Minor Prophets , livre ebook

A LSO BY J IMMY C AJOLEAS
The Good Demon

PUBLISHER S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cajoleas, Jimmy, author.
Title: Minor prophets / by Jimmy Cajoleas.
Description: New York, NY : Amulet Books, an imprint of Abrams, 2019. | Summary: After their mother s death, Lee and his sister escape their horrible stepfather by fleeing to their grandmother s farm, where Lee hopes to discover the truth behind his haunting visions.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019010422 | ISBN 9781419739040 (hardback) | eISBN 978-1-68335-642-4
Subjects: | CYAC: Visions-Fiction. | Cults-Fiction. | Brothers and sisters-Fiction. | Family life-Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.C265 Mi 2019 | DDC [Fic]-dc23
Text copyright 2019 Jimmy Cajoleas
Illustrations copyright 2019 Jay Miceli
Book design by Siobh n Gallagher
Published in 2019 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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Amulet Books is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
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With Dreams upon my bed thou scarest me affrightest me with Visions
-William Blake
The night Mom died I had a vision.
I was half drowsing in my bed, my headphones cranked, watching the ceiling fan swirl. It was probably four in the morning, and I couldn t sleep. I could never sleep. I d read until two thirty, when my eyes had started burning, and I d shut all the lights off, turned the music up, and prayed for a sleep miracle, but that miracle just wasn t coming. I was in the middle of that kind of gray state between waking and dreaming, and I got this strange feeling like I was being watched, like I wasn t alone in the room anymore.
I looked toward my window.
A man s face was there, grizzled and wild-eyed, staring into my bedroom. It was like I was paralyzed, like I couldn t move at all, not even to scream. Because I knew this man, and I knew he wasn t real, that he only came in my visions. I called him the Hobo, and when I saw him he was always watching me, his eyes bloodshot, his beard ragged, his face pressed against the glass, like any moment he would smash his face through and come for me. He was a bad omen, a promise of awful things to come.
I felt the terror grip my chest, the horrible tingling in my arms and legs and face that meant the rest of the vision was coming, that meant the world was about to split in half and reveal itself to me.
In a flash, I saw it all.
Mom s car swerving through the night. The right front tire rattling weirdly, shaking itself free, rolling off toward the highway median. Mom s car jerking and sparking, yanking itself from the road, slamming into a tree. The car crumpling, now half a car, the hood smashed skyward, tree limbs gouging the windshield. The stillness after the collision. Smoke and the smell of burnt tires.
Mom s bare bloody arm, limp, dangling out the window.
I saw other things too.
A sunset glimmering over a lightning-split tree, two gray clouds like watchful eyes in the distant sky.
A blank gravestone, fireflies floating around it glowing holy in the nighttime.
A red cloud of hummingbirds flitting wild over a field, a whirlwind of color and fire.
A woman who looked like Mom but older, gray-haired with eyes that sparkled like the stars.
An owl, wings spread wide like a crucifix, perched on top of a barn.
Horace s Trans Am in the garage. My sister, Murphy, sad in a black dress searching the trunk as if some kind of secret hid inside.
When I came to, I was screaming.
I flicked my lamp on, and the room was empty. No man was at my window, no hummingbirds anywhere.
I know what you re thinking. I d just finally fallen asleep and had some kind of nightmare. But I told you already: It wasn t a dream, not some random assemblage of the day s events thrown together haphazardly in the back of my mind, not a weird brain film collage that meant absolutely fucking zilch.
It was a vision.
A warning, a premonition.
I had to hurry. I scrambled out of my bedroom and onto the stairs to find my stepdad, Horace, screaming at Mom in the foyer below.
I saw Mom look back at him, her eyes fierce and burning. She wore jeans and a plaid button-down and combat boots, and her long blond hair was wild and tangled, like she d been fighting in her sleep.
Just you goddamn wait a minute, he hollered.
I hated Horace. I hated Horace more than I d ever hated anyone in my life.
This ends now, said Mom. I m going, and don t you fucking try and stop me.
