Remorse of a Depraved Heart

Six Months Prior

At the prayer group meeting in Unit 2, at the Maine State Prison, half a dozen inmates found temporary solace in communion, an oasis of humanity in a barren place. Among them was a relatively youthful man of a broken and yearning heart., barely twenty-five years old. He hung his head and prayed hard, harder than any man should, so hard that he sucked a singularity through a cleft in eternity, he stirred up the spirits of the dead, the other prisoners could feel it, and it drew a rush of energy into the recreation room. There was a blinding light, the guard was knocked back against the wall, temporarily stunned. Cries and stenches of the damned bombarded the inmates’ reeling senses, almost obscuring a woeful vision of the dead, not just any dead, but the particular dead belonging to these men’s actions and negligence; murdered, overdosed and left to die. The truth might set you free, but it can also condemn you. Elijah Starkey killed Curtis Diebel by placing a gun in his hand. By the power of prayer, he tensioned him back from the dead.

“What have you done, Ely!,” said Curtis, “Why have you brought me back?”, Curtis’ face seemed unfixed, seemed to slide from his skull just for an instant, “I don’t want to be here, this place is full of torment and sorrow”. The face slipped again, lopsided.

“I owe you this. I killed you. I brought you back,” said Ely.

“You owe me nothing,” the face slipped completely from Curtis’ skull and fell as a putrescent collar of flesh, the flesh from the body as well, “leave me in peace.”

“I need you to help me,” said Ely.

Now

Elijah Starkey was out on parole, and word quickly got out that he might be coming back to small-town Bairstow, to stay with his Ma up on Fulton Street. Sure enough, skinny and mean, he was seen smoking on a bench outside the north end laundromat, later on, ambling along in a black hoodie on the boardwalk near the harbor park. Officer Brian Jenkins, eating lunch in his stationary police cruiser in the lot overlooking the harbor, kept a close eye on him, watching out for the oblivious tourists off the cruise ship, meandering around in pairs. On the radio, warnings that Hurricane Tyrone might brush by New England.

The Myrtle’s crowd went silent when Ely walked into the bar. Two pool players, stern men fresh off a trawler, stepped away from the table, placed their cues in the rack, and slipped into the shadows. At the bar, a trio of fresh-faced apprentices took one look at Ely and when they realized that he was heading their way, they vacated the bar and regrouped, awkwardly, in a space near the window. The regulars, half a dozen or so, old-timers, contractors, and the like, watched Ely but avoided eye contact.

“You gonna be a good boy, Ely?” said Barb, the barmaid, half a step back from the counter, hands resting on her ample hips. Barb’s nephew was in the Big House, same Unit as Ely, still there. She knew how quick small men are to anger – over small things. Ely gave her a nod, without changing his expression. He looked pale, gaunt, sharp cheek bones, and his black eyes were sunk deep in dark hollows, like he hadn’t slept in days, maybe longer. He moved with animal menace, but his eyes darted around.

Jake Moran dropped his beer loudly on the bar counter, turned toward Ely and crossed his arms so that his ropey biceps bulged beneath his black T-Shirt. He welcomed Ely with a snarl, “Ely, we weren’t expecting you around here. Not so soon, anyways.” Someone sniggered over by the pool table, got dagger eyes in return. Ely ignored Jake, ignored the all-around hostility, and sat at the bar. “Ass hole,” said Jake and Ely flinched, tensed up as if he was going to leap at the big man.

Barb intervened, “What can I do you for?” she said, and Ely relaxed a bit, his muscled shoulders and back visibly shifted from a state of readiness.

“I’ll take a glass of beer”, said Ely, staring at the polished pine bar counter like he was thinking, deeply. “I know you is all concerned about my presence here,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “and I know I done wrong by Diebel,” he paused. Barb placed the glass of coke in front of him, “but I ain’t gonna do nobody no harm, not ever again, and I’m gonna make it good with the Diebels.”   The bar went silent, and Ely took a swig of his fresh-poured beer then swung around and raised his hands, as if supplicant to a higher being, “I know this will be hard to swallow, but I brung Curtis Diebel back.”

Jake stepped back, looked at Ely like he was smelled bad, “You’re a frigging nutjob, that’s what you are!,” to which there was murmuring of consent. 

“I brung him back, back from the dead.”

Cassidy Jones, the landlord, a man of immense girth was blocking the doorway that led to the kitchen, “You is a fool, Ely, a darned fool,” he said, stuffing a wad of chewing tobacco into his mouth. The air was suddenly thick with tension, you could have cut it with one of the kitchen knives that lay on a nearby table.

Ely hung his head and prayed. He prayed really hard.

+++

Pastor Sommers was a skeptical man when it came to miracles and saints; mostly he focused on saving souls the old-fashioned way, hard work, one at a time, deep prayer, study of the scriptures and practiced quest for personal revelation, preferably occurring within the four walls of the Bairstow Baptist church.

“Ely Starkey is damned. Conjuring tricks – probably learned in Maine State Prison – that makes him a trickster or a charlatan. I will have nothing to do with it!,” said Pastor Sommers, thumping his index finger into his well-worn, twice re-bound bible, “and besides, Jake Moran isn’t exactly a reliable source”.

Deacon Thornton patiently waited for the Pastor to calm down a bit. “It’s not just Jake, others were there too. Jake says Ely performed a miracle at Myrtle’s bar. He brought Curtis Diebel back to life, raised him from the grave.” 

