On the Third Day Read online

  Norman, despite many promises to replace them and to take better care of the car, never made a move to resolve the situation. For him it was easier to keep the car closer to the door. That also meant it was closer to his computer, his bed, and the kitchen, the only three things he cared about.

  Gladys turned to the front door and saw it was already closing behind her son. With a heavy sigh of resignation, she started up the walk to her front steps. She knew Norman would be stopping off in the kitchen on his way to his room and his computer. She would be free to make coffee and take a rest in the living room.

  As she closed the door behind her, she hear the door to Norman’s room slam closed. The pictures on the wall in the hallway shivered with the impact, and Gladys frowned. As she made her way slowly down the hall, she straightened each frame carefully. She’d have to say something to Norman, but she dreaded the confrontation. He was too destructive, and she knew that if he continued down the path he had chosen, she was going to have to find a way to get him out of her house. It was a simple matter of survival. If he stayed and continued as he was, she was certain she’d hit him with a frying pan, or a broom, and she was too old to go to prison.

  It didn’t take Gladys long to forget about her recalcitrant son. By the time the hallway was back in order and she reached the kitchen her thoughts were back on San Marcos, and on Father Thomas. These thoughts banished Norman from her mind, and soon she had hot coffee in hand and was bustling about the kitchen, putting together the ingredients for a pair of casseroles. One she would bake and leave to cool for Norman and herself, the other she’d cover carefully in foil and take back to San Marcos for Father Thomas. God knew that if she didn’t, he’d die of malnutrition.

  Gladys smiled at the thought. She imagined his protests, and the exaggerated way he’d rub his stomach, pull the front of his trousers taut against his slim form and complain of becoming fat. She didn’t hear the high-pitched whine of Norman’s modem connecting with the Internet, or the soft whoosh of his DVD drive door closing. They lived in separate worlds.

  * * *

  Norman Multinerry’s room was a dark, cavernous place. It was large, his father had insured that each of them had plenty of room to live comfortably, and it had two windows, one overlooking the lawn to the side, and the other over the driveway and the street beyond. Norman covered them with blinds and dark curtains. Only a trickle of light leaked in around the edges.

  The three bulbs in his overhead light had burned out long before. The only illumination remaining in the room was a small fluorescent lamp on the top shelf of his computer desk. The light from this didn’t reach the corners or the far walls, but that suited Norman fine. Those areas were cluttered with discarded laundry, food containers, and assorted cartons full of everything he’d ever owned.

  Norman still had the toys he’d been given as a child. He still had his comic books, lined neatly in cardboard cartons, each issue tucked into a plastic sleeve with a cardboard backing to keep them stiff and safe. He still had the entire series of Hardy Boys mysteries and most of the “How and Why” series for young adults.

  Norman almost never read anything that wasn’t posted on the Internet, but prior to that he’d devoured books so rapidly that he’d had to give up going to his school library and pedal his bike down to the Main Branch library in downtown Lavender to keep himself in words. He’d worn out several library cards over the years, and the librarians knew him by name.

  His parents encouraged the reading, though “Big Bob” would undoubtedly have liked to see Norman engaged in a few more outdoor activities, like sports, or fishing. Norman had tried. He’d liked spending time with his father, but was never able to find the draw in skewering worms with a hook, or hiking around out in the woods without a television. Then his father died, and Norman retreated further.

  School had been a nightmare of epic proportion. Other boys picked on him for knowing all the answers in class and not playing football. Girls picked on him for being slightly overweight, for his acne. Even the teachers weren’t fond of him because of the way he looked at the floor when he talked to them and seemed distracted during their lectures.

  Norman wasn’t really inattentive. He was bored. He’d read most of his High School texts within a week or so of acquiring them, filed away the information, and had a hard time concentrating when the teachers went back over and over that same material for the benefit of his denser classmates. The walls went up, hard, fast, and solid.

