by Harker Moore
It was bonfires in the beginning, but Oliver started his first real fire when he was nine. A small experiment to see how quickly the old shed could be consumed, how fast rotted board became ash. But the true payoff had been not the destruction, but the act of destroying, as Oliver discovered, the heat fanning his face, his eyes devouring the thick licks of flames. He had almost fainted, watching the blooming blaze eating the oxygen right from the air. And then, there had been that second fire. Another outbuilding. With its secret hefted inside. And Odin watched as Oliver’s eyes widened, his nostrils flaring, reaching out for molecules of charred flesh.
So the Kingdom would have to be destroyed to be resurrected. A great phoenix rising from flame. He had agreed to the plan, even helped in getting the materials. Though he wondered if the accelerant would not later be detected and nothing good would come of the deed. But discovery was never to be. Their crime buried in copious grieving over the tragic loss of the great house. Over the terrible deaths of the Dupres. And their son Oliver. Poor motherless, fatherless, brotherless Odin.
It had been easy finding another drunken vagrant, passed out alongside the railroad tracks way to the rear of the big house. They had drug him home in the deep of the night, and tucked him neatly in Oliver’s bed, no one the wiser when the ruined body was discovered along with the other remains. Only Odin escaping because he had always been a light sleeper. Stumbling from the house in a daze, lungs filled with smoke, his fine hair scorched, but not a cell of his flesh burned.
And Oliver deep in the wood, smiling and safe, masturbating as he saw the rosy red glow of the flames rise over the pines, smelled the smoke bearing the scent of that misbegotten vagrant, the scent of his will-less weak father. And bearing, most deliciously, the scent of Mother. Burning, burning, burning.
The big house was lost. But money would never be a problem. The family holdings were extensive: oil and natural gas reserves; lumber interests. If nothing else, their father had been a competent businessman. At eighteen, he came into his majority. And as sole heir, took charge of liquidating the assets as soon after the fire as he could. Though he sustained losses, expediency was more important than gain, and there was enough for him and Oliver for two lifetimes.
And so began a new freedom, though remnants of the old life remained, some of necessity, some by choice. With the Kingdom half in light and half in shadow, they moved to New Orleans. He, a new young man, with a fresh identity. Oliver, a mole living underground by day, coming out at night to feed. And feed he did, his lust insatiable with the desperate conviction that the taking of life prolonged his own, would make right his damaged heart. And he, mostly a voyeur in those first years, watching and masturbating as Oliver snuffed out breaths and humped the dying flesh. But there came a time when there was one body too many, and he had done all he could in New Orleans. Graduated in architecture with honors from Tulane. Designed a few homes. Made a modest name for himself among the young and trendier set. It was time to move. To new hunting grounds.
So they packed and left, disappearing in the night. Traveling separately. Oliver overgrown in mustache and beard. Hair to his shoulders. He, cut and curried, a young talent on the move.
In New York, it was an apartment for himself, the warehouse for Oliver. And for a time, Oliver seemed content. Roaming inside the large structure like Jonah inside the belly of the whale. Until he tired of aimless discovery. Grew weary of the dark nooks and crannies of the old building. Tired of helping fix up the place so that it was livable, even pleasant. Tired finally of the lonely night walks, inhaling moonlight and neon, gas fumes and traffic noise. Tired of being a freak barred from the freak show he encountered on the seamier streets of the city. Despaired that he was growing weaker. That he could no longer wait. That he was in need. The Kingdom crumbling. And so he, Odin, the brother of light, went into the dark, a procurer, a pimp, to satisfy a lust that in truth had also become his own.
The breeze had died away. Above him in the oaks, the crows had begun to gather, as they did for their kind. The closest thing to ravens here, the birds carried memories . . . a favorite book. The Children of Odin had been his present from Mother for some accomplishment now forgotten. He and Oliver had devoured its pages, reading the stories over and over. Identifying with the Norse gods—he, with his namesake; Oliver, of course, with Loki the trickster. But it was Odin’s ravens that defined them. Huginn and Muninn sent into the world each morning to return with everything they had seen and heard. Huginn and Muninn. Mind and Memory . . . Possibility and Karma. David St. Cyr had been a dream that Mind had created. And Fate destroyed.
Odin hanging three days on the World Tree, giving his eye for knowledge. Christ on the cross. Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for his brother. Older by minutes, he had been there always for Oliver. Oliver, who had died for his redemption.
Odin Dupre was reborn, free this time. But that dream was Mother’s. Never his. He had fled the warehouse that Friday morning because Oliver, too sick to run, demanded it. Their final joke on the world, a hat trick. But no one left to laugh, because in the math of the Kingdom one half equaled none.
He wished he had the book of Norse myths, but it was in the New York apartment, and he had never returned since the morning he’d spotted his tail, trapped two nights in the dead limbo of a hotel room. The plans he had drawn for the Redmond house were in the apartment too. He regretted that his masterpiece would never be built, a temple to the Kingdom where twins would live in the order and harmony denied to him and his brother. But Oliver had drawn his own plans, conceived in the moment he’d seen the crystal-framed photograph stolen that night from the Redmond townhouse.
That photograph of the twins, at least, was with him. Ironic that he had never seen the twins in the flesh, avoiding them when he’d come to Oliver in those final days at the warehouse. He took the picture from a duffel bag, along with the videotapes and everything else he’d taken from the warehouse. He placed them in a pile at the center of the garden. The photograph on top.
High above the crows collected, fat and black. Their cries prophetic, piercing. Sharp and dark as the beaks that issued them. Nothing left to do. He doused the pile with gasoline. The rest poured over himself.
He lit a match.