Circling the Drain (House of Crows) by Lisa Unger

Author:Lisa Unger [Unger, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

6.

Ever since he was a kid, things, most of them bad, just seemed to happen to Mason. Maybe as the child of neglect and abuse, he was just more vulnerable, less protected than other children. He was bullied on the playground, got pushed from the monkey bars once and broke his arm. As he got older there were fights—bloody noses and black eyes. Bike accidents. His whole family was like this—disease, car wrecks, bar brawls turned deadly, arrests and stints in prison. His childhood seemed a parade of funerals and hospital visits.

“It’s a family curse,” his father used to say. “The Brandts and the Granns. We’re marked.”

And he’d said it often enough, probably starting long before Mason was even old enough to understand, that he grew up thinking it was true. That bad things were going to happen to him. Or that he was going to do something bad.

His father was standing over him now. “You let that girl get the drop on you, Mace. Are you stupid?” The old man looked as Mason had last seen him—pale, broken.

Mason woke with a start.

There was Marla, standing with her hands on her hips. Maybe he was still dreaming. Because truth be told, he’d dreamed of Marla before. He’d dreamed of her, soft and tender, yielding, needing him, his strength, his comfort. It wasn’t sexual. Well, it wasn’t just sexual. When she’d called for his help, it was that Marla he’d imagined.

There was a terrible pain in the back of his head, a fogginess to his vision. He tried to move but realized that they’d duct-taped him to a rickety old chair. What the fuck?

The boyfriend—Mason grappled for the name—sat on a chair in the corner, a bulky shadow. Drew, that was it. The whole scenario had taken on a strange fuzziness, a nonreality. What were these idiots playing at?

“Pastor Mason,” said Marla.

He tried to stay calm, be reasonable. “Marla, what’s the endgame here? How do you see this going?”

She ignored the questions.

“Did you get kicked out of the priesthood?” she asked.

Christ. The damn internet.

“Not exactly.”

“Defrocked,” said the shadow, then laughed stupidly, guffawed actually.

“Then what, exactly?” asked Marla.

“I dropped out of seminary school.”

“Why?” she asked.

He was getting annoyed, started struggling against the bindings. “Why do you care? What are you doing?”

Some people were just sadists; he knew that. His father had been one. Mason’s father had just been happier when other people were hurting. Mason had read in a book somewhere that if you didn’t believe in evil, you were destined to live in a world you couldn’t understand. It struck him as grimly true.

“Answer,” she said.

He’d thought he’d heard the call to God. After all the pain and misery of his childhood, the loneliness, the idea of himself as a misfit. After Amelia, his father, and all the trouble he’d gotten into after, seminary school had seemed like a safe and good place, a brotherhood. He was smart, had good grades. He even had a benefactor, Old Man Merle. As a

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