  His mother tried to draw him out, but they had even less in common than Norman and “Big Bob”. Norman’s mother thought that hanging out in the rectory of the Cathedral at San Marcos and fawning over the priest was top notch entertainment. She hadn’t missed a mass at San Marcos in all the years of Norman’s life, other than the one year the family had taken a week to go to Disney Land, and even then, when Sunday rolled around, she’d looked uncomfortable, as if being there and having fun with her son, and her husband, was some kind of sin.

  Norman resented it all. She was his mother, after all. She was supposed to take care of him, to spend time with him and cook for him. He knew, of course, that he was too old to really expect this, but it changed nothing. He knew no other way to live, and the longer he spent locked in his room with nothing but his computer and a few dozen people he didn’t even know by their real names as company, the less prepared he felt to face any other reality.

  Sometimes he wished the Cathedral would just fall off that damn cliff like it always seemed it might. All it would take would be one good earthquake. If it weren’t for that church, his mother would have nowhere else to go, and he’d have her to himself. She wasn’t good company, but when she was home she cooked, and she kept his clothes reasonably clean. Lately the church had stolen her away so often, and for such lengths of time, that Norman wasn’t sure how he’d survive.

  Once he was safely inside his room, and the door was closed behind him, he fished the DVD he’d taken from Father Thomas’ office out of his pocket. He didn’t know what made him want to take it, but now that he had he was eager to find out what he’d gotten. His mind whirled with possibilities. It was marked confidential, and it had some very impressive looking seals on the envelope.

  Norman read the news feeds. He knew about all the recent scandals in the church. Hell, the DVD might have secret information about child molesters, or sensitivity training for priests. It could be almost anything, and one thing Norman knew from his time on line, “almost anything” was all that was required to make a thing valuable.

  He checked his old books and comics on eBay regularly to watch the fluctuation of their value. He would never have thought of selling them – they were his. His mother gave him money when he needed it. He drove her car, ate her food, and all he had to do to keep her from complaining too much was to drive her to and from the church and not leave the toilet seat up.

  Norman pressed the button to open the DVD drive. He slit the seal on the envelope and carefully slid the DVD out onto the palm of one hand. He handled the disc carefully, as he did everything he owned. His toys still lined the shelves in the closet, carefully pressed back into their original boxes each time he finished with them. If the boxes tore, he taped or glued them back together. His records and tapes were catalogued and pristine, and the gleaming lines of CD cases on the shelf lining the wall beside his desk held one of the most pristine sets of digital music, movies and files in existence. Norman had all the time in the world, and he was careful.

  He slid the disc into place and closed the drive door, turning his attention to the screen. The drive spun up, making a noise like a turbine as it ran through speed checks, then the familiar theatrical screen image opened, and Norman sat back to watch. He had watched a lot of movies this way, kicked back in his leather office chair. He had stacks of DVDs lined up against the wall by his door. One stack was going out to the library, the other was in from the library, and the third were those he’d either bought from discount bins, or off the Internet, or tha
t he’d talked his mother out of on birthdays and Christmas. This stack was smaller than the other two. Norman liked to watch movies, but he didn’t like to watch them more than once.

  It was like school. Once he’d seen a film he knew it. All of it. He knew the dialogue, and he knew the images. He knew every scene by heart and could have recited them if anyone had ever bothered to ask. Norman had always remembered things. No one knew it – he didn’t want anyone thinking he was more of a freak than they already did – but it was a good secret to have. It opened doors, sometimes, and allowed him to squeak by on very minimal effort.

  Even his mother didn’t know. She thought he was – if not quite stupid – not the brightest bulb in the pack. Despite knowing the material, his grades had never been stellar. Good grades in school required participation, which required interaction, which also required him to pay attention enough to know where in the material the rest of the class might be at any given time. Learning the material was no problem, and passing exams was a breeze, but the rest of what made up his grades suffered, and the “gift” was lost in the shuffle. Norman was careful to keep it that way. He liked to think of it as his secret weapon – the super power no one could know about. Like Clark Kent, Norman Multinerry had a secret identity.

