ELI FOUND A seat near the back of the church, a row empty but for a sour-looking pregnant woman he didn’t recognize and a rough-looking man in a suit but no tie. He figured them for distant cousins dragged in from a cross-state farm, bitching their way to the church in a beaten-down truck and a morning fight unsettled.
Someone tapped him hard on the shoulder, and he twisted around to see Henry Munson, one of Parker’s groomsmen (and all-around dickhead) staring down at him. Eli thought he looked a little drunk. His forehead was dotted with sweat, his toothy smile slippery.
“Hey man, what’s up?” Henry said. His too-wide grin and sunken eyes gave him the look of a malnourished jackal.
Eli nodded and said nothing. Henry rested a hand on his shoulder, his eyes darting around the room before finally settling once more, albeit restlessly, on Eli. “Listen man, the bride and groom are doing some quick pre-ceremony photos while they can. Just, you know, with friends and such. They don’t think they’ll have time after because of, uh, other obligations and whatever.”
Eli felt his pulse quicken but forced it to slow. He knew this day would be hard, but he was here for Carrie, whatever pain that may bring. “Sounds grand, have fun,” he said, not wanting to hear the request. Not wanting, truth be told, to be here at all. He began to feel the heat of Henry’s pressed palm making its way through the fabric of the thin suit, fought the urge to shrug it off.
“Yeah, well, Carrie wants you to come do a quick photo, dummy,” Henry said, finally removing his hand and taking a step back, as if to lead Eli away. “So, let’s go. They don’t have much time.”
Eli considered a moment, wanting to turn his back on Henry, to ignore the request and the slick weasel who’d brought it. He wanted to reject it, like he rejected the wedding. Like she’d rejected him. “I don’t…” he started, then stopped.
He sighed, dropped his gaze to his lap, large hands resting on his knees. He turned them over to study deeply-lined palms, searching for answers. He noticed, with the sudden heat of shame, how the cuffs of his brown suit coat settled inches high from his wrists, how frayed thread spilled from the left cuff, a permanent ink-stain soiled the milk-white shirt beneath.
Who am I to demand anything? he thought. And who am I really?
He considered a moment more, then stood. He noticed the quick stagger of uncertainty in Henry’s eyes as he rose almost a foot higher than the groomsman, whose smile had slid away to leave a twisted frown.
“When the hell’d you get so tall, man?” Henry said, then turned and walked quickly away, looking back only once to wave Eli after him.
Eli followed, wanting nothing more than to get all this over with; hoping that if he obliged he might find a moment alone with Carrie, offer reassurance of his support (despite it being feigned). He wanted her to be happy at any cost, even if he was part of the payment.
Henry led Eli through the foyer, then down a small hallway toward an office. Henry went through the door quickly, then let it swing back, nearly closing it behind him.
Eli heard laughter as he reached for the knob. Hesitated.
The door swung open and Parker’s massive, hot-headed brother, Brock, filled the doorframe. His brown eyes blazed and his reddened face was scrunched into a tight-lipped smile of anticipation and hate. He clutched Eli by the knot of his tie and yanked him inside.
The door slammed shut behind him.
Eli’s first thought was that he’d been pulled into a men’s locker room. The small, stuffy office smelled of piss and sweat and liquor. He registered four bodies – all male, all in black tuxedos.
Shit, he thought.
Everything that came next happened very, very fast.
PART TWO
Red Night
WHEN ELI WAS three years old, he disappeared from his bed.
Upon making this discovery, his mother, Francis, ran screaming through the house, out into the yard. “Eli!” she called, the sound a tinny squeak swallowed amongst the billion acres of the earth, the great turning wheel of endless dimensions, the infinite reaches of space. “Oh, my dear God! Eli!”
She found Eli’s father, John, working the crop, and frantically informed him of their son’s disappearance.
Eli’s parents spent the remainder of the morning searching their property but found no trace of their son. After a few hours, they called on neighbors to help them search. Soon thereafter, they called the police.
