This continued until he was twenty. His family then lived in a gated community in Burbank. They had a pool and hot tub, granite and stainless steel everything, stucco walls and a Mexican tile roof, topiaries in the front yard, a casita in the back, Cadillacs in the garage.
Then something happened. He began to notice a face in the crowd. The same face. Whether Juniper was in Tucson or Buffalo or Oklahoma City. Man or woman, Juniper could not tell, in a dress or in a suit, the fabric always funereal. He, she, it had night-black hair that reached past the shoulders. And eyes of the same color, glistening like hundred-year-old eggs. Its face was long and pale and bony and bent to one side. The thing. That was how he began to think of it. He asked others about it—his manager, the stage crew, pastors—but no one seemed to know what he was talking about. “Where?” they would say, and Juniper would no longer be able to locate the pale, bent face.
One time, when everyone brought their hands together to pray, the thing lifted its cupped hands and a big black fly fluttered free of them and circled the stage and finally alighted on Juniper’s sleeve, and he crushed it and the black guts burned his wrist and stained the shirt so that he had to throw it away in a hotel garbage can.
And then he woke one night, in a Best Western in Tacoma, to a shadow darker than the rest. The thing stood at the foot of his bed. A streetlight burned through the shades and lit its bent face. Beside it crouched a hound. It yawned widely and slurped its muzzle with a black tongue. Juniper heard a humming, and it took him a moment to recognize the black flies, their bodies battering the walls and ceiling.
Juniper felt as well as heard its words, like a cold wind that carried twigs and gravel in its currents. “Normally I don’t pay any attention to the pulpit.” There was such depth to the voice, a throbbing bass that went beyond maleness and into the elemental. “But you make so much noise, little Timmy. You have so much reach, so much impact, that you’re difficult to ignore. You burn with too much light.”
Juniper tried to retreat, crabbing back against the headboard. He almost cried out for help, but his throat felt strangled of air, thick with a brinish liquid that he knew was lake water. He gagged and coughed up onto the pillow a splatter of duckweed, a black water beetle that scrabbled off under the covers.
“You should have died, little Timmy. You should have stayed wherever it is you went.”
Juniper almost said he came back for a reason—he had a purpose, a job to do here on earth—but the thing seemed to anticipate this and made a dismissive motion with its long hand and said, “You’re furthering the cause of the light. It’s a twisted, fib-soaked, money-grubbing version of it, but still. The time has come for silence.” The thing cocked its head in debate. “But I think I’ll make you suffer first. Then you can share some of the pain and hopelessness with all those who are so eager to listen to you.”
The hound whined and the thing petted it.
Finally Juniper found his voice. “Who are you?”
A siren called in the distance, maybe an ambulance or maybe a police car, and the thing turned its head curiously toward the window before speaking. “In your sermons—which I must say are quite good, you’re an excellent performer—you’re always talking about the light. You can probably guess what that makes me . . .”
“The dark?” It felt at once silly and terrifying to say.
The thing shrugged. “Part of it at least. One shadow of many. There is no singular Dark. Just as there is no Vulture. There is much, there are many, always circling, feeding on carrion.” When the thing moved toward him, reaching for him, the tendons of its arms creaked like old ropes.
?
He believed it a dream when he woke in the morning to his phone ringing. A terrible dream. He took the call—fielding an invitation to a weeklong residency at a Houston megachurch—and put it on speaker and stumbled to the bathroom to lift the seat and drop his boxers. The piss came in a white stream that soon went orange and pungent before sputtering to a stop. “Can’t you talk them up a bit?” he asked his agent. “Their coffers are deep, and I bet we could get another ten thou without too much trouble.”
An unbearable pressure followed, and he gritted his teeth and tried to empty himself further. He dropped to the floor. A sudden sweat made his skin slick. He noticed then the flies crawling across the ceiling and the bruise on his belly in the shape of a long-fingered hand. He tried to massage the pain, to rough away whatever blockage stopped him up, but that only made it worse. There was a feeling like a pulse, but out of rhythm with his heart. And then something gave, and when he pissed, he pissed blood. From the other room came his agent’s voice: “Tim? Tim, are you okay?”
He wasn’t. The MRI revealed the tumor. It looked like a giant piece of chewed-up gum stuck among his organs. They cut out what they could, but the cancer had metastasized, spread throughout his body. He could choose chemo and radiation, or he could choose nothing. He chose nothing after hearing his odds of survival. He’d take quality of life over quantity. A few good months. That’s what he had to look forward to. He still didn’t know if the thing in the hotel room was real, if it had done this to him, or if he had once more built a fantasy to make sense of his nearness to death.
He told his parents about the cancer and they hugged him and wept with him, but it wasn’t thirty minutes later that they brought up his estate, and signing it over to them. And then they proposed a platform for his death. Letters to Heaven—that’s what they’d call it. There would be a book, maybe a television special. They’d announce it on the Hour of Power at the Crystal Cathedral. For a fee, Juniper would deliver messages directly to loved ones, or Jesus, or even God directly. What did he think? “We can make your death great,” his father said.
He could barely muster the request to be alone. He felt suddenly vacant, as if everything that had once filled his life had spiraled down a drain. He stopped preaching. He refused to attend Sunday service. He unplugged every phone in his house. He stopped checking his email and wouldn’t answer the door.
He closed down his investment accounts, ignoring the penalties and fees. It didn’t feel like his money. It felt stolen. Maybe he had done some good—giving people hope—but it was hope founded on a lie. He started writing checks. And every check he wrote—to charities, to libraries, to YMCAs and domestic abuse shelters and literacy programs, none to churches—made him feel unburdened, truer.