by L C Barlow
Something brushed against my face, and then there was a sharp pain in my throat. My head jerked back so quickly I thought my neck would break. I fell down and backwards. I hit against something hard. I tried to scream, but my throat was too tight.
I grabbed at my neck with my hands. My fingernails scraped against thin wire. This is it! I thought.
And then there was something in my mouth. It cut into the ends of my lips like a burning saw and then I could feel it winding around my head. My hands were jerked down and pinned behind me. I opened my eyes.
There were three figures in the dark, and then nothing. My head was shoved into a bag, and then I was pushed. I didn't fall onto concrete, but something slightly softer. My legs were pushed towards me, and then I heard a thud, and I knew. I was in the trunk of a car.
The tires did not screech, but soon we were moving quickly. I thought of Cyrus. I knew it was him. It had to be him.
No! It wasn't him, but the others. They had come for me - four years later - but they had come. I screamed.
Not a soul was there to hear me.
Chapter 20
THE DESTRUCTION OF FAITH
Ever since that first night, when I brought those men, women, and children back to the world of the living, I had yearned to do it again, and when Cyrus said that we were to murder a Minister's family for the sake of the box, I could not help but feel a little glee. It was not just that I finally had a route to disobeying Cyrus, or that returning souls felt just as fulfilling as cutting them away, but something in me was completed in those moments. When I was complete, I didn't need drugs to overcome the darkness.
I could be close to murder and death, and yet I made them shine and disappear. I fell in love with the completion.
I did not stop Cyrus as we treaded in the darkling night to the suburban home, where the wife and children slept, and I said not a word as I watched him slit their throats, one by one, silently, letting the white sheets turn black. I couldn't have stopped him, had I wanted to. He would have destroyed me just as cleanly as those young girls in the woods.
Instead, I remained silent, appeared to him nothing more than the usual Jack with the cuspate knife and the sparkle of blood in my eye. But inside, I stroked that warmth in the pit of my stomach - I petted the new power. It was a poison that undid his work, but as a poison it could only thrive if unseen and unheard.
He suspected nothing.
After Cyrus was through with killing the family, He, Alex, and I went to the cafe as usual to drink our coffees and eat gritty bacon and crunchy peppers and potatoes in the dark night.
Maria was there as usual, taking our orders, awaiting Cyrus's hundred-dollar tip. The silver owl clock ticked away the minutes, and I surveyed its silver wings, noting that soon they would rise and fall. Very shortly after they flapped, I would return to the minister's home, knife forgotten, and resurrect them all.
As we sat and talked, I licked my lips not from the food, but from the sweetness I knew I would feel in just a few hours, when Cyrus and Alex were asleep, and I could steal Cyrus's car and stall the "destruction of faith" that Cyrus so desperately wanted to commit.
"I'm sorry I doubted you," Cyrus said to me in the bright red plastic booth.
I smiled at him. "We all have our moments of weakness," I said, half in jest, all in seriousness.
"I apologize for trying to have you killed," he continued, "by giving you to that shining monster in that house. I am glad that he didn't do away with you. I'm also, I must say, curious as to why."
I gulped down a morsel of unease with my coffee. "Why what?" I asked.
"Why didn't he kill you? We have been at war forever. Usually, when he has the chance, he gets rid of my favorites. This time, it seems, he strangely failed."
"Maybe he knew I wasn't your favorite anymore."
Cyrus shook his head 'no.' "You still are."
I dabbed the corners of my lips with a napkin. "Maybe I am too young for him; he doesn't seem to have the same tastes as you, after all."
Cyrus tilted his head as though considering this. "Only if by young, you mean something else. Age doesn't matter to him, necessarily. He does not fight for what we fight for. He does not think the way we think."
"Who is he?" I asked.
"Someone who could have just as easily been on our side, but chose otherwise." He sighed. "Someone I can never get rid of. Someone who would, believe it or not, be greatly useful to me in his pieces."
I thought of the cracks in the man's body, and I wondered, suddenly, if he was indeed a living, breathing human pottery as I had first imagined. I counted again the brilliant cuts in his skin slicing all the way through him. "Why?" I asked.
"You break a piece of him off, and it's like you have programmable lightning. Cutting him apart would be like an endless Christmas holiday, with gift after gift after gift."
I felt the warmth stir in my stomach, an illness deluge me. I did not like the way Cyrus spoke of the brilliant stranger, even if that stranger had cut me open and sewed within me something against my will. In many ways, Cyrus had done the same surgery, but with a far more painful, messy, and debilitating method.
"I would like to make sure," said Cyrus, "that I am not wrong."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"I would like to make sure that he didn't save you for your innocence, or would be innocence."
I noticed the twinkling yellow lights of the cafe suddenly, and how great their glare and hum became, like my blood was suddenly filled with pure oxygen. Exaggerated was the warmth of Alex beside me and the tinkling of his fork and knife against his plate. I wanted to take his instruments and stab him.
"How are you going to make sure?" I asked.
"You're going to kill the next family on your own. Alex and I will watch, but you will be the one to do it - slit their throats one-by-one, even the children."
I shook my head as though trying to shake off his words. "What will this prove?"
