Voices in the Wilderness

"Out, out!" His father, dark haired and face unflinching, gave him a shove. "You do not belong here anymore. You have overstayed your welcome." You are unwanted; you cannot remain. You must out, away. Fly, carrion bird. Fly, ravenous demon. The treacherous voices echoed in his head as he stumbled away. The sun shone far too bright for this darkness. But that wouldn't last for long.

"Hey, lookit here." Shelby pulled a small book from her enormous sweatshirt jacket. "The Black Man's little book." She laughed, but Corey reached out a hand and took it from her.

"Where'd you get this?" he asked.

"Found it at that old bookstore on Independence. Copped it. D'you like it?" She grabbed his arm, tried to spark some response. Corey brushed his fingers against the black oiled cover and opened it to the first page. She sat down beside him and watched over his shoulder as he turned through it.

The ink was a rich black. There were intricate knots around the edges of each page. They were almost Celtic, except sharper, more alive. Listed on some pages were names. Robert Charles. Larry Portanova. Ordinary names, and famous names. Keith Richards. Francisco Franco. Sometimes there would be a cluster around a famous event, the Dresden bombing or the revolution in St. Petersburg. On these pages, haunting ink sketches of faces peered from every corner, melting into each other and almost obscuring the words.

"I think it was in some collector's Forty Licks box, or something."

"It's really cool."

"You can have it, if you want. It's not like it cost me anything." She laughed again. "Hey, are you coming to the Coven tonight?"

"Oh, come on, why do you call it that? It's nothing to do with witchcraft. Just a bunch of drugged-up idiots."

"You can't deny me forever, Corey," she told him. "I've been working on you for months. You're coming one of these days, whether you like it or not." The gleam in her eye remained entirely innocent and naive, as much as she tried to make it devilish. Corey scoffed inwardly.

"Maybe next time."

Corey's father came into the room. "You weren't paying attention in church today, Corey."

"Yeah?" Corey didn't turn, but kept gazing into the cobwebbed corner behind his bed.

"Is something the matter? Would you like to talk?"

Corey didn't say anything.

"Corey, if something's wrong, I'd like to help."

"Can you?" The note of challenge rang unsubtle in his voice.

"I'll try."

Corey snorted and looked away.

"What were you writing?"

"Want to see?" Corey handed his father the sketch pad he held in his hands. Written on the page were the words, I want out I want out I WANT OUT IWANTOUT.

"That's not something to joke about, Corey."

"It's not meant to be," he replied, and walked out without a backwards glance.

Let me introduce myself, he shouted. Rolling, tumbling, cascading against chords. Pleased to meet you. The darkness rippled and folded in on itself, a schizophrenic kaleidoscope. Tell me, what's my name? The sharp silence pounded in the half-rest. Tell me. One knee bashed against the ground as he toppled into his desk. C'mon, baby, what's my name? Corey's mind reeled and spun half-dreaming.

Shelby and Corey laid in her room on their stomachs reading a book. It was a heavy hardcover and as she read Shelby traced her finger against the upraised letters on the front. She finished the page well before Corey, and gazed over at him.

"Tell me a story, Corey." She grabbed the book and closed it over his fingers. He looked up slowly and stretched.

"Well, have I ever told you about the time my parents left me at the grocery store?"

"Yeah, once or twice."

"This time it'll be different." And he began telling it in his slow, measured cadence that rewrote reality as it meandered on, like a needle threading through a torn cloth to mend it.

Corey bought a marked-down Mick Jagger poster with a small rip in the corner. When he was seen taking it through the front door, his father sent him straight back out. "I won't have it in my house," he said firmly.

What it came down to, Corey knew, was that none of them knew the least bit about the occult. They all came from at least nominally religious families who clustered around their church in a small suburb outside San Antonio. But, he figured, if Satan existed he would come to you if you called. That's why Corey showed up at Shelby's door one November evening with a bundle of white tapers and a lighter, the small black book tucked away in a pocket.

"Follow me," was all he said, and she came. She always did, no matter how crazy his ideas were.