  The file began to play, and Norman sat up. He nearly clicked the stop button when he saw what it was. It was San Marcos, and the priest, Father Thomas. Norman hated Father Thomas more than he hated anyone else on the planet. Before Father Thomas came to San Marcos, Norman’s mother had spent most of her time at home. She hadn’t cared for the Bishop, what was his name – Michaels? The guy was too full of himself. Gladys Multinerry would never have said that, at least not to Norman, but he knew. He saw it in her eyes.

  Now all he saw was the kind of adoration she’d once lavished only on her own son directed full strength on the skinny priest. She cooked for the guy, and when something had happened and Father Thomas was stuck in bed, she’d stayed at the church for almost a week. During that time Norman had come to hate Father Thomas with a passion only equaled by his hatred of peanut butter and jelly, which was what he’d lived on while waiting for his mother to come home.

  Norman’s hand hovered over his mouse, but before he was able to click the mouse button, something strange happened. The people in the pews began to sway. Norman never attended mass. He had ceased being a practicing Catholic the day “Big Bob” determined he was old enough to decide for himself, and had never gone back. Still, he remembered. He remembered everything. Norman even remembered the liturgy, both the part of the priest and the response of the congregation. If he had been able to speak in front of more than one person at a time, he could have performed the mass himself from memory.

  In all the years of his childhood – in all the times he’d seen the old Bishop perform the mass, and Norman remembered each, even those where the man had stumbled over the words, or something had gone wrong, no one had ever swayed in their seat. They had sat, quiet and respectful, inspecting one another’s Sunday clothing and new hats and saving all of it up for the after Mass gossip sessions. Children had been cuffed if they so much as squirmed in their seats.

  Norman pulled his hand back, leaned back in his chair again, and watched. He knew the words well enough, but at least it was a different voice. He saw why his mother liked this priest better. He was younger, and he didn’t stare out over the tops of everyone’s heads as if he was somehow better than they were. That was how the Bishop had done it. He seemed to think he was talking with God, alone, and that the rest of the parish was merely an ornament he could show off, a celestial conversation piece.

  This priest, Father Thomas, was different, but there was still something wrong about what Norman was watching. Baptists swayed in their pews and sang and clapped their hands. Norman had even seen movies where they shook snakes around in the air and rolled on the floor, babbling nonsense in foreign languages. These were things he’d read about and seen, but never experienced, because in the Diocese of San Valencez, in the Cathedral of San Marcos by the sea, Christians were quiet and respectful. They were thinking about their confessions, trying to decide how much to reveal, and how much to hold back, how much hotter the flames of hell would be if Father Thomas didn’t know they’d slept with their secretary or run over their neighbor’s dog and said nothing. They were thinking about jobs and families, Sunday dinner and in a few isolated cases, like that of Norman’s mother, they prepared themselves to accept communion.

  They didn’t dance or sing, but here it was on his computer screen. He watched as the scene unfolded. He adjusted the sound twice on the speakers of his computer sound system to keep the volume of the sound from carrying beyond his door. The priest had found some way to amplify his voice without an obvious microphone…or?

  Norman watched carefully. He saw his mother near the front. She stood and was actually trying to get out to the aisle, despite the fact that they were in the middle of the service. No one seemed bothered by it, but neither did they make it easy for her. Then she was free, standing alone in the center aisle of the cathedral. She raised her arm, pointed at the priest, and screamed.

  Norman reached out quickly and lowered the volume on his speakers again. The scream had been too loud. His brow was coated in sweat. He was hunched over so tightly that the tension made his stomach hurt. The priest was bleeding now. His arms were raised, like he was on a cross or something, but he was still speaking, and his voice was still too loud.

