The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved Read online

  ChiZine Publications

  COPYRIGHT

  The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved © 2013 by Joey Comeau

  Excerpts from the text were previously published as Bible Camp Bloodbath © 2010 by Joey Comeau

  Cover artwork © 2013 by Erik Mohr

  Cover and interior design by © 2013 by Samantha Beiko

  All rights reserved.

  Published by ChiZine Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPub Edition JULY 2013 ISBN: 978-1-77148-148-9

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  Edited and copyedited by Peter Chiykowski

  Proofread by Stephen Michell

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also Available from ChiZine Publications

  CHAPTER ONE

  It wasn’t an easy birth. At four in the morning, after fourteen hours, the baby still hadn’t come. Why wouldn’t they give her more drugs? Did they think she was some kind of hippie? The doctor kept telling her she was doing just fine, and telling her to push. Elizabeth had never wanted to murder anyone before that moment.

  She hated his stupid smug face. It didn’t make any rational sense, but she was convinced that killing the doctor would stop the pain. She could coax him closer until he was leaning over her, patting her arm reassuringly, and then she could tear into his throat, her teeth grinding through the thin walls of his major artery. And then her pain would pour out of her onto the floor, like the blood from his smug doctor body.

  And who knows? It might have worked if she hadn’t betrayed her intentions so clumsily. The doctor kept smiling reassuringly, and Elizabeth couldn’t think. She wanted to coax him closer somehow, but the pain made it impossible to formulate a plan.

  “Bring your neck here,” is what she wound up saying. “Bring it here. Bring me your neck!” The bedsheets were wet in her hands, and the doctor smiled even wider.

  “I think we can give her another epidural,” he said to the nurse at his side. “Make her a bit more comfortable.”

  “Did you miss me?” Elizabeth said.

  It was her first day back at the makeup counter, and Janice was late. Elizabeth had covered for her, as always. They weren’t exactly friends, but they had to work together and in the past year Elizabeth had gotten good at getting along. She just thought of it as part of her job. Janice was like a customer, that way. It was part of Elizabeth’s job to be nice to her, even if she was kind of an idiot.

  “Oh, I didn’t think you were coming back,” Janice said. She leaned down to reapply her lipstick in the small round counter mirror.

  “I was having my baby,” Elizabeth told her. Janice didn’t look up.

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “Right.” She finished her makeup and then leaned back against the cash register. “God, it must have messed you up. What’s it like down there now? My cousin Alex says his girlfriend came home from the hospital with a fucking slaughterhouse between her legs. And postpartum depression or whatever they call it.” She exaggerated a shudder. “More like post-traumatic stress disorder. You should see the size of their daughter’s head. Did it hurt? What’d you name it?”

  “Martin,” Elizabeth said, and she laughed. She knew Janice didn’t care, but she couldn’t stop talking about him. “Oh god, he’s ugly,” Elizabeth said. And he was. He was ugly the way babies are ugly, strange and shrunken and wrinkled, but he was beautiful, too. A person. He had the smallest hands and the clearest eyes she had ever seen.

  “But did it hurt though?” Janice said.

  What a vapid question, Elizabeth thought. “Of course it fucking hurt!” She took a quick look around for their boss. “It hurt so much at one point that I threatened to murder the doctor. I just wanted to bite into his neck and tear the throat right out of him. I could almost smell his blood.”

  “Oh . . . kay,” Janice said. She turned away, and Elizabeth was sure that she would have rolled her eyes if there had been anyone to roll them for.

  “I just kept gnashing my teeth at him,” Elizabeth said, leaning forward so that she was close to her co-worker’s face. “And howling like an animal. That’s what we are, don’t you think? Just animals? Maybe I should have chewed through Martin’s umbilical cord myself, you know? I should have eaten his placenta like we would in the wild.”

  “Someone should call social services on you,” Janice told her. “It ought to be against the law for a freak like you to raise a baby.”

  Elizabeth told the story about wanting to kill her doctor again and again over the next few years. It became part of the story of Martin’s birth. She told it so often that when she started working part-time as a makeup artist on a local television show almost a decade later, it was still the first thing that she thought of when the director needed one of the characters to kill a doctor.

  Her eyes lit up when she came across it in the script. Just those four simple words. “He kills the doctor.” It was like she’d been holding onto that murderous feeling for ten years, and now she had the chance to finally tear his throat out.

  At home she stayed up late into the night, making a piece of flesh that would sit invisibly on the doctor’s throat. She tried different colours for the stringy tendons hidden inside, finally settling on a garish purple. This was the colour she’d imagined that day in the hospital.

  There was a soft tap at the door to the office.

  “Come in,” she called, sitting back from the workbench.

  “Mom?” Martin stood in the doorway. “Can I see?”

