Every Year, Rain is an in-progress, serialized supernatural thriller. This is Chapter One.
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“This Purifying Flame”
As I offered him the money, he stared over my head and whispered that the moon was leaning the wrong way that night.
“Of course, I can't be sure,” he added. “But no. It's different. Everything's coming together. Or perhaps I should say coming apart.”
Had I seen him and his grungy brown coat perched on the grocer’s curb, I would have parked on the far side of the lot and gone in the other door. But the canned lights beneath the canopy had burned out, and aside from the shocks of silver-blue moonlight that illuminated the pocked ridges of his cheeks, he stood in darkness. If I could do it again, I would stroll right past him. I wish to God I had, but a blonde in a navy peacoat spotted the two of us as she jogged across the parking lot, and I fished a dollar out of my jacket as a token of my generosity.
Some people don’t care what others think of them. I never learned the art. I felt foolish standing there being ignored by this bony man in his ill-fitting coat when all I really needed was a box of dish detergent. I coughed, and he finally dropped his jaundiced eyes to mine. The beggar went on whispering.
“Order has you in a cell, pining for better days. Chaos offers the only way out.”
I supposed withdrawal had reduced to insanity most of the destitute creatures that panhandle in shopping centers, and this one was no exception. At least he hadn't seemed to notice the money in my hand. I had been holding a twenty rather than the buck I was willing to part with, and I slipped my hands back into my pockets and braced against the wind.
It was then that I realized he held not a sign, as I'd previously imagined, but a book. The fingers of his gloves had been unceremoniously torn away, exposing the dirty digits of his hands in which the vellum notebook lay.
“What's written in there?”
He smirked, his fray of rust-gray hair snapping in the wind.
“Only the truth, Everett.”
There was something about the snarl of his grin and the look in his eye. An eager insinuation I couldn’t put my finger on. Beyond that, I couldn’t remember telling him my name. I felt as though I had introduced myself to someone who expected I should know them quite well. I nodded politely and left him out in the cold.
The aisle of cleaning products was empty of other customers except for the blonde who still wore the blush of wind-bitten cheeks as she inspected a handbrush. I settled myself in front of the detergents and tried to parse out what made any of them different.
I hate these errands for the choices. Somehow I knew that not one of the half-dozen dish detergent options would be right. But indecision has its benefits. I tried to be subtle as I glanced at the blonde woman in the aisle, her flat-ironed hair shifting across the back of her blue peacoat like wheat. It was something Jess might have worn once. Perhaps she still did, but I could see nothing of her through the haze of silence that hung in our apartment.
The woman moved on from the handbrushes, and I turned to see if the front of her face matched her profile. It did. She had soft eyebrows and lips that raised to return my smile. She stopped a few feet on the other side of me, and I cursed the length of her peacoat as I gave a monochromatic, eco-friendly box of detergent a shake.
“That’s not gonna get you clean,” a voice whispered in my ear.
When I turned, the beggar’s chin was practically over my shoulder, and the yellow light of the fluorescents had made rawhide of his face.
“Christ,” I said, involuntarily stepping back.
“Most people just call me Malmacchío.”
He dipped his head toward his worn vellum notebook, as though skimming the pages in search of something. He stopped and nodded approvingly and closed the book. The blonde gritted her teeth half-apologetically, likely glad Malmacchío had stalked me into the store instead of her.
“What?” I said.
“That won’t do the trick is all I’m saying.”
The bland eco-friendly detergent felt suddenly light in my hands as though it had no substance at all. I supposed he was right—those green brands never get the job done. I put the box down and grabbed a brightly colored brand whose box sported an artificially gleaming glass. His laugh came shrill and fast like a coyote yapping over a fresh kill.
“Your head’s in the wrong place, Everett. It’s a different kind of dirt I’m talking about.”
He flipped the book open again and began to read, loudly.
“When you came into the aisle, you imagined the scent of the girl’s neck. That the blush of her cheeks arose from something clever you had said. The shift of her shoulder blades under freshly laundered sheets.”
The blonde shuffled a few feet further from us, but Malmacchío only raised his hoarse voice louder.
“You’re still dying to know if the fit of her jeans flatters her ass, but her coat’s preventing you from sneaking a peek.” He stopped and glared at the blonde. “Her name is Carol Fischer, and she was just leaving.”
I can’t remember a girl ever looking at me so fearfully. Those soft eyebrows furrowed with confusion, and she slunk backward to the end of the aisle and hastily got the hell out of there. Off to notify security, if I had to guess.
The lack of audience didn’t phase Malmacchío, and he went on reading. The smile growing on his face was incongruous with the raspy drawl of words coming out of his mouth. It was a recital heavy with the weight of accusation. They were words the order of which he could not have known and had no business repeating. The very thoughts a man keeps to himself as though, if not hidden from God, they were yet contained and, if contained, of no consequence. To hear them voiced aloud soon dispels one of such a notion. He recited dates and times and what I wish had been the merely intrusive thoughts that had accompanied them. As he finished reading, his eyes stole about my face. His mouth hung open like a grinning dog, and he waited for me to respond. There was nothing for me to say.