  It reminded Norman of scenes in some horror movies he’d seen. He remembered them all, of course, names, actors, actresses and plots. Even as he watched the strange tableau unwind on his computer monitor his mind sorted them out, pulled out legends and rituals, trying to explain what he was seeing. He didn’t doubt that it was real. He had known his mother all his life, and she could no more have acted this scene than she could pole-vault.

  He hadn’t seen anything in the news about it, though. He remembered that she had seemed shaken the previous Easter, but had never questioned her about it. It was right after that she stayed in the rectory for a while. All Norman recalled of that time was peanut butter and jelly, and anger. He blamed the church for his dirty laundry, bad food, and a fight with his mother that lasted nearly two months. He remembered that, too. Now he wished he’d asked what had happened.

  The mass neared completion. There was a lot of blood, more than there should have been. Even in the movies, where reality was a far-away notion that was largely ignored, they would not have tried to make people believe one body could hold so much.

  A knock sounded on his door, and Norman spun quickly. The door swung slowly open.

  “Norman?”

  His mother’s voice was cautious. She always knocked before she entered – right before. She’d walked in on him one day and found him with his pants around his knees and a very naked girl on the computer screen. Another thing he remembered was her face at that moment. Disbelief was too mild a word, and shock didn’t cover it. Norman was sure that she had relived the moment herself in nightmares. He’d be willing to bet his mother had agonized over it, not told the Father at confession, and then felt the guilt build, day after day, as she tried to convince herself it was a normal, natural thing, and that she was not the one who had done it, and that it didn’t need to be confessed, all the time believing she would miss her trip to the pearly gates because she’d forgotten to knock on her son’s door.

  Norman reached for the mouse, scrambled it into position, and managed to click another icon. He didn’t know what he’d clicked, and didn’t care. If the program would open quickly enough it would hide the screen. That was all that mattered.

  His mother stepped up behind him, and Norman spun quickly to face her. He couldn’t tell what she might have seen. She stood, staring over his shoulder in disbelief, and his face went white.

  “What is it mother?” He asked. He forced the sudden, irrational fear that always accompanied her “catching him” at something aside and fro
wned. “You know I like you to knock AND wait for me to answer before you come in.”

  She snapped her gaze away from his computer screen and met his eyes. She very carefully didn’t look back at the screen.

  “I need you to take me back by the church this evening,” she said, her voice stiff. “I want to drop off a casserole for Father Thomas.”

  Norman blinked at her. He desperately wanted to spin and look at the screen, to see what horrible gory panorama was sprawled across his screen, but since she wasn’t saying anything about it, he couldn’t. He had to pretend he knew exactly what was there, and wished to God that he did. What icon had he hit?

  “Jesus, mother, we were just there.”

  “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” she replied automatically. “It won’t take long. “

  Norman shrugged his best “Whatever” shrug and nodded.

  “Let me know when you need to go.”

  Gladys Multinerry nodded to her son and turned quickly, carefully avoiding any angle that would bring her eyes in contact with the filth she’d seen on her son’s computer screen. She muttered under her breath, and Norman suspected it was “Our Fathers,” or “Hail Mary’s” in his behalf. He held his tongue, and a moment later he heard the solid click as his door swung closed.

  He whipped around and stared at the screen.

  What met his gaze stunned him. The screen was covered in playing cards, laid out in a line for Solitaire. The problem was, smiling, absolutely naked women covered the backs of each card that lay face down. Norman stared a moment longer, and then burst into laughter that turned very quickly to near hysteria.

  What would he have done if his mother had caught him looking at the DVD of the Easter Mass? There was only one way he could have come by the recording, and there was no doubt in his mind that she would have taken the DVD, and probably Norman himself, if he didn’t want to be cast out alone in the street, directly back to the source. He took a quick breath, checked his watch, and then set to work. Even if she cooked using the Microwave, which she never did, his mother could not bet ready to go back to the church for at least another hour.