Mom left, slamming the door shut. I ran down the stairs and outside, but she was already in her car, swerving out of the driveway. I chased her down the street in the hot starlit summer night, waving at her, screaming, begging her not to leave, until her headlights disappeared around a corner.
My sister, Murphy, came walking outside, half awake and worried.
What s wrong? she said.
I yanked her out of the way as Horace s Trans Am came roaring past us, cutting over the neighbor s lawn, laying black tread marks all over our street.
Please , I prayed, please let this one be a false vision. A lie, like so many of the others . Even though I knew it wasn t. I could feel in my bones that this one was real.
They re just fighting, Lee, said Murphy. It s okay. She ll come home in a few hours, same as usual. Right?
But I couldn t answer her. Because I knew that wasn t true. I knew exactly what was going to happen.
I knew Mom was never coming back.
Things had been weird with Mom the last few months. She just hadn t been herself.
Like the time two weeks before when I went downstairs for a midnight snack and found Mom peeking out the windows and then snapping the blinds shut, like she was watching for someone. Before I could ask what she was doing, Horace swooped in and threw his arm around her, trying to coax her back into bed, them whisper-fighting the whole way.
Or the time when Mom opened our front door one afternoon and screamed. Murphy and I came running up behind her.
What is it? I said. Mom only pointed, her hand trembling, her eyes all bleary with tears.
It was a hummingbird, its throat ripped open, its guts splayed across our welcome mat.
A stray cat probably did it, Mom, said Murphy. It s just nature.
But Mom turned and ran to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. I knew hummingbirds were Mom s favorites, but this wasn t like her, not at all. I mean, Mom was the toughest woman I d ever known. I d seen her take a machete and chop the head off a cottonmouth that had wandered up the gutters to our house without a second thought. She was never one to be mortified by gore.
Or strangest of all, the morning when I woke up early and found Mom staring up at the living room wall, the furniture moved away and all the photos taken down. A picture was painted on the prim white, a kind of mural, wild slashes of colors like blossoms blooming, all light and energy. It covered the whole wall, maybe six feet tall and four across-a painting of a tree, little flames hovering all around it like birds, a giant gash down the middle of it like a cave you could crawl into. It wasn t exactly a realistic painting, but it felt real, if that makes any sense. It felt real in the way my visions feel real, like you could slip into them and live forever. Realer than real-that s how Mom described her dreams sometimes, and that s what this painting felt like too.
Mom, I said, who did this?
She seemed startled by me and even more so by the mural that had sprung up on our living room wall. Mom looked at her fingers, her clothes, all speckled with paint.
Why, she said, I suppose I did.
That tree loomed over us. There was something so familiar and strange about it, like maybe it had fallen out of an old memory that I didn t remember having. I realized Mom was shaking.
We have to cover it up, she said. Quick, before Horace and Murphy wake up.
But this is amazing, Mom, I said. I didn t know you could paint.
I can t paint, she said. Not anymore. Now help me.
We took what was left of the white and covered over everything as best we could.
I told Murphy about it later, and she could hardly believe me.
That s insane, she said. I ve never seen her so much as doodle on a napkin before.
I know, I said. And Murphy, it was good. I mean really good.
Why does all this worry me so much? she said.
I don t know, I said, but it worries me too.
See, none of this made any sense if you knew our mother.
Mom was a badass, a chain-smoker who had never attended school a day in her life but could fix a flat and clean a gun with equal precision. She was gruff and rude and a total genius. Mom had homeschooled us since we were kids. She taught us basic self-defense as toddlers, and she trained Murphy in Brazilian jiujitsu until Murphy accidentally broke Mom s arm in the sixth grade while performing a particularly vicious reversal. I have never seen our mother prouder. She even had Murphy sign the cast first in her shaky looping scrawl.
I guess maybe all the weirdness started when Mom married our stepdad, Horace, about a year back. Yeah, that was definitely the first time I started to worry about her.
Because Horace was a hard man. Six-foot-seven, 250 pounds of unsmili