AS ELI GREW older, his father often left him in the care of the neighboring Foster family, where he was watched over while becoming fast playmates with their youngest daughter, Carrie, who was of the same age.
Years later, when Carrie and Eli were in grade school, Mr. Foster suffered a savage heart attack that killed him faster than the swipe of a scythe, leaving both children now semi-orphaned and even more reliant on the other’s friendship.
Gradually, for no reason either of them could put a clean finger on, Eli became more and more of an outcast. Despite his father’s efforts of secrecy, rumors ran rampant about the strange disappearance on the night of the blood moon, and Eli’s awkward demeanor and daydreaming manner left him open for attack from kids, gossip from adults. Some thought him a changeling, or a demon. Others suggested he was an alien from outer space.
Eli and Carrie would often laugh at the rumors, although Carrie knew, deep-down, that they deeply affected her best and closest friend.
“What would they call me if they knew the things I could do?” he said one day, and although he said it lightly, Carrie felt a rise of panic in her chest.
She clutched at him, stared deep into his eyes. “You musn’t Eli,” she said sternly. “You musn’t ever. Not ever. That’s between us, understand? Always.”
He’d nodded and smiled in his melancholy way. His eyes left hers, found the horizon. “You don’t think I’m any of those things, right?”
“What, like an alien?” she said, then kissed him quickly on the cheek, smoothed his thick wild hair. “Nah, if anything you’re an angel, sent here to protect me.”
“A guardian angel,” he said, brightening. “I like that.”
She took his hand and pulled him toward home, stepping through the field’s high grass toward a dripping red sun. The sweet powdery smell of grain filled the air. She carefully pulled burdock burrs from her jeans as they went, brushed brown straw from his hair.
“That’s right, blue eyes,” she said, “and don’t ever forget it.”
PART THREE
Green Eye
A TERRIBLE SCREAM split the air.
Carrie was huddled in the nursery with Mother, Nana, and her two bridesmaids. A rectangular Plexiglas window – cut into the wall below a speaker used to relay the sermon for mothers soothing their bawling infants – allowed her to see into the chapel. Organ music had just begun to play, signaling the guests to their seats (and Carrie’s entrance), when the horrible scream rang out.
Carrie leapt from her chair at the sound and flattened her face against the narrow strip of clear plastic, searching for the source. Through the scratched pane she noticed that a small contingent of guests had left the pews and gathered along the large windows just outside her field of vision. The scream had come from someone in that area – she couldn’t tell who – but the faces appeared to be focused on something outside.
Frustrated, she turned around, as if to follow the gazes, but instead of windows she saw nothing but a scuffed white wall filled with pinned shapes of cardboard flowers, photographs of baby faces glued to their centers, the tiny bald heads sprouting cartoonish petals of gold, red and blue.
“What’s happening?” her mother asked, already at the door leading to the foyer, where a tuxedoed usher would momentarily be waiting to escort her out.
“I don’t know… I can’t see,” Carrie said, and spun to look once more into the chapel, craning her neck as if it might expose a wider view of the scene. More people were standing now, moving with purpose toward the east-facing windows. Carrie thought a few of them looked alarmed. Despite the commotion, she saw no sign of Parker or Brock at the front of the chapel. Just a bemused-looking Pastor Willard.
“They should be standing up there by now,” she said quietly, and watched as the pastor – why does he look so nervous? she thought – eyeballed his watch, then left the altar to step down toward the pews, speaking hurriedly to the guests.
Carrie turned away from the window, confused and concerned, and saw all four women looking at her with expressions rooted in fear. “Something’s wrong,” she told them.
Her mother’s crease-worried face suddenly smoothed as if frozen, a hardness that emptied the emotions from her features and made her appear as marble. Carrie noticed Trish take half a step away from her. Beware a mother’s love, Carrie thought.
“Stay here,” her mother said sternly. Carrie felt her protective force, her desire to be sure nothing ruined her daughter’s special day, and was comforted at having such a stalwart ally. But Carrie also wondered what, exactly, was going on. What sort of incident was transpiring outside the church, and would the severity of her mother’s ire be any sort of hindrance to its inevitable occurrence?