“Death is a funny thing. He is found at the end of every road, patiently waiting for your last footstep to fall. Every true oath bears his seal. Who can cheat Death? Who can bargain with him?
“This evening,” Malmacchío continued, “your friend Daniel Simmons got into his car. The streets were freshly wet. Slick. I bet you want to know what happens next.”
“I suspect I already do.”
Malmacchío shook his head and gestured toward the front of the store.
In warmer months, bulb lights, strung from patio vigas, illuminate patrons of the Old House, elderly locals who would never abandon a historic winery for an upstart brewery. After all, a place is not a place without its legends.
Hundreds of years ago while much of the structure was still being built, the Old House had been a convent, a novitiate of which once awoke as a man was shimmying through the narrow window of her cell. The only thing the girl prized more than her savior was her virginity, and wielding a nearby crucifix as a dagger, she thrust the cross of Christ into the intruder’s neck, and he fell to the floor with a sickening snap. By candlelight, she recognized the man as the Duke whose charity kept the convent’s doors open, and who likely did not expect anyone to be in the newly occupied cell. The next morning, the prioress found the novitiate caked in the mud that plastered the adobe bricks in the Old House’s new wing, an entire section of wall finished that had been left undone the night before.
The convent closed shortly after the Duke’s disappearance, but his ghost is said to still unlock doors in the evening so none need ever crawl through the Old House’s windows.
Malmacchío slinked along those adobe wall, shying from the lights of intermittent cars, and passed beyond the heart of the village, where he finally dashed across the road and disappeared into the trees.
It wasn’t lost on me that chasing a beggar into the woods on a moonlit night was just the sort of reckless behavior Daniel Simmons lived for. And if he were the one keeping pace with Malmacchío’s anxious lope toward the bosque, I wouldn’t have blamed him. You can’t let a man who knows your thoughts out of your sight.
The crooked moon loomed above us as Malmacchío slipped under the bony limbs that jutted out from shrubs along the bosque path and nearly rubbed his cheek along the trunks of passing trees. The naked overstory hung in the air like fossilized rocket-bursts, the remnants of some precambrian conquest which we now marched below. He doubled back once, paused at a tree he’d just passed, and trotted off in a different direction. If the trunk was marked, it was in no way I could see.
My eyes kept finding their way to the leathery cover of Malmacchío’s book of truth. With a beggar, you always know what they want from you. It’s simple, straight-forward, and usually more than you’re willing to give. But Malmacchío was no beggar. He was a thief. Malmacchío turned his wolfish face to me as he left the beaten trail, as though the crush of leaves beneath my feet weren’t evidence enough that I had not abandoned him. We squeezed through a thick stand of salt cedar, and I asked him how he’d come by the book.
“The book has always been mine,” he said.
“But not the words written in it. Those were never yours.”
“Do I sense embarrassment? That too is a seed of Chaos. He’s brushed your ear with his tender lips just as he once brushed mine.”
If he wanted me to kill him out in that salt cedar, behind the screen of the mottled red bark that shot into the air like haggard bamboo spears, he was making a good case for it. To what end could following a madman into the forest dark lead if not to the death of one or the other?
“Most people keep their eyes on this side of the veil,” Malmacchío said. “I didn’t take anything except the memory of what I saw.”
“Even a memory can be stolen. The man crouched at the window of two lovers has already taken more than he has any right to.”
“You would know.”
His yipping laugh rose into the sky where it was joined by the melancholy glee of all the canids close-by. The coyote chorus whooped and swelled and seemed like to never end before it finally died and a grave hush engulfed the bosque again.
In the distance a lambent yellow haze suffused the forest. It jittered across limbs like lamplight, casting odd shadows that danced from branch to branch. The glow overpowered the light of the feeble moon which was soon to be lost to the dense horizon of the woods. As we neared the source of light, an unsteady rhythm crepitated and hissed, and Malmacchío and I passed into a henge of bosque cottonwoods where a blast of warmth so scalding hit me and forced me to cover my face. But the heat struck deeper than the skin, somewhere in the hollows of my soul, and my raised hands did not diminish its effect.
When I dropped my hands, Malmacchío stood scratching his ear beside a fire in the center of the trees. The rhythm of the light exaggerated the gyrating form of the cottonwoods, their limbs splayed like some giant dryad race cursed to worship around an everlasting flame. The book was open in Malmacchío’s free hand.
“Let’s flip back a few chapters,” he said. “Here we are:
“You walked into the woods at dusk and came upon a throne. Now seven years have passed since your betrayal at the stone. "If you denied the charm foretold that sitting there would bring, then why, once Daniel sat, did you not take your place as King? "Assured of your commensurate act, he sat at your behest, and when he rose, you smiled and said your promise was in jest. "Had they been kept, the words you spoke would have cost you your life. The debt your friend acquired there is due this very night. "But should you choose to set it right the throne will switch its claim, life for a life, when you pass through this purifying flame.”
