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  “When We Join Jesus in Hell is as crazy as its tormented protagonist. Hard as nails.”--Jack Ketchum, author of The Woman

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  “The Dampness of Mourning is a riveting thriller.”--Midwest Book Review

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  “Before Leonora Wakes reminded me of Clive Barker's The Thief of Always in spots, as well as Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, two other magnificent coming-of-age tales with hefty doses of the supernatural.” – Gef Fox, A Den for Dark Fiction

  “Down Here in the Dark gives us a fantastic dose of Lee Thompson darkness. There is a difference between "dark" and "Lee Thompson dark" you will just need to experience for yourself. His descriptions are unlike any I have read.” – Book Den, A Safe Place for a Dark Read

  Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy

  Lee Thompson

  DIGITAL EDITION

  Published by Lee Thompson

  Copyright 2013 Lee Thompson

  Cover art by Daniele Serra

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  For Chris and Char… two amazing people I lean upon for feedback, faith and encouragement.

  Author bio

  Lee Thompson is a prolific alcoholic. Jack Ketchum has called one of his novellas, “Hard as Nails…” Tom Piccirilli said, “Lee Thompson knows his Horror-Noir…” Brian Hodge claims one of Thompson’s novels is “Taut, tough and terrifying.” Those are three of his heroes so he’s happy as hell. Creator of the Division Mythos and several standalone works, he’ll also be writing under the names Thomas Morgan, James Logan, and Julian Vaughn. You can visit his website at leethompsonfiction.com, but don’t be a stalker.

  Author’s note

  I’ve always found relationships between mothers and daughters to be especially interesting. They have such a strange dynamic which shapes who they are and who they become. Men gladly embrace masculinity, but a mother is probably the most ferocious creature. To what limits will we go to protect those we cherish?

  The following novel deals with that relationship and the themes of love and sacrifice that come so easily for some, and never for others.

  Hold the ones you love close because tomorrow they could be gone…

  “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” ― Winston S. Churchill

  There once was a beautiful girl who held sway over the people of a nowhere desert town. They admired her beauty, the incantations she whispered in the light of the full moon, and the treasures she gave them in exchange for their loyalty. She kept them eternally young, this goddess, this seer of exquisite nighttime mystery. They loved her so deeply they would do awful things to protect her, and to protect the gift given.

  It went on for centuries, until a cool October night when a strange young man walked in from the cold desert. His face shown white beneath the stars, these same stars reflected in his black orb eyes, moonlight and building mating, spewing shadows about his shoulders like a cape. He wore a shirt of chainmail like a knight of old. His boots were dusty. The cross around his neck was silver and a blue eye grew from the center of it. He moved with precision.

  He seduced the young beauty who the town worshipped, his hands gentle, his lips warm and tickling her neck. He rarely smiled but he was so gorgeous to her that he didn’t have to.

  His touch said it all, aggressive, obsessive, insatiable, as he nipped at her neck, his teeth drawing blood, him filling her, ramming, panting, licking the sweat from the hollow of her throat.

  He loved her like they never could. He loved her without being gifted anything, though it would be much later, after much blood was spilled, that she discovered the pleasure and security she’d blessed Gossamer with, he had possessed before he came in dusty of cloth and gleaming of eye, into their lives.

  He slept during the days and left their bed after dusk to be, she first suspected, alone with the stars and the open night. She worked her charms, weaving hair and polishing the bones she’d inherited from her mother. She’d yet to see the Devil, though she had been a studious child, a passionate teen, an angelic and stalwart adult, for centuries. She drifted daily, her mind not on her task, or her duties to her people, as he went about his lone midnight wanderings. Then the first time her lover returned with blood on his lips, she thought, The Devil has come at last…

  Part One

  I wish I could tell you that this story didn’t have any blood in it, that it is simply a love story, but then I would mislead you. Instead, let me be up front because that will build trust between us…

  Love and Tragedy are the only soul mates I’ve ever seen, and I will show you two situations that intersect, meld, and become one. Love’s allure on one side of a dark carousel, arms outstretched, trusting, hoping, believing; Tragedy’s hunger on the other side, many-limbed, voracious, and insatiable.

  There is never a more deadly or more honest embrace than Love aching over Tragedy’s grief, and Tragedy admiring Love’s hope.

  The webbing that traps them is of a unique substance that is anchored upon several lives running through the course of time, and the creator of the web, the unseen forces of order and chaos, grow fat on the husks of withering love and forlorn sorrow.

  None of us have to share our stories with anyone else, but we must, because we want to see the reflection of our existence in the recognition of other people’s joy and other people’s pain. We want to be remembered, for something, whether grand or miniscule, by someone.