“Oh, for Heaven’s Sake” said the Pastor, “what purpose can be served by catering to this nonsense?”.  Pastor Sommers rolled his eyes, raised his head to the rafters of the Bairstow Baptist Church, and offered up a private prayer, calling upon God for patience with his unruly flock, especially for its troubled youth, plagued by drugs and violence.

“Curtis Diebold is buried up on the hill, in the new plot,” said the Deacon, “I should probably check on the grave. Make sure it’s not been disturbed.”

Six Years Ago.

It was all pretty nihilistic, funny, weed-fucking-hilarious, until it wasn’t. It was a cold January day, snow on the ground, Curtis, Ely, both seventeen, were truant from school. Ely said there was only one bullet in the stolen revolver, that the odds were good, and that nothing could take you higher, but then Curtis spun the cylinder, pulled the trigger, there was a dazzling flash and ear-splitting boom, and Curtis’s face collapsed on one side, his brains sprayed against the wall from out of the other side of his cranium. 

Ely grabbed the six-shooter from Curtis’s dead hand, held it for a moment confused, his own hands started shaking, “There weren’t no live bullets in the gun, just the one dud!”. He pushed open the cylinder, six chambers, five bullets: only one empty chamber! He looked at the gun in horror, snapped the cylinder shut. “Oh No! Oh No! I don’t understand”.,” but he did understand in a foggy kind of way, as logic and probability got un-warped in his head. One chamber full, not like the others. One chamber empty, not like the others. One-in-six.

Ely went silent, closed his eyes, raised the gun to his head, but just before he pulled the trigger the room chilled and an unearthly presence exited Curtis’s body and rise toward Ely, and envelope him like a shroud. He pulled the trigger. Nothing. Ely pulled the trigger again and again and again, until his hand cramped, nothing, then he fell to his knees, dropped the gun on the floor, and wept. He was still weeping when Officer Jenkins burst in, cuffed Ely, and took him to the police station. Curtis body lay lifeless on the sofa, whatever entity had once occupied this body, was gone.

Months later, the State Prosecutor called it a depraved heart murder; neither a game, nor chance, it was a cold-blooded, and premeditated murder. Whether the two juveniles were high on marijuana or not, whether they were friends or not, there was no getting away from the facts. Ely Starkey was a manipulative and heartless killer, had done everything but pull the trigger himself, and now old enough to be judged as a man, he would be sentenced as a man.

Now.

The grave was a small, indented patch in the grass at the edge of the Bairstow cemetery, a brighter shade of green, a simple slab of gray granite for a headstone, “Curtis Ezekiel Diebel, 1999 – 2017”, no epitaph, which agitated Curtis. Ely and Curtis stood at the foot of the grave. Curtis was alternating in form – one moment vital and youthful, another moment a living corpse.

“You gotta let me go,” said Curtis, “this town, it’s full of bad memories and the people, they’re unwholesome. I need to go.”

“But there’s unfinished business,” pleaded Ely.

“Not for me. I’ve moved on. I’m in a better place,” Curtis’ tone becomes more threatening, “I don’t want to get stuck here or any place else, I don’t want to be one of them tormented souls who are tied to an injustice, or an interruption, a dislocation, some kind of unfinished business”.

“Ghosts?” said Ely.

“You can call them ghosts” answered Curtis, “what I see is some soul that is trapped, neither living nor dead.” A pause. “Which is what I am right now, I am neither living nor dead, and it’s because you have called me here and captured me, won’t let me go. You can undo what you’ve gone done.”

Crows cawed in the trees, a stiffening breeze at times warm, at times with an icy edge, seemed to come and go. Overhead it was accumulating dark, the clouds were moving in double-time, threatening a summer squall, and toward the horizon, almost black, the vanguard of Hurricane Tyron. Officer Jenkins, leaning against his patrol car in the parking lot at the bottom of the cemetery, watched with fascination as Ely seemed to embrace a vague form, a form that at one moment seemed corporeal and gray at another moment not there at all. There was a barely discernible flash of light in the distance, and then an ominous rumble. Officer Jenkins sipped at a bitter and cold cup of coffee, the last dregs from the Dunkin morning batch.

“What about me?” asked Ely, “Why did you stop the gun from firing? Why’d you save me?”

The question hung in the air like smoke from an extinguished fire.

“I didn’t save you. You are a ghost, trapped on this side of the grave,” with which Curtis shrugged off Ely’s attempt to hold him back.

Curtis stepped onto the grave, stooped and scratched something into his tombstone, then the ground opened beneath his feet, and he was swallowed into the earth, just as the summer squall dumped water in sheets on the cemetery, just as thunder boomed overhead and lightning bolts struck nearby, an atmospheric force so strong that Ely was flung to the ground, where he lay pale and a-weeping.

Officer Jenkins dragged him towards his patrol car and called for the paramedics.

+++

Deacon Thornton visited the cemetery the next day, after Hurricane Tyrone had slipped off into the Atlantic, and he was appalled to see that Curtis Diebold’s grave was disturbed, as if someone had disinterred then re-buried his mortal remains.

The Deacon tidied things up by hand, as best he could, then stood at the foot of the grave, and in a moment of repose his gaze fell upon the gravestone. “Curtis Ezekiel Diebel, 1999 – 2017”, and legible below, scored freshly into the stone by an unsteady hand, “REST IN PEACE”.