A Strange and Savage Garden Read online

  Fury welled up inside Lauren. “What the fuck are you talking about, you crazy bitch?”

  Madelyn looked at Lauren for a long moment and then she knelt down and her hand lashed out, cuffing Lauren hard on the side of her head.

  “I understand that this isn’t easy for you, but that’s no reason to start name-calling, young lady, you hear?”

  Lauren gritted her teeth. She wanted nothing more than to break free of Stephen’s grip and pound the living shit out of Madelyn Carter, but she knew it wouldn’t be smart to try, not yet, not until she knew what was really going on here. So she kept her mouth closed and did her best to look submissive as she nodded.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Madelyn looked at her for another moment before standing once more.

  “I was born with the power to create illusions. Where my ability came from, I don’t know. No one in my family had ever demonstrated any special powers before. My father was a Kentucky coal miner, a simple, superstitious man who thought my talents made me a witch. My mother was somewhat more open-minded, but she knew that other people would think of me the same way my father did, and perhaps try to hurt me. And she knew that some folks would want to exploit me, use my powers for their own benefit. So my parents took to punishing me whenever I used my powers to make pretty colored lights sparkle in the air or to make my dolls sing and dance.

  “I didn’t realize that I could’ve resisted my parents if I wanted to. My illusion-casting abilities alone could’ve done it if used the right way, and I have some lesser powers of telepathic persuasion which help me convince people to believe in my illusions. With them, I might’ve been able to bend my parents to my will. Perhaps even made them forget that my power existed.”

  Just like you made me forget about the Beast and my baby, Lauren thought.

  “But I was far too young to realize the full extent of my strength, and I loved my parents and wished to please them, so I did as they wanted and stopped using my powers altogether. And as time went by and I grew from a child to a young woman, I came to believe that I’d never truly had any powers, that they were nothing more than a childish bit of fantasy, like an imaginary friend or a monster lurking beneath the bed.

  “I wasn’t quite eighteen when I met the man whom I would marry. His name was Thomas Carter—don’t look so surprised; Carter really is our family name. He was, as the song goes, the son of a preacher man, who traveled with his father throughout the Midwest, going from town to town, putting on revival shows.”

  Madelyn stopped and stared off into the distance for several moments, a far-off look in her eyes. Lauren turned her head to look at the horizon. The blue was lighter now, with traces of pink. Dawn was drawing near. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  Madelyn continued. “I don’t know what it was about Thomas that first attracted me to him. He was handsome enough, but not movie star handsome. It might have been his voice. When he preached to a crowd, his voice was so strong, so confident. It made you feel as if he truly were speaking the word of God, as if, in a way, he and God were one.

  “I stayed after the service one night to speak to him, and we talked about God and Jesus and the Bible for hours. He and his father stayed in our little Kentucky town a few more weeks—a good bit longer, I later learned, than their usual stay—and we talked more…a lot more.

  “When it finally came time for Thomas’s revival to pull up stakes and move to another town, I was determined to go with him. My mother wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but my father was all for it. Probably because he thought a preacher man would keep any witchly tendencies of mine in check. And so, with my parents’ blessing, I left home and traveled with the revival, singing in the choir, even though I didn’t have the world’s best voice.

  “After a few months on the road, Thomas asked me to marry him, and I was delighted. His father performed the ceremony during a service one night—I forget which town we were in; they’d long since started to blur together in my mind—and later that night Thomas and I made love as husband and wife. It was my first time, and perhaps it was his as well, but even though he was a man of God, he was a man, so who can tell? Not that it mattered to me; I loved him so. When I reached orgasm, it was beyond any physical sensation I’d ever experienced. I saw swirls of multicolored lights before my eyes, which I thought were a normal, and pleasant, after-effect of lovemaking. Until, that is, I realized that Thomas could see them too, dancing in the air between our faces.

  “I was horrified at first. I remembered my childhood ‘imaginings’ of talking and dancing toys, remembered how my father thought I was a witch, and I threw myself into Thomas’s arms, sobbing and begging him to forgive me, to help me cast out the devils that infested my body.

  “But Thomas, bless him, didn’t think my powers were evil. He thought they were a miracle, a great gift from God. Over the next few weeks we tested the limits of my abilities—in secret, of course—and we learned that I couldn’t affect the physical world beyond some basic psychokinesis, like making the mud and wood bodies of the citizens of Trinity Falls move, like I made my dolls move as a child. Otherwise, my powers were primarily confined to creating the appearance of reality. I saw this as a drawback. After all, I couldn’t heal the sick. Couldn’t turn water to wine or multiply bread and fish. But Thomas said it was only to be expected, for such powerful miracles as those were the province of the Lord only.

  “Thomas was a devout man, but a practical one. He realized that my powers would be a great asset to the revival—if we used them in the right way. We couldn’t pretend to perform healings. That would be far too dishonest, and besides, after the show, when the illnesses of those who’d been ‘healed’ suddenly returned, we’d be exposed. And it wouldn’t be right for me to use my ability to give people a mental ‘push’ to make them more susceptible to our message of salvation. Thomas said people had to choose the Lord’s way of their own free will.