  And so starts the first strand of my story…

  *****

  My mother, Sarah Good, died before my eyes on July 19th, 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. I, Dorothy Good, had just turned five years old. A week prior to her death, a policeman, assisted by another man I had never seen before and wished to never see again, knocked on our door while Mother was away at the grocery. My father opened the door to them and ushered them inside the darkened foyer. Our house was always dark and the policeman made a comment on it, to which my father only shook his head, exasperated, sighing, saying, “It’s the way she likes it.”

  Meaning, of course, my mother.

  My father nervously checked his waistcoat watch, a faded and worn golden instrument that dully reflected the nervousness of his eyes. I stood near the coat rack, five feet from them, but they paid me no heed for I was only a child, not to mention the daughter of the accused.

  The policeman’s name was O’Connor, and in true Irish fashion he smelled of rotten things, secrets and fanaticism. He was short and wide. His officer’s cap was smudged with street grime. He looked like one of us
, one of the poor, but surely, he wasn’t. He was a man of power, though to a limited degree, working for and answering to men much more influential than he could ever be, much like Father was and did.

  The stranger with Officer O’Connor was tall and lean and wore the garb of a priest. His eyes were soft and his face pale, slightly doughy. He had about him the manner of a demon in the set of his mouth, a cruelty reserved normally only for the most debased. He noticed me first. He smiled a horrific smile, extended his arm, and that dry, cool hand settled on the top of my head as if he wished to hold me in place. He whispered, while Father and the policeman spoke quietly, “There is a great darkness here. Have you known about it for a time?”

  My father had told me there would be questions like this.

  I nodded, which took great effort due to the weight of his hand on my skull.

  O’Connor turned, raising a hand to silence my father. He straightened his back and rested both hands on the thick black belt about his waist. His smile was warmer than the priest’s, but just barely. He said, “Aye, the little one.” Then he knelt in front of me and I was afraid that he would touch me like the Priest was touching me, and I was angry with my father for letting either treat me as they saw fit. But my father was powerless, and he was a coward.

  O’Connor stroked my cheek. He said to the priest, “Do you think she’s troubled?”

  The priest, who had not had the courtesy to introduce himself, said, “Very.”

  My father had told me they would say things like this. I opened my mouth to speak but words failed me because the game we were playing was tiring. It wasn’t fun like Father said it would be, and even as a small child, I knew that the game, as he called it, that we were running on my mother was no game at all. It would have dire consequences, only, at the time, I had no idea what they might be other than her arrest, given the presence of the policeman who walked our street, and others like it, his bulbous belly only slightly ahead of his bulbous nose, his feet always aching as they hauled him from one troubling encounter to the next.

  But, as I’ve said, it was really the priest who troubled me. He was a scale for souls, weighed the common man’s shortcomings, sought out vileness he saw squirming about in the shadows where sunlight could not reach. His hand continued to cup my head and hold me in place. He leaned forward slightly and my eyes ached from looking up into his dusty and stricken and judgmental face.

  My father said, “She’s done nothing wrong.”

  O’Connor glanced over his shoulder and his stinky hand continued to stroke my cheek. He said, “You leave the detection to the professionals, all right?” His voice was low and serious. Father shrugged, looked at me a second or two, and then looked away, down the hall of our home as if he’d lost something. I very gently removed the priest’s hand from the top of my head and then the policeman’s hand from my face. They both seemed amused and irritated. It was an odd mix to see on an adult face. My father, for all his blessings and curses, could barely manage a smile or a shout, and never both at the same time. These men were different, oh, so different, than the type of beast he was.

  I cleared my throat and said, “What are you here for?”

  O’Connor said, “Safe bet she gets that from her mother.”

  The priest said, “Most assuredly.”

  They both laughed at Father, who, despite his cowardice, stared back at them in disbelief. But a coward can look you in the eye, that he taught, and he also taught that that was as far as their bravery extended. He held their gazes a moment longer and then looked at his watch again. He squawked, “She will be back in about ten minutes.”

  O’Connor said, “We should sit this little princess down, then, yeah?”

  The priest nodded. His fingers stroked the lining of his vest. He said, “Time is of the essence if we are to disarm the Devil’s incendiary devices before good Catholic men and women stumble into hellfire and suffer irreparable damage.”

  My father waved me to him. His hand was cold and damp on my right shoulder. He led me from the entryway into the living room, the men following us, and I can honestly say that it was the earliest memory I’ve ever had of feeling trapped. The policeman and priest rode hot on our heels, one of their breathing labored, the other’s nonexistent. My father pointed to the sofa and ordered me to the sit. The men stood, all three of them, two like vultures batting their wings, one, my father, like a field mouse, darting left and right between them, sensing no chance of escape. O’Connor said to me, “Tell us what your mother has done.”

