She turned the keys to fire up the ignition. The car didn’t move. The arrow remained at zero. She began to cry.
She didn’t know how long she spent in the car, curled up in the driver’s seat with her head tucked against the window. When she opened her eyes again, morning sunshine drenched the station in a semblance of cheer, warming no one but her. Then the door of the convenience store next to the gas station creaked open.
Her dad walked out, dressed as a convict, a cup of coffee in one hand, and waved at her. His eyebrows rose once he registered who she was; he walked over quickly.
“Dad?” she said.
“Do you want some coffee?” he asked. “Are you okay?”
She shook her head. No.
“There are only so many hours you can sleep in a stranded vehicle.” He glanced at the dashboard of her car, then at the untouched receipt—her receipt—sticking out of the machine a few feet away like a stuck-out white tongue. “There’s only so many times you can try to resurrect the dead. You can sit there all you want but you’re not going anywhere. And, stuck as you are, you’ll be forced to think about it, forced to wake up at some point, forced to depart or die here.”
She nodded. He smiled at her, kissed her cheek, and walked back toward the convenience store. She watched him go. When the door shut firmly behind him, she got out of the car and began walking, away from the highway and the station.
She walked along a stretch of cement that paralleled the silk of the sea, rolling rippling waves that jostled gently like drugged children, flailing as they brushed against the cement wall, the line that served as a horizon between the black traffic of the asphalt and the blue motion of the water, the line that defined solidity from fluidity, the line that she tread upon with bare feet, forgetting the reason she’d begun walking.
The road swerved left. The crash of waves morphed into the rumble of thunder, and the black asphalt tapered to become a slender stretch of rope. She followed it up into the darkness, night spilling around and below her as someone knocked over the ink-jar of the sky and scattered its liquid to the furthest corners, dislodging silver shards of moon that bounced off her umbrella. The wind tugged at her hair and clothes and ripped the umbrella from her hand so that it disappeared as suddenly as it had materialized, and she danced and ducked to keep her balance.
I can’t, she thought.
Zach crouched on a beam at the far end of the rope, like an acrobat waiting for his turn. The clouds veiled whatever contraption he stood on. “If I stopped to think about how much life could hurt me, I wouldn’t get out of bed,” he remarked. “There’s always the risk of the suffocating pillows, of course. Breakfast would be a complete battlefield, frying eggs sending catapults of fire into my eyes. Getting dressed is another story altogether, because I might get lost in my oversized shirt like a child’s head caught in a plastic bag, or my belt might whip up and uncork my eyes from my skull—and, really, what’s a worse omen than tying a noose around your neck each morning? Weaving through cars on the highway is like zipping your fingers in and out of a cobra’s mouth and hoping it won’t decide to clamp down on your hand.” He shrugged, the wind tearing away fragments of his voice and face until he vanished altogether. “Then there’s always the possibility of getting run over by a car, of my noose getting caught in a metro door and dragging me like a potato sack till Dupont Circle, or a tiger escaping the zoo and realizing I make for a wonderful prime rib.”
The rope turned translucent beneath her feet, insubstantial as the clouds, and she fell through and between the miasma surrounding her. Someone had written with chalk on a wooden sign staked into one of the clouds, inscribing a single number “9”. The wind punched her until she turned cartwheels in the sky, caught in a brawl with elements that had been fist-fighting for their survival long before her coming; she was no match for them. A fierce blow to her eye left her reeling, unseeing, swept up in thunder and light, until she landed on the stage.
The wind set her down with surprising gentility, as a midwife hands over a squalling baby to its mother. She felt the roughness of the wood beneath her feet. And she saw, then, how her hands and body were of wood, too, and clanked and clacked with each step she took. A light blazed on her, its brilliance and heat startling her; she turned, squinting, and faced an audience of Dominics, each face twisted in grotesque laughter.
