whoop and wail, as the girls called it; the shrill, screaming fire alarm. An alarm’s an alarm, she thought. And what does it matter now? She’s gone. Tammy’s plum gone.

Emily was halfway across the room before Arthelle sprang to her feet. The crazed girl had hauled the fireman’s ax back over one shoulder, its red and silver blade glinting in the fluorescent light. The nurses working on Tammy were too busy to see what was about to happen, but Arthelle did. The ax blade struck the arm of the wheelchair a few inches from Marshall Ferriot’s limp right hand. By then, Arthelle had driven Emily face-first into the floor with enough force to knock the wind out of the crazy little bitch.

Thanks to Arthelle Williams, they had all been spared two gruesome deaths at the center that day. But as soon as Arthelle felt a surge of triumph, she looked up and saw Tammy Keene’s blood sliding toward them across the linoleum, making the victory feel as empty as the patient sitting a few feet away appeared to be.