They drove north while the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. Finally they reached Black Key Canyon, and Corey pulled the car onto the shoulder of the winding dirt road. They waited in the car and talked, among other things, until 2 in the morning, which Corey took to be a fortuitous hour. He pulled out the candles and lit them.

They walked in silence from the car into the mouth of the canyon. The walls gradually pulled in so close that the candles were bright enough to see by. At its narrowest point half a mile back, there was a hairpin turn that formed an enclosed space with a ledge overhead. The air was completely still. Every other time Corey had been there, a constant wind had blown out of the canyon. Not this time. This time the air was dead as a burning August afternoon, and as cold as midwinter's eve.

He sat down, then gestured for Shelby to do the same. They placed the candles between them and waited.

"A demon has him," noted his grandmother, coming into the hallway. His father shot her a sharp look.

“A demon may only enter if invited,” he said. He turned to Corey. “Come, son. Pray with me.” Hand in hand, father and son knelt down and prayed until morning.

Corey was fourteen, but he had gone frightened into his parents' room to tell them that he couldn't sleep, and could they please make the voices be quiet. It was the first time he heard the multitudes within him. He couldn't understand them; he feared that one day he might.

Corey's father always prayed with a full voice, the one that always attracted the gaze of neighborhood women when he spoke the closing prayer on Sundays. It rose in crescendos and sweat beaded his cheeks; it fell into depths and he pleaded with God to give his son peace. It filled Corey's head until he collapsed in exhaustion, and still his father prayed.

The following night in Corey's dreams, the entire family came in front of him, roused by several echoing phone calls from his father, and he reacted to each one in turn. His dad stood accusing. "But dad, they're just talking. I don't even know what they're saying." His grandmother shied away as he faced her. "It's just me, Grandma. Don't run from me." His little brother looked at him with round eyes. "C'mon, Sam. I'll tell you a story." They surrounded him with arms reaching and faces tearful.

"The King is dead, the King is dead. What does Scheherazade do now?" Corey muttered to himself, walking in circles. He turned his desk lamp on, off, on and left it. He tapped his fingers against the metal bed frame. He made a brief but determined walk to the door, but shied away uncertainly when he reached it. He sat down in front of his desk and placed his chin on it.

After resting there for a moment, he took a deep deciding breath. He sat straight up and closed his eyes. He let his arms go limp and hang listless by his sides and he began to listen. The room was entirely silent, he knew, but the dull ever-present voices lay at the bottom of the well of silence. Slowly, hand over hand, he raised them up.

They crashed over one another, and he could pick up brief snatches of speech — single words only. Clutch — can't — crawling — ghost — isn't — to — sorrow — of — red — but the words kept rushing by and nothing came clearer and Corey slumped back down into exhaustion.

The words were more coherent this time, up from the depths of his mind. Yet still the singular voice eluded him. The short sentences and fragments that he caught were still nonsense; he couldn't follow the thread of a single speaker for longer than a few seconds.

Shelby's family got back from their long summer's trip, and Corey was at her door instantly.

"I can't make sense of it, Shelby. It's inside me and I don't know what it is. Where do they come from, what do they—. You say go to a shrink, my parents say pray, some people take meds, but I can't do any of that. It's part of me. I don't know how I can just, I don't know, overturn the tables and throw it out of the temple."

"There's a great metaphor. Bet your parents would like it."

"Fuck my parents. They don't know anything."

"Come tonight. Maybe you'll learn something."

"There's nothing there to be learned. You know that."

"You don't."

So he came.

Corey lay at the top of the stairs as his parents voices climbed up to him. The murmur in his head turned restlessly at the bottom of the well, but he paid it no more attention than the ticking of a clock.

"He's our son, Laura. We have a duty to do by him."

"Sam is our son, too."

"I know."

"Corey wants to rebel, Charles. He wants you to react; you know how much he tests you. He doesn't-- he doesn't care about this family anymore. And we have-- it's our duty to hold it together."

"How can I choose between my sons, Laura? How?"

"He's eighteen. He's old enough to be responsible for his own actions."

Corey climbed to his feet and walked back to his room, closing it quietly behind him.

