Dark Rivers of the Heart

undressed, the first time you'd ever touched a woman. My God, Spencer, in supercharged circumstances like that, not just terrifying but so emotional in every way, so confusing, such a damned primal moment-touching her was bound to reach you on every level, all at the same time. Your father knew that.
        He was a clever sonofabitch. He tried to use your turmoil to manipulate you. But it didn't mean anything."
        She was too understanding and forgiving. In this blighted world, those who were too forgiving paid a cruel price for a Christian bent.
        "So, I came back through the catacombs, with the dead all around me in the walls, with the memory of my father's blood, and still with the feel of her breasts in my hand. The vivid memory of how rubbery her nipples had felt against my palm-"
        "Don't do this to yourself "Never lie to the dog," Spencer said, with no humor this time, but with a bitterness and rage that frightened him.
        A fury welled in his heart, blacker than the door before him. He was no more able to shake it off than he had been able, that July, to shake from his hand the remembered warmth and shapes and sensuous textures of the naked woman. His rage was undirected, and that was why it had been intensifying in his deep unconscious for sixteen years.
        He'd never been sure if it should be turned against his father or against himself. Lacking a target, he had denied the existence of that rage, repressed it. Now, condensed into a distillate of purest wrath, it was eating through him as corrosively as any acid. with the vivid memory of how her nipples had felt against my palm," he continued, but in a voice that shook equally with anger and with fear,
        "I came back here. To this door. Opened it. Went into the black room… And the next thing I remember is walking away from here, the door falling shut behind me… … barefoot, walking back through the catacombs, with a void in my memory more perfectly black than the room behind me, not sure where I've just been, what just happened. Passing the women in the hallway.
        Women. brothers. sisters. Their silent screams. Perpetual screams, where is God? What does God care? Why has He abandoned them all here?
        "y has He abandoned me? A magnified spider shadow, scurries across their plaster faces, along the looping shadow of the light cord. As I'm passing the new niche in the wall, the niche prepared for the woman in the black room, my father comes out of that hole, out of' the dark earth, splattered with blood, staggering, wheezing in agony, but so fast, so fast, as fast as the spider The hot flash of steel out of shadows.
        Knife. He sometimes paints still lifes of knives, making them glow as if they were holy relics.
        Flashing steel, flashing passing across my face. Drop the gun.
        Hands to my face.
        Flap of cheek hanging if my chin. My bare teeth against my fingers, a grin of teeth exposed along the whole side of my face.
        Tongue leaping against my fingers in the open side of my face.
        And he slashes again. Misses. Falls. He's too weak to get up.
        Backing away from him, I pull my cheek in place, blood streaming between my fingers, running down my throat. I'm trying to hold my face together: Oh, God, trying to hold my face together and running, running.
        Behind to get off the floor but not too weak to call after me: "Did you kill her; did you kill her, baby boy, did you like it, did you kill her?
        Spencer still could not look directly at Ellie and might never be able to look directly at her again, not eye-to-eye. He could see her peripherally and he knew that she was crying quietly. Crying for him, eyes flooded, face glistening.
        He couldn't cry for himself He had never been able to let go and fuliv purge his pain, because he didn't know if he was worthy of tears, of her's or his own or anyone's tears.
        All he could feel now was that rage, which was still without a target.
        "The police found the woman dead in the black room," he said.
        "Spencer, he killed her." Her voice trembled. "It must have been him.
        The police said it was him. You were the boy hero."
        Staring at the black door, he shook his head. "When did he kill her, Ellie? "When He dropped the scalpel when we both fell to the floor.
        'Then I ran, and he ran after me."
        "But there were other scalpels, other sharp