"That even if there was something in you not like us, worth his saving, there won't be anymore. What we need to do is excise. Just once. Then, you can leave it all again to me as your leader."
In my unease, I touched my lips with one of my fingers and felt the dry skin like it was scales. I plucked a piece off, but it seemed another scale slid into its place, and I felt suddenly that all of the actions in all of the world were useless - that we always come back to where we started.
"It's no problem," I told him, "to do what you ask." He smiled and touched my hand.
"Tomorrow night, then," he replied. My stomach recoiled as his fingers gripped mine gently, and when I could do so without seeming impolite, I pulled my hand away.
The silver clock ticked, and the owl's wings stretched out at the strike of two with two flaps. Cyrus excused himself, left the booth, and walked towards the restroom, and as he did, I said to Alex turning to look at his blonde head, "Lucky you, you've never had to do a damned thing."
"I do lots of things," he replied, characteristically wicked. "Just in a very specific place, with a very specific people."
I exhaled a disgusted laugh and said, "I'll never understand you."
"That's because you've never had sex."
"We kill, Alex. That's our sex."
"I don't kill."
"That's right," I replied, dropping my fork, sounding as though I had been suddenly reminded, though I had never forgotten. "I suppose we're both virgins."
This did not sit well with him. He leaned close to my ear, and he whispered to me his condescension. In the midst of his insults, I watched Cyrus exit the restroom, and Alex's words came to me with the beat of Cyrus's step. "You think you're so much better than me, but you're not.
"People think you're strong, but really, you're just sly. Without a gun or a knife, you're nothing. Without our family, you would have been raped and dead long ago, just a hollow whore in the ditch we'd drive past - a junkie without a cause. You're practically a puff away from not existing. That's wh
at you'll always be. Killing men does not make you any different from that. People kill each other every day. It's nothing special, just like you."
Cyrus squeaked into the red booth, and Alex leaned away from me and reclined next to the window as though we had not spoken.
"Are we ready to go?" Cyrus asked.
"If you are," I replied, as pleasantly and agreeably as I could. I looked to Alex, and he smiled.
But as we three evil-doers sauntered to the car, I stayed two steps behind Alex the whole way, realizing that, though there was something deep down inside me that lusted for, and now could accomplish, the full-circle completion of life to death to life, there were some people that I would never have return.
There were times when not being complete would fill my need - when failure to resurrect would be a pleasure.
I pictured a lepidopterist's collection. I saw a room filled with thousands of butterflies with shimmering blue and amber wings, small yellow ones, and brilliant orange.
Then, I imagined the magical lepidopterist himself who, with a strange power not his own, could bring these butterflies back to life, watch them crowd his office like bumbling confetti.
Every butterfly he would make soar - all but one, that is. The poisonous one - if there was such a thing as a poisonous butterfly - would be the one more wondrous dead. Alex was such a poisonous butterfly.
I would love to have Alex as my victim, I thought, as the precious victim that would never return. Yes, though I had full satisfaction in the full circle - of the swing from up to down and then all around - there were times when not satisfying that circle would be satisfying. This was one of those times when magic was not needed, only the hard, cold tool of reality.
And the knife, yes. And the gun.
* * *
As Cyrus lay in his bed, I crept out, took his car, and drove to the Minister's home.
Their corpses were heaped on the marble kitchen floor - three children and the mother - and I thought back to just hours before, when Cyrus slit their throats, sacrificed them to the boxed god he now worshipped, and practically skipped with joy as he reiterated to both Alex and me how the husband would return, his faith for the next few days shattered, and that we would revisit the home and kill him. We would send him to hell. It was, in a way, hell on top of hell. Hell-squared.
I knelt to the shiny black marble tile that reflected the moonlight through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and my knees instantly grew cold and wet in their blood.
I held my hand over the woman's face and brushed the hair from her eyes. I opened my hand wide and brought it close to her, flexed within myself the desire to resurrect, and I saw the woman's green eyes shift up towards my hand, just as the children had done before in the woods, just as the families on Cyrus's land. The ball of my stomach grew warm.
In one swift movement, I touched her cheek and those same eyes came alive, her mouth parted in a deep gasp, and she leaned over to her side while looking wildly in every direction.
“What did you do?” she whispered. It sounded violent, accusing. In her emotion I nearly forgot my confidence; yet, when I heard my own voice begin to respond, it swiftly returned.
“I’ve brought you back.”
“Back?” She looked to the ground at her own blood on the tile, her right hand lightly clawing at it, and then to her children beside her.
“Oh God.” Her left arm went to her left side and then neck, checking for the previous wounds. “Oh God, you brought me back.”
“Yes. I did.” I leaned forward and crouched closer to her level, my shoes squeaking on the floor.
"Who are you?" she asked, and her eyes drank me in.
I nearly stuttered, stupidly. I hadn't planned what to say.
Her breaths billowed out before her as she looked incredulously at me. She shook her head. "Who the hell are you?! What... Where was I?"
"You were dead," I said. "I... I came to bring you... and your children... back."