“You think,” she screamed at them, “that because I am tiny, I am solid, I am not like you—you think I am heartless? You think that because there are strings that crucify my palms, because my painted hair is covered with a painted cap, or because tears and frowns do not belie emotions on my rigid face, I feel no pain?”
She jerked her body and pulled at the strings. The violence of her movements cracked the wood of her skin. Splinters of blood burst from her fingers. Her heart pounded in the hollow cave of her hand-crafted chest, ready to erupt in protest.
But she did not stop.
The wood disappeared from beneath her feet as quickly as the rope had. Her hands lost their rigidity, becoming again things of flesh and blood. The splinters at her feet morphed into thorns, the curtains of the theater collapsed into the uneven branches of rose-bushes, and the laughing Dominics melted into shadows which thickened and stretched until they touched tips and kissed and bled into a colorless horizon. She continued her dance, snatching her feet away as the ground bared its teeth and rumbled, thorns clustering in rows and growing to become the teeth of upturned rakes and spades.
In the center of the garden reared a tree, glinting golden in the darkness, peppered with flowers that smelled of blood. The great yawning hollows of the trunk invited her in, promising a snug sanctuary. “They will suffocate you like a pillow of sand and you will never emerge alive,” a chittering voice cried out. The patterns engraved on the tree’s bark dizzied her eyes. “If your finger brushes against them, you’ll know true madness.” She glanced away from the bark, her eyes caught by a movement in the branches. A squirrel scurried down the trunk towards her. It didn’t seem to be bothered that its tail was swathed in flames, or that something had eaten away at half of its rot-black face and torso. Death’s pet project bared its teeth at her. “Do you really want to be here?” it asked.
She turned away and looked in the other direction.
The house at the end of the yard beckoned to her, beyond the abandoned farm tools and the uprooted fences. As she approached, she recognized it as the house where her grandfather lived as a child, a place she’d created and painted with the building blocks of his stories and the color of his shared memories. She ran in through the door, hoping to find Pappou. She found herself gazing at a spartan space, a room stripped of everything but a ragged blanketed mattress on the floor. The walls were russet-red, covered with paint or blood, depicting swastikas and other images she did not want to look at.
She crawled into the bed, instead, wrapping the blanket around her body to try to warm the gap where Dominic had punched through to reach her heart. She clutched the pillow to her chest, stemming the hurt oozing from inside. She listened to how the stones of the walls and the threads of the mattress envied her despair, telling her that her emotions were beautiful like birds of paradise, seemingly fragile, surprisingly resilient, fleeting and lovely, with wings that could churn blood and claws that could rake souls.
The voices of the stones and threads became muffled. She didn’t notice until she felt the tightening. The blanket, red as embers and smelling of disinfectant, wound itself around her as if of its own accord. Tight enough so it locked her arms against her torso, tight enough to shut her eyes and silence her screams. It happened too quickly for her to act, but life had a way of doing that.
React, though, she could.
She panicked, at first, and that only made it worse. She stilled her breathing and quieted her mind, knowing it could not end like this, wrapped in a blanket within a non-existent house in a make-believe story. She had a family to return to, a project to deliver for work, a wolf that needed h
er to open the door before he urinated on the carpet, and a heart that needed mending.
She didn’t have time for this.
Let it go, she instructed herself. It is important to cut things loose.
So she let go of the two ends of the blanket.
The fabric relaxed around her once she stopped tugging, shedding from her skin and collapsing into her upturned hands. The cocoon shrunk before her eyes, morphing from blanket to scarf. She threw the red scarf aside and stood up, walking across the room and towards the door.
The door no longer existed. She faced, in its stead and its dimensions, a smoky mirror. Dominic’s eyes stared back at her through it, his disembodied face golden in memory’s afterglow.
“Hello,” he said.
She jerked away. The pounding of her heart reminded her she had one, still.