Corey always attended the crack of dawn service with his parents on Sundays. Afterwards, he went downtown with Shelby, whose family attended the second service. They bought black currant ice cream, or loitered in the park and kept timid children away from the swing set. But Corey couldn't find Shelby anywhere today. When he knocked on her door after dinner that night and asked where she had been, she answered that she had decided to humor her mum and dad and go to church for once.

"What did you think of the sermon?" Corey asked.

"It was utter bullshit," she answered, and all was good.

Corey's younger brother Sam lived in the worlds Corey spun for him every afternoon. "I met a girl named Kendra today," Sam would say, and suddenly raven-haired Kendra would appear in Corey's story. It didn't matter that Kendra had blond hair and was short, in Sam's mind she would have dark hair for as long as he remembered the story.

"And Kendra took one look at the devil and he vanished, poof! just like that. But she remembered their bargain, and even though it hadn't yet come to pass, she knew that—"

"What's this about devil's bargains?" Corey's father appeared in the room. There was a dangerous light in his eyes. "I warned you—don't fill your brother's head with this wickedness."

"Everyone bargains with the devil."

"And Jesus said to him, 'Away from me, Satan! For it is written: "Worship the Lord your God and serve him only." ' "

"Different devil," said Corey in a low voice. And he knew what must come next.

"Follow me," said Corey, 12 years old. Shelby ran along behind him past a broken bottle graveyard, through a break in a chain link fence and into an aged barn whose slatted roof sagged in the middle, bowed so low that its forehead brushed the ground. They sat cross-legged next to each other, and Corey opened his mouth and began to tell a story. It was stolen, for the most part, from what he could remember of a Robin Hood collection he lost when he was ten. Something about leeches, but he knew nothing about their medical use. They suck Robin dry. Shelby gathered dandelion seeds and piled them on the packed earth at the center of the barn. With each handful, the story gathered reality.

"Man, it's freezing out here. Maybe we should go home, cause nothing's gonna happen." Shelby stirred, and began to get up from the dusty ground.

"Stop." Corey said.

The wind began to blow in the canyon, and goose bumps raced across his arms. The darkness around them roiled at the edges of his vision, and the voices in the back of his head stirred, then jumped to a peak. A perfect line of speech rang out, only a faint echo in the back of the cacophony but as loud to Corey as if the surrounding darkness had spoken directly into his ear. Shelby was sitting right across from him, her eyes closed once again. His gaze lingered on the curve of her neck, slid up to the lock of hair curling beneath her ear. The candles grew dim and red, and Shelby was lost from sight. Corey's arms tensed and he clutched at his shoelaces. His eyes rolled briefly, then his vision cleared and everything stood in sharp contrast. The starlight illuminated every pebble on the ground, every line on Shelby's face, every fold of her clothing.

"Shut up, damn it!" Corey finally burst out. The class was torn from their concentration, and Shelby looked quickly over from a desk nearby. It was the final week of their sophomore year of high school.

"Are you all right, Corey? Why don't you go to the nurse's office. You can finish the test during lunch if you feel...." The teacher's brows drew together, and she faltered. She waited for Corey to respond.

"No, I'll be fine." He looked savagely back at his test and finished up his response to short essay number four: "Discuss the three major ethnic groups in post-Reconquista Spain, and how the Inquisition may have served as a reaction to the social unease and conflict between these parties."

Corey knocked at Shelby's front door. His hair was twisted in knots, and he was pale from the cold. He had angry red scrapes all over his ankles from running through a brambly park at midnight to stay warm. "What happened?" she asked, as she let him inside.

"My dad kicked me out." Thankfully, she didn't try to look surprised. Over tea, they talked irrelevancies until it grew dark again.

"You remember that night at Black Key Canyon?" Corey asks.

Shelby nodded. "It was kinda boring. Pretty, but boring. I wish something had happened."

"Something did."

She looked doubtful.

"I heard voices."

"Corey, you always hear voices."

He looked down, then directly at her. "But there were too many. I couldn't listen to any one of them. This time, it was only a few."

"So it was different. That doesn't mean it was real."

"Not to you. But you don't understand reality, do you?" Harshly. "You think the occult has something to do with getting stoned and playing records backwards at 33 rpm. But it doesn't." He took a breath. "It's about what's inside you. It chooses you."

She was silent after that.