  “It took almost a year for Thomas and me to decide how we were going to use my powers in the revival. During this time, Thomas’s father died, and the show was now completely his.

  “I remember the first night we did it; it was in a little town called Danville, Illinois. Thomas was in rare form that night. We had a full tent and he was preaching as if he were nothing but a phone line with a direct connection to the Almighty himself. And then, when Thomas reached the most dramatic point in his sermon, I made an angel appear over the heads of the crowd. It was beautiful: large ivory-feathered wings, snow-white robe, sandaled feet, long blonde hair; kind, delicate features that were a mixture of masculine and feminine, and surrounding the body, a shimmering, warm golden light.

  “I let the angel float above the crowd for several seconds—their mouths and eyes open wide—and then I made it smile right before it vanished. The entire illusion lasted less than a minute, but Thomas had told me that was more than long enough. ‘Miracles are like snowflakes,’ he’d said. ‘They’re special because they don’t last long.’ And he was right—the crowd went crazy. Some fell to the ground weeping, others laughed as they hugged friends and family, while still others fled the tent screaming. Many just closed their eyes, clasped their hands together and prayed.

  “After the service, so many folks stayed to talk to Thomas and pray with him that we didn’t get to bed until almost four in the morning. I felt uneasy and more than a little guilty. It hadn’t really been an angel that’d visited our tent. It was just the illusion of one. But when I told this to Thomas, he said that I shouldn’t worry. The angel was merely a symbolic image of the power God had given me—one that simple folk could understand, that’s all. We weren’t deceiving them. My power did come from the Lord, didn’t it? By using it, wasn’t I demonstrating proof of the existence of the Divine? Of His love?

  “Reassured, I worried no more, and I continued to make the angel appear during services. Not at every one, of course, and not in every town
. Thomas was too good of a showman for that. He knew miracles should be rare as well as temporary.

  “Sometimes reporters would come, maybe a college professor or a minister of another denomination who’d heard tell of the ‘visitation’ that sometimes appeared during our services. We were always careful to look for them, and the angel wouldn’t show up on nights when they were in the audience. ‘The last thing we need is for some scientist to stick you in a lab, or worse, for the government to get hold of you,’ Thomas said. ‘They’d never appreciate your gift. They’d want to use it—pervert it for their own ends.’ And if a reporter did manage to sneak past us and take a picture, it didn’t matter. My illusions didn’t photograph.

  “We went on this way for some years, happy with the good work we were doing, gratified to be saving souls and spreading God’s word. We weren’t blessed with children, which saddened me, but Thomas said God wanted us to devote our lives to our work, so I tried not to miss having little ones, though it wasn’t easy. Sometimes when I was alone, I used my powers to—” She broke off, suddenly looking uncomfortable.

  “Never mind. Thomas was older than I by about fifteen years, so when I was in my early forties, he was in his late fifties. And that’s when he started having heart trouble. It began as a racing pulse that wouldn’t slow down no matter how much he rested. Doctors gave him medicine, which helped for a time, but the problem came back. The doctors decided to put in a pacemaker, but something went wrong during the operation and Thomas died on the table.

  “I was devastated. How could God allow such a devoted servant to die like that, when he was still relatively young, when there was still so much work left for him to do? Why would this loving God give me the power to create the illusion of reality, but not the power to heal my own husband?

  “Eventually I realized the answer: there was no God. My powers weren’t the result of a divine blessing, but rather a genetic accident, a quirk of evolution, nothing more. But, I thought, just because there wasn’t a God now, didn’t mean there couldn’t be a God someday.

  “Think about it, Lauren. There are millions of people in the world, from many different faiths, all of them believing in a lie, believing that there is something more to life than breathing, eating, shitting, fucking and dying. Believing that something created them, something that loves them and is waiting to welcome them home when they die. Something that doesn’t exist!”

  Her voice rose in volume during these last few words, almost to a yell. The Great Beast snorted and stirred, but the Offertories sang louder, and the creature settled down again.

  “So you decided to make a God,” Lauren said.

  Madelyn nodded. “I thought that if I could harness my power, focus it, bring it to bear on a single purpose—the creation of a Divine Being—perhaps I could move past illusion for once and create something real.”

  “So you came here and created Trinity Falls—nice name, by the way—and all its people as…what? Your laboratory?”

  Madelyn smiled. “More like my very own Garden of Eden. I needed an environment dedicated to my purpose. A place where my God could grow. And a place where I could bring up my child.

  “You see, after a couple of years of exploring the true limits of my powers this—” she gestured, indicating the people around them, “—was the best I could do. And that —” she nodded toward the Beast, “—was the closest I could come to a God, the end result of reading volume after volume on religion and mythology.” She walked over to the Great Beast and scratched it on the head. The creature made a satisfied rumble deep in its throat, almost like a purr.

  “He’s a wild, primitive thing…the kind of God prehistoric tribes might have worshipped.” Madelyn grinned. “I suppose you could say he’s the bastard love child of myself and Joseph Campbell. He was so wild that I had to create the Offertories to keep him under control. Music hath charms.”