“It’s not real,” she said out loud. “You’re not real.” She stepped close again, pressing her palms against the glass, and attempted to push open the mirror-door that would not budge. She desperately tried to find her own reflection somewhere, but there was only Dominic’s distorted face. “Wake up, Lexi. Wake up!”
“Why do you bother writing these stories?” he asked, lips curled in amused contempt. “They are stupid. They offer nothing. You never could see the fallacy of your passion. When you write it’s like you’re stealing pieces of the soul, taking them from others and airing them out and selling them.”
A flare of anger warmed her. “That’s not true,” she said. “I take nothing but inspiration.”
His face shifted for a moment. It became black and feathered, yellow-beaked and gruesome. “You’re nothing but a vulture, scavenging the minds of others. You chew through their thoughts and keep what you like, spewing it out as yours.”
“I’m a mirror,” she countered. “I reflect what I see and I share the truth of what I know, even if I do so clumsily. For what is a mirror, that you are so afraid of it anyway? It’s the shadow cast by reality, the reflection of the reflecting lens in your own eye. Beyond that, beyond the glass of reflections, the veil of illusions, the story continues. And it’s a lucky thing we cannot step into the fictive world of mirrors, for half of us would never know how to emerge and the other half of us would never want to.”
“Fictive?” He laughed until he gasped. “You mean lies. You write lies!”
“Do I? Then they are good lies that speak of real truths, giving you a different perspective in the hopes you will someday understand them.”
Dominic’s face snarled at her, no longer golden. “I built dreams on you,” he hissed. “I staked my hope on you. You weren’t enough. You couldn’t ever be enough. You’ll never be enough.”
The words snaked from his mouth and through the mirror, reaching towards her. They coiled around her arms and tightened around her throat until they brought her to her knees. She fought to breathe. A black serpent slinked between her legs and up around the curves of her breasts, its diamond head inches from her eyes, its forked tongue slipping in and out, kissing her eyelashes.
The room rebounded with Dominic’s laughter as Lexi collapsed against the mirror
Part Five
What happens when you mask your face, your weakness, your truth? What happens when you’ve worn a mask to the point that it is more skin than shield? Ink taints water. Mask fuses with skin. If someone tries to pry it off, they could unglue most of your face along with it.
That could get ugly.
24 / The Butcher
“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”
–Robert Bloch
She didn’t know the number. She didn’t know how it knew her, either. The text message didn’t waste time on cordialities.
TURN ON THE TV, it said.
Curiosity killed the cat. Lexi hesitated. Curiosity saved the mouse. She found the remote and switched on the TV.
Dominic gazed back at her; Lexi shrieked. It took her a heart-pounding moment to realize he wasn’t moving. It wasn’t him, somehow hiding within the screen. It was his photograph. And it wasn’t there anyway; it was just on TV.
“Just” on TV—right. Lexi shuddered.
She recognized the photograph. Dominic bundled in his black coat, a blood-red scarf around his neck branded in her memory, forever smelling of disinfectant. He was smiling at the camera. At her, specifically, at that point in time.
Lexi had taken that picture once upon a month ago.
It took her a second to recognize Sia Cussak’s voice emerging from the television, the reporter’s commentary accompanying the photograph.
“Dominic Lazaro has become one of the Hydra Party’s most outspoken supporters and generous donors. The Party, created by President Daimon, is calling for a resurgence of the agencies and a stricter upholding of Ruling 666, established during the President’s prior term. The Party’s members are said to be behind a number of recent bombings. Opposing parties complain of extremism, saying that the Hydra Party’s policy is to bomb first and ask questions later.”
On TV, Dominic’s photograph remained, resized to take up only half the screen; the other half was replaced by Sia Cussak, reporting live in the news studio. Lexi frowned. It had been quite a while since she’d last seen the news. There were new lines on the reporter’s face. There was emptiness in her eyes.
Lexi realized she preferred the tic. At least spasms indicated life.