  “Of course!” she said. And she showed him how it worked. It was soft, so it could be torn into with the actor’s teeth. Torn out. Blood and the stringy elastic of tendons tight and dripping. There was a small pouch of blood in there, too, that would
tear open easily.

  “That’s disgusting,” Martin told her, but he was smiling.

  The next day she set up the effect on the doctor, and tried to explain to the other actor how to bite into it. Behind her, the director started laughing.

  “Are you insane?” he said. “We can’t show that on daytime television!” He looked amused, though.

  After they shot the scene with a much simpler (and more television-appropriate) bloodstain gun-shot wound under the doctor’s lab coat, the director took Elizabeth aside and told her about a friend who was making a horror movie.

  “It doesn’t pay very well,” he told her.

  But it did sound like fun, and that is how the best careers are made. Elizabeth made the same throat effect for the horror movie. And she designed a section of fake skull that could open and expose an unexpectedly pulsing brain. They loved it. And so the director told another director and so on.

  The work didn’t come often. She still had to keep her job with the TV show, and her job at the makeup counter, but she loved working on horror movies. She took pictures of the grossest effects to bring home for her son.

  The two of them were partners in crime, sitting together on the couch watching horror movies again and again, deciding which scene was the grossest. Grossest was always best. He helped her come up with new ideas, too. Bits of brain that plopped like bubbling oatmeal. Eyeballs filling up with blood. When she heard that the director of Blood Socket 2 was thinking about coming to Halifax to film, it was Martin who helped her put together a portfolio. He helped her pick which clips to put on her demo reel. And on the day of her big meeting, her eleven-year-old son walked her to the door and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Good luck,” he told her. “Tear their throats out.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I got the job!” Martin’s mother announced. She tossed her bag on the pile of shoes by the front door and came into the living room, scooping Martin up in her arms. “I’m going to be spending three weeks making flaps of wet torn skin, jutting white broken bones, and drooling chunks of flesh for Blood Socket 2. Blood Socket 2, Martin! Pus! Spleens! Teeth! I’ll be spreading fake guts all over the walls. They said they loved my work on Undead Hungry Grandmother Birthday Party in particular. I didn’t think anyone even saw that movie.”

  Martin squeezed his mother while she spun him around the room. He kissed her neck. She was so happy. This would be good for them. She was always happiest when she was working on movies. She was too good for the makeup counter at the mall. She was too smart.

  “You may have to go and stay with your aunt and uncle for a few weeks,” she said. “A lot of the filming is going to be in Toronto, so I’ll have to go there and stay in a hotel. Those filthy big city streets will run with blood. They’ll have to install blood gutters!”

  She set him down on the floor and then she spun around by herself, her arms raised and her eyes closed. She was beautiful. Martin put his own arms up, too, and spun, laughing. Later tonight, she would probably invite her friends over to celebrate, but right now it was just the two of them. It was their time.

  “What should we have for dinner?” his mother said, stopping her spin and staggering a little, like she was dizzy. “Lobster? Caviar? Should we eat the children of our enemies?”

  “My enemies aren’t old enough to have children,” Martin told her.

  “Then we’ll have to eat the parents of our enemies,” she said. “They might be chewier.”

  “Ice cream cake!” Martin said. He climbed up on the edge of the couch, and held his arms up to the roof. “Ice cream cake!” He knew that ice cream cake was her favourite. So it was his favourite, too. She lifted him in her arms again.

  “Calm down there, killer,” she said. “Ice cream cake it is.”

  The ice cream place was downtown, and on the bus ride Martin let himself drowse against his mother’s shoulder while she told him everything she knew about Toronto.

  “There are a lot of people,” she said. “It’s not like here. There are people from all over the world there. Chinese, Koreans, Ugandans, Persians. I was only there once, but it was so different. When I came back I couldn’t believe that I never noticed how white everyone here is. It’s just white people as far as the eye can see.

  “I went the year before you were born,” she said. “When I decided to keep you, I knew I had to go somewhere before you were born. It was my last chance to get away before I had to be a mom. I stayed in a hotel for travellers right downtown. Somebody was shot right down the street while I was staying there.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Everything’s dangerous,” his mother said. She kissed him on the top of his head. “You can’t let that stop you.”

  They got off the bus downtown and held hands crossing the street. The girl working at the ice cream shop looked unhappy, and Martin smiled as wide as he could for her.

  “Hello,” he said. “We’d like to order an ice cream cake for our dinner, please. It’s a celebration.”

  “That’s nice,” she told him. She pushed a small plastic sheet of paper across the counter. “Which cake style would you like, sir?” she said. There were birthday cakes and Halloween cakes and celebration cakes of all kinds. But one caught his eye.

