by Blake, Bruce
It flicked again, but Cory held on. The hard ridges pressed against his fingers; though it glistened, its surface was neither wet nor slimy. He squeezed it tight without noticing the grip, as though the appendage was independent of him, with its own nerves and feeling. The thought brought a little relief.
Cory brought the knife up, intending to lay the sharp edge on the thing, but using the mirror’s reflection proved difficult and he missed. The tail strained against his grip; he held on tight and raised the knife again.
He pulled the end of the tail away from his body, stretching it out, and set the edge of the blade against the black appendage near the base. It was an awkward position, and difficult to put enough pressure on the knife for the blade to cut. He gritted his teeth, determined to remove the thing from his body.
The blade pressed hard enough against the protrusion he felt the pressure in the base of his spine, but the thing’s tough flesh didn’t so much as dimple under the edge of the knife. He exerted more pressure with the same result. Cory lowered the knife, still gripping the tail in his fist.
There must be a better way.
He changed his hold on the knife’s handle and brought it back up, this time finding the base on the first attempt. He adjusted its position, moving the cutting edge closer to his spine, then pushed the knife across in a sawing motion. The sound of steel grating across the tail’s hard surface found his ears and tingled his teeth like he’d chomped on a piece of aluminium foil. Cory swallowed hard and did it again.
Nothing.
The pressure pulled on the skin of his back and he heard it scrape, but there was no cut, no more pain than a vague pinch.
Cory gritted his teeth and drew the knife back and forth, a macabre carpenter laboring over an unusual board. The knife scraped and skittered as though attempting to cut stone, then found a dip between two ridges and settled in. Back and forth, back and forth.
The first twinge of pain shot up Cory’s spine and slammed into the base of his brain. He gasped a sharp breath between his teeth and stopped sawing to look over his shoulder at the tail, but saw nothing past the blade. Cory set his feet and resumed the sawing motion, each pass of the knife sending another jolt up his back, a shock similar to bashing your funny bone. The pain increased with each swipe of the edge across the tail.
Sweat stood out on Cory’s brow as the pain grew more intense. It spilled out from his back and into his belly, crept down his abdomen into his groin; his penis shrank from it, his scrotum drew his testicles toward his body, seeking protection.
The hard covering gave way under the blade of the knife and pain exploded through Cory, engulfing him like a sandstorm howling across the desert. He opened his mouth and screamed as black mucus spattered against the white porcelain sink.
***
Something cold and hard pressed against Cory’s cheek, but he didn’t open his eyes. Instead, he lay unmoving, wishing for the pain to go away. This wasn’t the pain he experienced every day upon waking—the pain of having to face the world one more time—but real, physical pain. His head hurt, his arm hurt, his ass hurt.
If he attempted to count them, he thought the list of body parts not hurting might be shorter than the tally of the ones in pain. He shifted a little, the same cold and hard touching his shoulder, his side, his thigh. He considered opening his eyes to see what it was, but decided against it, worried he’d discover himself alive, and he didn’t want that.
“Took a fall, did you, Cory?”
The words echoed against the bathroom walls, the tub, the sink, the tiles, making it impossible to judge where they came from; he didn’t recognize the voice. Against his better judgment, Cory opened his eyelids a crack: white linoleum spotted with dirt, hair balls collected in the distant corner. A glob of black fluid lay on the floor a few inches from his face, prompting him to remember the tail, the knife, the pain. His ass throbbed, like someone held a cattle prod to the base of his spine.
The pain had been too much when he cut the appendage off and he’d passed out, falling to the bathroom floor. Lucky he didn’t hit his head.
Lucky. Right.
It didn’t explain the voice.
With effort, Cory raised his eyes and the pain in his head followed it, as though attached by thick rubber bands. He must have hit his head after all, not hard enough, though. He let out a throaty groan.
“Don’t worry, Cory. It won’t hurt much longer. Soon, nothing will hurt.”
The words sparked a flicker of hope in the teen, making him forget the pains wracking his body. He ratcheted his head up enough to see the boy sitting on the closed toilet seat. Dark complexion, darker hair, still darker eyes. Cory realized he’d seen him before, here in this bathroom, and on the street.
“Are you going to kill me?”
The boy’s laughter was immediate but sounded unlike anything that had a right to come from the mouth of a child. It crackled with flame and grated with the sound of tectonic plates shifting. It drove the hope out of Cory, scared him. The boy slid off the toilet, lowering himself onto the floor with snake-like grace until his eyes were the same level as Cory’s, an ear-to-ear smile worthy of a hungry man about to tuck in to his favorite meal curling his lips.
“I’m not going to kill you, my boy. I have a job for you. And then, I’m going to make you immortal.”
Chapter Eighteen
“What are you doing?”
I glanced away from the micro film reader and blinked the tiny letters of newsprint out of my vision to bring Dido into focus.
“Research,” I said and went back to it. I moved the knob at the bottom and pages of old newspapers flew by fast enough to make my head spin. I heard her take a chair from the work station beside mine and pull it over. She sat.