“Lazaro claimed that he has exclusive information concerning whereabouts of places that have still not conformed to the 28th Amendment. Though not confirmed, this information was enough for President Daimon to personally welcome Dominic Lazaro, son of former CIA Director and current Head of the Department of Illusory Affairs Derick Lazaro, to the Oval Office.”
Lexi reached out to the television and touched Dominic’s face. She struggled to ground herself. A family shrouded in secrecy. Had he been a Hydra conformist all this time? A career in medicine that hid a legacy of politics? He’d once told her his parents were dead—and she’d believed him.
What else had she never questioned? What else had he been hiding?
“Young Lazaro has already earned a nickname in the political arena,” Sia continued. “Members of the Hydra Party call him the Butcher, a name that they say pays tribute to his medical profession. However, despite—” Sia stopped herself mid-sentence. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just received word from our correspondent in the White House.” She pressed the earplug closer to her ear, nodding expressionlessly. “The leads from Lazaro have been confirmed.”
Lexi hurled herself from the television as if electrocuted.
25 / Judas
“‘I suppose he does run Hell. That’s not so great, you know, with the torture and eternal damnation.’
‘I’m retired. And besides, I didn’t create Hell. I just worked there.’”–Lucifer (2016)
The pick-up was a bad idea.
She didn’t make it more than half a block before the vehicle skidded on ice and slid into a ditch. It was like moving in the worst kind of dream—she’d been going so slow, the wheels were out of her control, and she was helpless to do anything but watch the inevitable unfold. She cursed as the vehicle nosed into the ditch, the impact throwing her against her seatbelt. Yang yelped from the seat beside her and scrabbled to keep his balance.
Lexi jumped out. Minimal damage to the truck, but it wasn’t going anywhere. Vehicle assistance would take forever to arrive in this weather. A stuck pick-up was worthless to her. She pocketed her keys and walked as quickly as she could, wary of the patches of ice.
Dominic Lazaro, the voice echoed in her head.
One of the Hydra Party’s most outspoken supporters…
Claimed that he has exclusive information…
She ran then, praying she wouldn’t slip, staying on tire tracks that hadn’t had time to freeze over. She ran until she whimpered from a stich that stole her breath, and kept running. Her knees ached. Yang l
oped at her side, muscles bunching and contracting, running ahead and circling back in order to stay near his slower human. Lexi’s breath came in gasps, gulping down frosty air pockets.
It was a surreal winter wonderland. The clouds muted the sun in a smoke-white sky above sleek dark streets. Silence, cut only by the crackling of the snow beneath Lexi’s pounding boots. The sky was splotched black as crows suddenly erupted from the trees, cawing like harpies.
“Judas!” they cawed. “Judas! Judas! Judas!”
No, she begged. The vision of a tragic confrontation looped in her mind, playing again and again. Forgive me Khalil, for I have sinned.
Khalil would laugh and ask: Yeah right. What have you done, gir? Called in sick to work?
The warehouse appeared in the distance, half-hidden behind snow-capped trees. Camouflaged. Unwary. Seemingly abandoned. Lexi could imagine the chiming laughter deep inside the building’s belly. The clack of backgammon chips on the tables. The clinking of glasses in a toast. She startled a second flock of crows.
I’ve spoken of the Tzami, she would say. I’ve betrayed you.
Khalil would solemnly confirm her fears. That is a terrible crime.
A near-silent thrumming made Yang whine. A stealth helicopter, the kind that didn’t make much noise, colored like a cloud and shaped like a shark. The kind that was hard to notice if it didn’t spook the wolf beside you.
Or if you hadn’t been looking for it.
Twenty yards from the warehouse, Lexi slipped and stumbled on the ice. She fell hard on her left kneecap and yelped in pain. She was close enough to see—through the pines, through the snowflakes that began to fall—Khalil slip out through the concealed door of the building, dressed in a thin sweater and jeans. He held a bulging blue trash-bag in one hand. A third and final flock of crows exploded, cawing in warning, over the Tzami.
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