  “This one?” Martin pointed at a pink graduation cake, and looked up to his mother for confirmation.

  His mother nodded. “An excellent choice.”

  “And what would you like the cake to read?” the girl asked.

  “Congratulations, Mom!” Martin said, but his mother put a hand on his arm and shook her head.

  “No, no, something better than that,” she said. She turned to the girl, and leaned forward so that Martin couldn’t hear.

  The girl behind the counter listened, and gave his mother a strange look. But then she shrugged her shoulders.

  “Whatever you like,” she said.

  Martin and his mother went for a walk while the man in the back of the shop made their cake. The public gardens were right across the street, and Martin peeked through the huge wrought-iron gate while his mother sat and drank her coffee. It was locked for the day, but inside the gardens Martin could see one of the swans curled up beside a little stone bridge.

  “I’m very proud of you,” Martin said. “Nobody else’s mom works on horror movies.”

  “Maybe they do and it’s a secret, that’s all,” she said.

  Two teen girls walked past them, giggling. One of them looked over at Martin and met his eyes. With his baggy shirt and wire-rim glasses, Martin looked like he’d been picked too soon. He was eleven years old, and he wore button-up shirts that were always too big on him. He looked like the kind of kid who was proud when people called him a nerd. And he was proud.

  His mother was a nerd. Sure she was a violent and unpredictable nerd who dressed like a panhandling teen, but she was a nerd. She knew more about chemistry than any of his teachers. Sometimes, just for fun, she made the strangest things boil and ooze for Martin. For his last birthday, she set a Halloween mask over a shot glass full of mystery sludge so that sickly foam drooled and spat from the mouth. Martin made her repeat the trick again and again, watching the foaming grin in horror. Who wouldn’t be proud?

  “Our ice cream cake is probably ready,” Martin’s mother said, standing up. She held out her hand for him to hold.

  They took the cake home, and his mother refused to let him see it until he was sitting at the table and the lights were dimmed. Then she came into the room holding the cake out in front of her. Three candles flickered and lit her face with their orange glow.

  It was the pink graduation cake, but they had decorated it with little white Halloween skulls, and three candles, each in the shape of the number six. On the top of it, in red glossy icing, it read, “Happy Birthday Lucifer, Our Sugary Dark Lord.”

  They sat at the kitchen table eating their ice cream cake, while Ma
rtin’s mother sketched ideas for movie gore effects. Martin rested his head on her shoulder and together they planned the perfect dangling kitten eyeballs.

  Martin had a picture he’d clipped from a magazine of a goat standing on the back of a cow. It seemed otherworldly to him, but neither the goat nor the cow looked concerned. They didn’t care that the goats in picture books never stood on cows. They pulled this shit all the time. This was just how it was. His mother had that same look on her face, up on the kitchen table with someone else’s bottle of wine in her hand, head tilted to avoid the light fixture. Martin could see mud caked around the edges of her boots, smeared on the tabletop.

  He stayed quiet, out of sight. He knew how this worked. It was against the rules for her to wear her boots in the house, but if he spoke up the response would be, “Bedtime, kiddo.” And he didn’t want to go to bed. He liked to watch his mother when she was around her friends. She acted like a different person, and even though it was scary, it was interesting, too. She was so complicated, and he felt like if he watched long enough, he might understand. As long as the table didn’t break again, it was okay. Mud was easy to clean up.

  He watched her from the hallway for a while, and then crept back to his bedroom. He could hear his mother laughing, and it made him smile. His bedroom was not quite clean, and so he listened to the party through his open door while he remade his bed, folding the corners tight the way his mother never remembered to do. It wasn’t important to her, so she never remembered. She didn’t think it was important to make the cans in the cupboard line up properly by size, and she didn’t think it was important to wash your hands every time after using the bathroom. Martin folded a dry cloth and wiped down his dresser top, lifting his books and piggy bank to wipe underneath them. Then he wiped the window sills. Outside, the neighbourhood was lit up in the dark.

  He couldn’t see downtown through the window, even though the apartment building was up on a hill, but he could see down to the northwest arm and make out the yacht club there. Some of the boats were lit, floating orange lights out in the water by themselves. The dark water reflected them so that each light was two lights, one exactly on top of the other. If they lived on a boat, his mother wouldn’t need to have her friends come over in order to have fun. They could sail around the world together, just the two of them. The perfect team. Maybe they could finally have a dog. Something small because it wouldn’t be fair to have a big dog on a boat. Besides which, small dogs seemed smarter. Cleaner. Martin imagined that there was a whole apartment down inside of each boat, with a kitchen and a bathroom. With windows looking out under the water from the bedrooms, so that he could stand in his dark room and watch the fish swim by at night. Peaceful.