  She walked back to Lauren’s side. “I came to the conclusion that, try as I might, I could never bring about the existence of a true God. But there was one way I could create life, the same way any woman could: I could have a baby. A baby who might inherit my powers and, if I worked hard on psychically ‘pushing’ the fetus as it grew within me, who might develop into a child that would exceed my abilities. Might even, in fact, be able to create reality through the sheer force of her imagination and will.”

  “You mean me,” Lauren said.

  “It wasn’t difficult to get pregnant. I don’t own many real things—just my trailer and its contents. But I did have a car, and I drove to Ash Creek, draped myself in an illusion of youth and beauty and went into the first bar I came to.”

  She grinned. “It took a few times with a few different men, but eventually I discovered what I’d hoped—that I wasn’t the reason Thomas and I never conceived a child. After you were born, Lauren, I created your family, as well as a playmate fashioned from an aspect of the Beast. A playmate I hoped you’d invest with enough reality so that, when you were of age—”

  “He and his other self could rape me.” Lauren shifted her weight, but Stephen showed no sign of relaxing his grip on her.

  “Could impregnate you with their Godforce—which would then be embodied in a real, living child.” Madelyn pointed to the still form of Lauren’s baby resting on the bench. Its tiny cheeks were now tinged pink by the rays of dawn. “But you cocked it up, you stupid little bitch. You ran off into the woods to have him alone, and when he was born, he was born dead—because that’s the way you wanted him to be. And then you buried him and used your powers to cloak the grave from the Beast’s senses and, despite how hard I ‘pushed’ you later, you refused to tell me where my grandson was.”

  “So you made me forget about it all.”

  “I did better than that. You wanted to forget, so it didn’t take much pushing on my part. You helped bury the memories just as you buried your dead baby. But I added an extra push to make sure you’d have nightmares, hallucinations about being raped by the Beast. Visions that I hoped would eventually wear down your resistance to me, so that one day I’d be able to get you to tell me where the baby was buried. Maybe even get you to restore him to life.”

  Lauren looked at her dead son. No rot, no decay. He looked as if he were merely sleeping. Was it possible? Could she really bring the little one back from the dead?

  “That’s why I didn’t really care when you ran away from home and eventually settled in California. I knew the nightmares would bring you back sooner or later. But then—”

  “You got sick, and you knew you couldn’t afford to wait for me to come home on my own.”

  Madelyn nodded. “So I killed your ‘father’, and you came back for his funeral. And now here we are, all of us, waiting for you to shit or get off the pot.”

  “What?”

  Madelyn knelt down until her face was even with Lauren’s. “Do it,” she said, voice tight with tension. “You now know why I did all this. I want to give the world a God. And that little fucker over there is it. All you have to do is wish him alive, and it’ll finally be done.”

  “As simple as that, huh?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, young lady.”

  “But I’m not a young lady to you, am I? I’m not really your daughter, either, not in your mind. All I am to you is a brood mare whose only purpose was to squeeze out another baby for you to twist into whatever thing you want him to become. What sort of God would you create? Not a loving, just God. Not the sort of God Thomas believed in. If He were anything like you, He’d be a selfish, lying, manipulative God. The world deserves better than that, Madelyn.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Really? Well, how about if I imagine this?” In her mind, Lauren saw Stephen losing his grip on her shoulder and flying backward through the air as if flung by some giant, invisible hand. As soon as it was conceived, it was done, though
the cry of surprise that burst forth from him and the sound of cracking bone when he landed were welcome additions to her imagining.

  She thought she might feel some sense of elation, of empowerment, of something, but she didn’t. Affecting reality with her thoughts seemed as natural as breathing—and to her, perhaps it was. But what mattered most to Lauren about her newfound power was that it gave her a weapon to fight with.

  She got to her feet and faced Madelyn—not her grandmother and certainly not her mother—grim determination on her face.

  “An infant’s trick,” Madelyn scoffed. She made no move, made no sound, but the Beast rose and began padding toward Lauren, eyes blazing, tongue lolling with a hunger that had nothing to do with filling its belly.

  “All right, then. How about I imagine a pit opening up beneath your pet?”

  The ground under the Beast yawned opened like a mouth and the creature howled in frustration as it plunged downward.

  “And maybe I’ll add a few dozen needle-sharp spikes at the bottom, just for fun.”

  There was a thud and the Beast screamed in pain.

  “Better,” Madelyn conceded, “but I’ve a lifetime of experience using my powers. You may be stronger than I in some ways, but you can’t hope to beat me. Not when I command an entire town.”

  The Offertories stopped sing-chanting and stepped into the stone circle, the assembled townsfolk of Trinity Falls right behind them.

  A leonine paw came over the lip of Lauren’s pit and caught hold. It was quickly followed by another and the Great Beast, bleeding from a dozen wounds and one eye missing, hauled itself up and out. Its remaining eye shone a sour yellow, and Lauren knew that without the Offertories’ song to placate it, there was nothing to restrain the monster’s animal fury. She wondered if even Madelyn would be able to control it. And then she wondered if she could.

  “You had your pet rape me, and I bore its child. That created a bond between us, Madelyn, one stronger than even you, its creator, have with it. Shall we see just how strong?”