  I looked at Father. He nodded slightly as if to conceal it, but I knew that he didn’t have to conceal anything in front of these two; they were like him, yet worse. I folded my hands in my lap. I pictured my mother, trudging down the ashen streets with the bleak gray sky above her, a sack of groceries in her arms, heading home to us and unaware of what waited. But I remembered what Father had told me before the men knocked: This is extremely important, Dorothy. If we do not give these men what they want then they will take everything, including what they came for. And I had asked him, “What do they come for?” And he said, “They come for your mother, because she’s done something bad to someone else and everyone has to pay for their sins. You’ve learned that, haven’t you, at church?” And I had said, “I have.” He’d nodded, said, “Good,” and touched my head much like the priest did, cupping my skull in his hand as if to infer something important, or to take something away from me.

  O’Connor said, “Look at me, child.”

  I looked at him.

  He said, “Have you seen your mother conferring with Satan?”

  I hesitated, and what they read of the hesitation, I have no idea. Then I nodded. I looked at Father. He smiled slightly, a worried, guilty smile. O’Connor looked at him, frowning. He said, “And you, sir, were unaware of her urges and impulses upon courting and marrying?”

  My father looked at the floor as he answered. “I had no idea.”

  “And you failed to notice this change?”

  “This devilry,” the priest said, sternly.

  “Yes,” my father said. “I had no idea. I had not noticed that she was a bride of Lucifer. It caught me,” he glanced my way, “us, I mean, completely unaware.” He trembled, as if still in shock of either my mother’s behavior, or his own stupidity. “I should have seen it.”

  He was convincing. O’Connor and the priest both shook their heads, looking sorry for him, and for me, though they had nothing to feel sorry for because my mother had not done what my father had told me to tell them.

  The air in our small home was cloying. I felt ashamed of myself, and for some reason I didn’t yet understand, ashamed of my father. If he noticed, he failed to show it. He simply said, “Can we make this quick?”

  O’Connor shrugged. “The course of justice is not swift.”

  The priest said, “And neither is the judgment of God. These things must unfold at their own speed, for the sake of truth.”

  “Truth,” I said plainly.

  They all studied me; the priest in particular, and the policeman to a lesser degree. My father shook his head as if to tell me to remain quiet, to stem my tongue its mockery. By the sight of him you would have never guessed that he’d contemplated the sharpness of a child, how quickly they learn right from wrong, and how it is like a raw nerve outside their skin until life’s adult troubles chip away at it, leaving behind only a faint feeling of culpability and acceptance decades hence.

  The priest said, “And what has your mother taught you of the dark arts?”

  I was so focused on my father that it took me a second to realize he was speaking to me.

  “I have a snake,” I said. “It suckles my finger in the dead of night. It speaks to me of heinous things.”

  O’Connor visibly trembled. My father wiped a sweating hand across his face. He said, “Don’t torment my daughter like this.”

  The priest said, “We must know for this earthly court and the higher court.”

  M
y father nodded assent. “Fine, but be quick.”

  He drew his watch from his waist coat again and studied it with a furrowed brow.

  “Well?” the priest said. He took the authority from O’Connor easily, I thought, and there was a deeper meaning to that which I couldn’t understand at the time but my aunt would make clearer once we were beyond the harrowing silt of mortal man.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, “what it is you want from my mother.”

  O’Connor said, “We want her and her kind to hang from the neck until they’re dead.”

  “Enough,” my father said.

  “No,” the priest said, “it is only enough when our Lord says it’s enough.” He threw a stern look at Father, then added, “Are you a Christian man, Mr. Good?”

  “I am,” my father said, unable to meet his gaze.

  “Then you understand the severity of these allegations.”

  “I do.”

  O’Connor crept nearer. He sat on the sofa near me. He said, “Tell us what else your mother has taught you.”

  I waited for my father to give me some clue as to what I was supposed to say but he was a vacant mess worth admiring. He said, “She’ll be back in moments.”

  O’Connor leaned close to me and said, “We’re not done with you, princess.”

  I spat in his face.

  The priest recoiled, stumbling back.

  My father gasped.

  O’Connor wiped the spittle from his face and smiled. He looked at my father and said, “She has spunk, this one. Let us hope she didn’t get that from her mother, as well.”

  I said, “I got anything worth having from her,” and I thought, from Auntie… but I kept that secret to myself because though they were ignorant men, Auntie, my mother’s older sister, would hurt them.