“Now you girls just relax, this is no time to be fussy,” Nana said, sitting in a plastic blue chair that was designed for children rather than eighty-three-year-old women. She smoothed her cream dress over her thin knees and pursed her lips. “No reason for fussiness,” she reiterated quietly, as if soothing her own nerves as well as those of the young bridal party.
Beth pulled Carrie’s arm, offered her most disarming smile. “Whatever’s going on, just know I love you, and that I’m really happy for you and Parker.” Beth gave her a quick hug, then held her at arm’s length, eyes beaming confidence. “Don’t you worry. Everything is going to be fine.”
Carrie smiled back, was about to say something in return, something equally assuring, a well-worn platitude… when the sound of an air siren rose in the distance.
The high-pitched whine carried across the fields and through the thin white walls of the church to caress the skin of those inside with icy fingers, to flood their hearts and minds with black fear.
“Oh no,” Carrie said. She gave Beth’s hand a squeeze, then a tug. “Come on!”
Carrie opened the door leading to the shared bathroom, pulling Beth behind her. They ran across the pale porcelain tiles and back into the vestry. They raced to the window, stared in awe at the scene forming outside.
Panting, Trish burst into the room just behind them. “What the hell is it?”
Carrie stared at the mountain of coal-black clouds suffocating the horizon. The entire sky had turned a spearmint green. Through a gaping hole along the roof of the angry cloud-cover, a bright aqua light shone through like a spotlight breaching the surface of the sea, the great eye of an alien god opening within the face of the storm.
As if coming awake.
As if coming alive.
ELI KNEW HE was in deep trouble. Even worse, he’d walked right into it. He’d been fooled by fools and he should have known better.
Parker had hated him for years, and had told him repeatedly, using different means of cruelty and violence, to keep away from Carrie. But now that the two of them were getting married, Eli had figured – with grave miscalculation – that Parker would move on from his childish paranoia, his obsession, with Eli and Carrie’s friendship.
Because that’s all it is, he thought, whether I like it or not.
Brock grabbed Eli’s shoulders and shoved him into the seat facing the pastor’s desk. Behind the desk, fingers folded as if preparing to lecture a naughty schoolboy, was a sly-looking, and somewhat intoxicated, Parker.
“Eliiii,” he said dramatically, extending the name comically, almost amiably, as if they were old pals and Eli had just walked into the same bar Parker had designated as his evening’s watering hole. “Eli Eli Eli…” he went on, slightly slurring the “L” sounds, and sounding – to Eli’s ears – less amiable with each repetition of the name. “What… the fuck… are you doing here, boy?” Parker leaned forward, crossed his arms on the desktop, and grinned like a shark. “I mean… I know you and Carrie are friends from kindergarten and shit, but I thought… hell, man, I thought you and I had an understanding.”
Without warning or provocation, Brock punched the back of Eli’s head with a knotted fist. White light popped inside his skull, but he gripped the worn wooden arms of the old chair tightly and said nothing. One of the others laughed, and Eli had to fight against rolling his eyes at their sycophancy. Parker stood, strolled magnanimously around the desk.
“I mean, shit man… last time we had this chat it ended with you on the ground sucking piss-water in the alley behind Tom’s bar, remember? God, that was just a few months ago, too. How could you forget that chat, Eli? I know you’re dumb, boy…” Parker settled himself, ass pressed against the desk, his wrinkled black cummerbund not quite covering the beginnings of a beer paunch at his waist. He bent over and put a firm hand on Eli’s shoulder. “But I didn’t think you were stupid.”
Surprising everyone, perhaps himself most of all, Eli sprang up, inadvertently connecting the crown of his head with Parker’s nose. There was a loud crack as Parker’s head snapped backward as if yanked from behind. Eli twisted and saw Brock coming at him, a mad bull in a very small china shop. In his peripheral vision, he saw the other two assholes squeeze their hands into tight fists but stand firm, at least for the moment. Behind him he could hear muffled cursing, as if Parker was screaming through clenched teeth and tight lips. Eli dared a split-second glance, saw with some satisfaction that the groom was stumbling backward, a hand pressed tightly to his face. Blood spilled down his wrist, soiled the cuff of his pressed, white dress shirt.