As he finished reading, he raised his eyes to mine and held them there. A waiting wind swept in from the east.
“Is it all in riddles?” I said.
“Just a little artistic flair. I can read the more detailed account if you’d like.”
I didn’t see the point.
“He’s not dead.”
Malmacchío smiled.
“He could be. He could not be. You’ve got your hands on the wheel. What say you?”
He let that last question hang as though it were an old cobweb forgotten in a ceiling corner and not a proposal for self-immolation. The merit of that proposition rested upon grounds that were dubious at best. A broken promise. An allegedly mystical throne in another wood some two thousand miles northeast of us. I had a memory of such a place, but it was hazy.
With a little help from Daniel Simmons, I once recalled a fight that had broken out at Mickey’s. We’d been sitting in our usual corner booth, the foamy heads still thick on our beers, when a man in a pastel Hawaiian shirt, with a voice as crackly and loud as a megaphone, sent his drink sailing down the bar. Somehow, you could hear the friction of the bottom of the glass on the unpolished bartop, and it only passed two patrons before it toppled and surged into the lap of an NCAA women’s center. Her date was kneeling on his stool like a toddler just to maintain what little eye contact with her he could manage through his perpetually fogged glasses. To avenge this giantess, he dashed the remains of his drink in the faces of the two patrons seated between her and the instigator, and all hell broke loose. Daniel would have jumped into the fray, he reminded me, if I hadn’t talked some sense into him. We later relayed this adventure to another friend, Nick, who confirmed every detail—except that he had been the other person in our booth and I hadn’t been there at all.
“You said Death can’t be cheated. If I step into those flames, I die and Daniel lives. But for how long?”
Malmacchío shrugged.
“Quite the bargain you’re peddling here. Why the hell would I set myself on fire without so much as a guarantee anyone will be better off?”
“Because if you don’t, you’re not going to want to live anyway.”
Whoever built the fire had stacked the tinder like a king-sized bed, or a funeral bier prematurely lit. The orange light flashed over Malmacchío’s narrow cheeks. With a worn gray running shoe, he rolled away one of the stones that inconceivably bound the fire in place. The book was gripped tightly in his veiny hands. He rolled away another stone and swept his hand through the air to present the newly-made gap.
Even if the memory had been vivid and sure, how could I be expected to believe that an abandoned throne had dominion over me or Daniel, a man I’d last laid eyes on half-a-decade ago? What bearing could my body, engulfed in flames, have on the foggy suggestion of a decision Daniel may or may not have made seven years prior? How could anyone blame me for not quenching my life in those flames?
I had to know what else was in the book.
“It won’t be as bad as you’re imagining,” Malmacchío said.
I advanced toward the pillar of fire. Its fingers grasped at the blackness of space and coiled beyond the stone boundary with the wind. Indescribable heat. Yet Malmacchío just stood there with his mouth lolling open again in that deceptive grin. In the midst of the bier, a finger of granite split the box of wood. It was as black as a cold night, though heat radiated from it in murky disturbances of place. I raised my sleeve to ward the heat from my eyes until I came to where Malmacchío waited, drumming the vellum notebook against his leg.
“But one more step,” he said. “And you can claim your throne.”
The truth, he had said. And a truth no one deserved to know more than I did.
I lunged for the book. I got a hand around it, though Malmacchío gripped my waist. He lifted the book along with my hand above his head, and I clutched his other arm for leverage. His knifelike fingers searched along my side until they came to my hip and clenched. The man was made of more than bone. The fire flickered in his eyes and across the toothy grin that had never left his face.
“Everyone will know,” he said. “The moon will stand as witness. Your own words will condemn you.”
His fingers squeezed and something crushed in the joint of my hip. I yelled and slouched backwards, which caused us both to lose our footings. As we fell, I gripped him even tighter and swung toward the flames and felt the smooth cover of the book slipping from beneath my fingers as both the truth and Malmacchío flew into the inferno.
When I hit the ground, everything was dark. The cold swept in on the ash-scented wind. Not a glimmer of red remained in the bed of coals where the fire had been, only the pallid blue of the moon, which I was surprised to find back at its zenith in the night sky and fuller now than when Malmacchío and I had met. It showered its light upon me and the bare limbs of the trees—those giant cottonwoods that no longer seemed to gyrate in ritualistic dance, but to stoop with age, having begun already their inevitable return to the earth which had borne them up.
Something beneath my skin was boiling, and blisters were forming on the backs of my hands, which made the desperate dash for my phone all the more agonizing. I clawed at its form within my pocket, scraping it out like a sliver of wood from a shallow wound. I gave the command, and the phone rang Daniel Simmons. It rang, and the leaves rustled beyond the circle of trees. It rang, and a pair of yellow eyes appeared beneath the hunched cottonwood branches. It rang, and the coyote’s form slunk over the moonlit dust, and the metallic memory of Daniel’s voice sang from my speaker for the last time.
Continued in Chapter Two.
dig it. i'll look forward to the next installment.
Nicely done! ✨👏