The woman looked behind her wildly and saw her children on the floor. "Oh my God," she said. She crawled to them and grabbed at each of them, unable to decide if she should touch them, and then she pulled both towards her. "Oh my God, hurry."
"No," I replied, and she turned to me. "No, we need to clean this place before I bring them to."
The woman peered at me as though not understanding. She shook her head back and forth.
"I swear to you, I am here to return them to you. But they don't need to see all of this. We need to clean everything."
She pelted me with questions then, her brain like a person's just waking from a black out. "Who are you?" she asked, and then, "Who did this to us?"
I stood, but I did not answer her.
"Are you an angel?" she asked, breathlessly.
I said, "I'm not anything. I'm not anybody. I'm not what you could possibly guess that I am. More importantly, I do not have all the time in the world." I stepped to her quickly and knelt down. It startled her.
I touched her arm. "Help me clean this, so I can give you your children back."
We cleaned. I took the sheets back to Cyrus's and burned them, but not before we washed the children, not before we tucked them back into their beds, not before I saw their blue eyes waken, as if from a bad dream, their cold bodies suddenly hot and full of energy, and not before she thanked me.
As I left their home, she stung me with the words, "You are so miraculous. Thank you. Thank you. God is so good. I thank Him for sending you to me." She was clawing at my arm and holding me close. By then, the memories of what had happened returned to her, and tears streamed down her face.
As I was leaving, "You must be a guardian angel," she said.
I whispered to her again, "I am nothing. Believe me."
At her front door, stepping into the night, I whispered, "Never speak of this, or the death will return." This was not true, but nevertheless I said it. She nodded her head in assent.
"I'll never doubt Him again," she said as I stepped onto her porch and out into the cool air. This sentence made me pause, but no response felt safe to speak.
I made sure my knife was snug in my pocket as I walked back to Cyrus's car, bundles of clothing and sheets to burn under my arm.
There are no such things as angels, I thought to myself as I walked that path. There is only Cyrus, those who follow him, and those who sneak around him. Everything is a backwards dealing, a script where errors are miracles, and corrections are only a bullet away.
As for good works, they are dangerous and impossible. Only the likes of demons can successfully complete them, and they know not wholly what they do.
Chapter 21
A DIFFERENT BREED
There was the trunk, and then the next moments felt so long, so horrible, and I began to imagine in excruciating detail what would happen to me. I felt the knives slice into my belly, crisscross, and come back to center, before they even touched me.
I tried to pull the cuffs to the front of me, but they were bound as well at my waist. I thought I might suffocate with the cord wrapped in my mouth, and then I pictured myself vomiting, choking, dying, before they could even cut into me. I told myself I should want to vomit. That it would be quick.
When the trunk opened, I psychically reached out for cool air, but I couldn't feel anything except hands as they pulled me out like a doll from a case. They grabbed my hair and held it as though it was the strings to controlling me. And then I was pushed, walked, walked, and then stopped. I had entered a room. A small one, for I could hear echoes against close walls, and then a finger barely pushed me back, just enough so that I fell. I hit something hard and was sitting.
Then, the bag over my head was pulled away and nearly at the same time, the gag was pulled from my wet mouth.
When I could see again, I looked savagely at them, peering into eyes, eyes, everywhere. Five pairs of them, but none that I knew! They were cold, they were numb, they were experienced eyes. They were unfeeling, but they were not my kind of unfeel
ing. They did not belong to me or my past. No Cyrus, no Alex, no Marcus, no Greg.
I relaxed and looked dead center.
Before me was a square, dark-wood table, and on the other side of it a man. He was older, but not more than in his forties. He was graying early. His face was round, his hair wavy, perfectly cut. Trim. He looked crisper than even the table. He was adorned with a black leather jacket that was zipped to his throat. He had laid his hands out on the table, almost like a card reader. There was a file between them.
"Calm down," he said to me. "You can rest assured that we will not hurt you... tonight."
It was at that moment I realized I was panting, and I tried drawing my dry tongue into my mouth and closing it, but it was impossible. I looked away from him and leaned back against the chair, breathing deep, trying to return my perception to normal. I looked to the ceiling and it was all exposed pipe.
"Now, now, don't shut down on me," the man said. "Would you like a smoke?"
I looked back to him and gave the barest of nods. "The whole pack."
His laughter was velvety and deep. "We have liquor, too."
There was a bang, and sure enough, there was a glass in front of me and a very small, unopened bottle of whiskey.
"James, remove the cuffs. I don't think we'll have any problems with... you go by Jack?"
There was a pause. I nodded.
I leaned forward, and with a little effort, James unbuckled me. I pulled my hands around to the front of me and lit a cigarette that had appeared with a lighter. I just sat there and smoked and smoked, and then he spoke to me.
"Not once did you scream. Why?"
I didn't know why, and I told him so. "It never occurred to me."
"Hm," he said. "Are you sure that's why?"
"What else would it be?"
He said nothing. Then, "You should learn how to scream. It might save you one day."
I did not respond.
"Jack, do you have a brother?"
"No," I said. "I'm an only child."
"Well, that's not true." He smiled. "After all you have a sister, age sixteen, named Samantha. She lives not too far from here."