As afternoon turned into evening, John overhead some of the officers on a coffee break amidst the day-long search. They spoke in hushed tones about the blood moon of the night before, that rare blood-red tinting caused by a lunar eclipse. They shared the strange calls they’d received over the previous twenty-four hours: dogs going berserk and attacking their owners; livestock dropping dead so suddenly that farmers feared poisoning; a multiple homicide – the first one in more than twenty years in Gehenna County – that involved a mother drowning her three children, one-by-one, in the small pond behind their home.
John didn’t want to hear such things, didn’t take stock in some nonsense of a blood moon any more than he did vampires and werewolves. Despite his rejection of such ideas however, his pulse quickened and his skin grew cold as he left the officers to their coffee and bizarre conversation. Under a blackened sky, he shut out the voices and continued to search for his only son.
It was near midnight—more than twenty-four hours since the child was last seen—when one of the officers, while relieving himself along a nearby tree-line, heard what he swore were the dampened sobs of a child.
Led by Eli’s parents, a corps of volunteers and six officers walked into the trees. Flashlights ignited the dark forest, sent ground critters scurrying for cover, erased shadows. They all heard it now – the unmistakable sound of a child – and John tried to keep Francis quiet as they walked deeper. Her wailing and constant beckoning bordered on a fractured mind, and it wasn’t until the Sheriff himself took her by the shoulders and whispered frantically into her ear that she quieted to an oft-choked whimper.
They found Eli at the bottom of an old well, a forgotten, beaten-down shaft that had been covered with planks, now rotted through. The circle of stone marking its entrance was thick with Hosta leaves, ivy and wild ginger so dense they would have likely never seen it – never been aware of its existence – were it not for the child’s complaining cries of hunger and cold.
They lowered John by rope (a span of nearly thirty feet) to fish out his boy.
Later, John would comment that when he looked up from the bottom of that well, clutching his cold, wailing child to his chest, he was struck at how the faraway moon seemed to look back from the well’s opening, a bright white pupil centered within an ink-black eye, and how glad he was to see it pale milk instead of the fiery red from the previous night.
Although found (inexplicably) naked, and half-sunken into the soft muck at the base of the well’s chute, Eli showed no signs of injury or long-term physical complaints.
His mother, however, never recovered.
Francis grew more anxious and fretful around her baby boy as the weeks passed. There were rumors she’d lost part of her mind, broken by the shock of the odd disappearance (and even odder reappearance) of the child. It was whispered she did not believe the child hers, that her boy had been taken away and replaced by another, the very one found in the bottom of the well that dreary night. John did his best to alleviate his wife’s paranoid conclusions, but despite his tearful protestations he was unable to convince her otherwise.
Then, early one chilled morning, months after the incident, John woke to find both Francis and Eli gone. Panicked, he searched the home’s immediate surroundings, and by the grace of God found them both.
She had taken him to the creek.
Her full weight was upon his back. His limbs thrashed in the ice-cold water’s flow, his face completely submerged. John ran at her screaming a cry of horror and hate. He struck her head brutally with a clenched fist and pushed her off his child. He scooped the coughing and red-faced boy into his arms and ran for the house. Without hesitation, he called the police.
The Sheriff found Francis where John had left her, babbling and glassy-eyed with shock beside the creek, her eyes wide and distant with the loss of reason. A purple knob swelled at her brow where her husband had struck her.
Francis was hospitalized and heavily medicated, but did not survive the week. It was never discovered how she acquired the rusted razorblade she used to open her wrists and slice the carotid artery in her neck.
They found her lying in her bed, the thin mattress heavy with blood, the surrounding linoleum floor a red pool that stretched and channeled into thin, branching limbs, of which one had crept under the door leading to the hallway, where it was spotted by a nurse doing rounds.
Eli’s father never discussed the incident of the well – or his wife’s tragic suicide – with his son. He told him only that his mother had passed of a sudden illness and prayed their friends and neighbors would keep his family’s dark history to themselves.
And so, as a child, Eli never knew different than a fictitious version of his past, and therefore never considered himself to be anything other than the son of a widowed farmer, growing up among crops in the heart of the Midwestern United States. He never considered himself unusual in any way. As anything other than human.
Not even when he performed miracles.