“Why are we sitting here researching? Shouldn’t we be out looking for someone?”
I stopped and leaned back in my chair. “You ask a lot of questions. How are we supposed to find Meg’s son if we don’t know where to look or why?”
“We know why.” She paused and I heard her tapping her fingers on the desk, but I didn’t let it distract me from the words whizzing by on the screen. “Why are you going through old papers?”
I sighed and leaned back in my chair, my hand going to my shoulder to rub the ache threatening to become constant. She sat watching me, awaiting my reply; I did my best not to scowl at her. Sometimes I needed to remind myself she was a kid, and a lost soul. She deserved my sympathy, not my ire, but she made it tough at times.
“I’m trying to figure out why I recognized the guy in Meg’s photo.”
“Hmm.” She looked away, traced a scratch in the desk top with the tip of her finger. “You ever heard of the internet?”
I let the impending scowl have its way with my face, then turned back to the screen. A minute passed, the pages of a nearly twenty year old paper flying by in the viewer. I was unsure if I’d picked the right day, and my temples started to throb somewhere around the sports section; it wouldn’t be long before it became a headache and the headache made me grouchy. Well, grouchier. I noticed my personal space being invaded by Dee leaning over in her chair for a better view.
“What are you hoping to find?”
I sighed and halted my search again. If she kept interrupting, a turtle with a note strapped to its back would complete my task quicker.
“Something to remind me where I know the guy from.”
“And you think you’ll find it in an old newspaper?”
I nodded, anxious to continue my search rather than having to explain myself. Inexplicably, I suspected finding out details of this woman’s life was important and might help elucidate something I didn’t realize needed elucidating. And after that, I needed to find some guy named Chan Wu to get rid of my tag-along soul.
“I think I met him once, when I was living on the streets, so I must have been eighteen or nineteen.”
She frowned. “I don’t get how going through old newspapers will help.”
I looked away from the half-column review of a play at a local theater that had long since closed and a bunch of advertising. “Because I went back the next day and the place was surrounded by yellow crime scene tape and crawling with cops.”
Dee’s expression brightened. “They really use that stuff? Like on TV?”
“Yeah. It’s not so exciting when you’ve seen it a few times. There’s still some around your house.”
I mentally slapped myself in the forehead after I said it—not the best plan to remind her of her death. Luckily, she seemed to miss my faux pas as her eyes widened.
“Did you...?”
“No. He was fine when I left.” I reconsidered my statement. “Alive, at least.”
“What else do you remember?”
I shook my head. “Not much. I was...distracted.”
“Do you mean high?”
I averted my gaze, shamefaced. “Distracted. The only thing I remember is he didn’t belong in that alley.”
Dee leaned in to see the page on the viewer. “Move it lower.”
I did and a bunch more pages flew by.
“No, not so far. I want to see the date.”
I shifted it a little more so it settled on the date at the top of the page.
“You’re on the wrong day.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “How do you know? You’re eight, you weren’t born.”
She raised her eyes to mine and I detected a flicker in them. A second later, her face transformed, and in it I saw an old woman, a black man, a bald man with glasses, a child, then, as quickly as it changed...Dallas/Dido/Dee again. I blinked hard.
“Wha--”
“Trust me. You’ve got the right year, but try...” She paused and rubbed her chin, as though she hadn’t just been four people in one. “The twelfth of April.”
Instead of doing what she said, I continued staring at her. She held my gaze for a moment before giving me a wide-eyed, exasperated look.
“What? Will it hurt you if I’m right?”
“No, I...” Probably. “What just happened?”
“Nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about. April twelfth.”
My gaze hung on her a moment longer; she flicked her gaze toward the screen, prompting me to continue, so I faced the viewer and flew through months of newspaper articles, ads, births, deaths, marriages and graduations in a matter of seconds, like some hokey effect in an old movie to denote the passage of time. When I found April twelfth, I started with the headline and scanned it page by page right through to the end. Nothing. I did it a second time.
“Nothing,” I said through a mixture of disappointment at still not having an answer to my question and an unsettling feeling over what I thought I’d seen in the young girl’s face.
Dee leaned back in her chair looking at least slightly perplexed. Her eyelids narrowed in an expression denoting deep consideration. After a second, she raised her finger in the air.
“If they found him on the twelfth,” she said, “it wouldn’t be in the paper until the next day. This is a newspaper, not the internet.”
I glared at her for being right, then flicked my wrist and brought April thirteenth’s issue into view. On page three, beside a picture of the smiling man, I found the story.
That’s him.
I scanned the article with all the pertinent details: John “Jack” Medlin, survived by his fiancée, Meghan Burns. They suspected alcohol and drugs might have been involved.
I stared at the view screen, mouth hanging open.
Was his death my fault?
I squeezed my eyelids shut to concentrate, but it was so long ago; I was nineteen and in the throes of addiction. His face floated into my mind and I concentrated on picturing the alleyway.
“I was alone,” I said aloud, more for my own benefit than Dee’s. “Sitting in the dark, enjoying the solitude and some good weed Orlando comped me, when this joker in a suit stumbled into the alley and puked on me.”
“He was ill?”
“Drunk. I gave him some hits off my joint, but nothing else.” I regarded Dido. “I didn’t kill him.”
“Okay. What else do you remember?” The young girl’s eyes shone with more understanding than should be expected from an eight-year-old.
“I don’t know.” I shook my head and returned to scanning the article as if grade six-level journalism might remind me. “We talked a while. He was upset.”
“Why?”
I bit my lower lip. That did the trick. I slapped the flat of the hand on the table as it came to me, the impact making the viewer shudder. People at other tables around the room glared at me with righteous library anger burning in their guts, but I paid no attention.
“He told me his girlfriend was pregnant but the baby couldn’t be his.”
The revelation struck a welcome spark of vindication. I wasn’t off my rocker thinking I recognized the man in Meg’s picture, but it didn’t do anything to clear up the mystery of the devil-child. If anything, it muddled the issue. If Jack Medlin wasn’t the kid’s father, who was?
Unfortunately, a few ideas came to mind.
I glanced out the window at the crisp winter afternoon. One tree grew outside the library; it stood tall and straight and leafless beside the window, a shady refuge in the summer where readers browsed their borrowings out of the glare of the sun. It cast little shade at this time of the year, but it did offer a resting place for a dozen or more swallows.
“Hello, Gabe,” I said pivoting in my seat.
***
It made me nervous when I saw the address on the scroll belonged to an elementary school. I needed neither another dead child on my hands or a second harvest with Dido riding my coattails.
We stood across the street from the school, the glow of a flickering streetlight shining above us. Illumination showed through the spaces at the sides and bottoms of the closed roller blinds on most of the windows, but was there anyone inside? I glanced at my watch: nine thirty-two. Three minutes remained and we had the whole building and the fence-enclosed field behind it to consider.
“Shit,” I murmured.
“Language.”
I didn’t want an eight-year-old with a dislike of foul language hanging out with me during a harvest—she’d proven herself a hindrance already—but what else could I do with her? I vowed that, as soon as we finished this harvest, I’d delay my search for Meg’s son and find this Chan Wu character. Might not be any help, but might as well try.
“Sorry, but it’s going to be difficult to find him.”
“Where should we start?”
A good question. I tapped my foot and crossed my arms. Where should we start searching for Sebastian Coe and have any hope of finding him before his spirit left his body and a passing-by Carrion got it before us? And, since we’re talking about it, what would the former Olympic running hero be doing at an elementary school in North America at nine thirty-five on a Thursday night, anyway? Common sense suggested the name on the scroll might refer to a different Sebastian Coe.
“Let’s start out back.”
Since we’d be able to survey the small athletic field and playground more efficiently than searching the building, I figured we may as well start there.
We went around the side of the building and through a gate in the chain link fence. The play equipment lay to the left, the usual collection of wood-and-metal structures set atop a bed of cedar chips, like playthings in a giant hamster cage.
Two figures were climbing on the monkey bars.
Bingo.
Dido started for the playground, but I stopped her and pulled her back.
“We can’t show ourselves. Wait for it to happen.”
“But we could stop it.”
“Trust me: it doesn’t work that way.”
She glared at me for a second as though I’d banned her from watching her favorite Saturday morning cartoon, then she nodded and we melted into the darker shadows crouched at the base of the building.
/> The figures appeared too big for elementary school kids, leaving me to wonder who’d be climbing on a jungle gym behind a school at night?
Teenagers.
One kid was short and stocky, the other taller and skinnier than anyone should be. They dragged themselves up to stand on top of the bars, poking and prodding at each other. It was easy to see how this was going to end; the last remaining question: which one’s spirit were we collecting?
They jostled for a minute, their laughter floating through the night air to find us hiding beside the school. But then the playfulness stopped and they both stood erect facing away toward the far end of the playing field. One of them yelled something unintelligible and threatening.
“What are they doing?” I said. A rhetorical question, but Dee chose not to take it as such.
“There’s someone out there,” she said pointing. “There.”
I squinted and managed to make out the figure standing at the far end of the field. The dark made it impossible to see who it was.
“Who is it?” the spirit asked and I wondered again if she read my thoughts the way angels did.
“Carrion, maybe. Let’s go.”
As we started toward the jungle gym, the two teens standing atop it decided it was time to descend and deal with whoever spied on them from the far end of the field. The stockier fellow bent, put a hand on the side bar, and vaulted to the ground, ungraceful but effective. His friend took a step to do the same at the precise second the alarm on the cheap digital watch around my wrist went off. I threw my hand over it, muffling the sound; the young men had too much going on to notice, anyway.
Turns out the kid’s body was skinnier than the space between the bars on the jungle gym, but not his head. He went straight through like a condemned prisoner through the trap door in the gallows, stopping when the bars caught him by the chin and the back of the head.
And thus ended the life of one Sebastian Coe.