by Brian Hodge
"Then go back and start being nice to him. Get him to quit sulking in the bathroom."
She barked another of her strange, incredulous laughs. "He went in by himself, let him decide when he wants to come out. Why should I have to coax him?"
Valentine took a step forward and leaned into Ellie's face. "Because if you don't, I'll blacken your eye," then he reached beneath his cable-knit sweater to draw out a gun that Clay hadn't realized he'd been carrying, a heavy revolver that captivated by sheer presence and oiled, black sheen. He spun the cylinder and let the gun dangle errantly from his fist. "And if that doesn't move you, then we'll play the game again, like we did that one time."
Ellie drew herself together, very cool, very aloof, her lips compressing into an expression almost prim as she regarded him for a few moments. "Okay, Patrick. You can have it your way." She began to scoot toward the hall. "You always do."
And when Clay followed Valentine over to sit with him in the living room it wasn't so much that he wanted to, as that he hoped for some explanation that would shed full light on this nineteenth floor cuckoo's nest. Certainly he didn't belong here, and probably he would have left by now if he had anywhere to go, anything to do … any reason to leave and live for. He was beginning to get a distinct feeling of being used, rather than educated.
"What is this all about, here?" Clay asked. "What is it you want out of those two?"
And when Valentine began to rhapsodize about conception, and breeding stock, and what might the offspring be like parented by not one but two Helverson's subjects, it seized Clay's imagination with a dread so palpable he really feared he might be ill.
Helverson's times two? Helverson's squared? Or might the result be a mutation fouler still, never before seen, never anticipated, grotesque potency distilled through the generations.
"You'd do that to some kid deliberately?" he whispered.
What a horrible thing, what a perfectly horrible thing, and he recalled those times with Erin when they had lain in bed and the thought of siring a child was the worst act he could think of, the worst crime he could commit upon innocence, even upon a world as corrupt as he knew theirs to be.
"You're a monster. You're a complete monster." It might have stung the man, for while he didn't flinch, he cocked his head to one side almost as if he didn’t comprehend. It might have hurt him … but it was so hard to tell.
Clay stood to turn his back on the man, nearly stumbling on his way to the sliding balcony door, where he leaned against the glass and stared at the snow beginning to fall. When he heard Valentine behind him he knew if the guy so much as rested a hand on his shoulder, that would be it, he would go for his eyes.
"No. I'm not," was all the man said, all he did. "I'm just the first."
But there Clay stayed, Valentine leaving him be, an hour or more passing as life went on too slowly, as Ellie and Daniel came back and seemed at truce, and one of them asked, "So what's wrong with him?" but went unanswered. They began to smoke from her stash, peace pipe maybe, and Clay watched the leaden sky go darker with the first gloom of dusk.
Then he heard something he had never expected to hear, not in this place, with all four of them as isolated from one another as they were from the world at large:
He heard the doorbell.
*
Adrienne's gaze fell naturally upon Clay as soon as they were let in. Fifteen feet away, across this penthouse apartment, there was true pain in what she saw: Oh, he's worse, he'd not weathered the trip north well at all. Only three days had passed since she'd seen him, but he appeared thinner, paler, his eyes burning gray hollows. The only genuine color in him came from the savaging he had given the side of his face: the red badge of desperation.
Only then did she truly notice the others.
She thought, oddly, of their brief discussion about Salvador Dali, wondering if Sarah did likewise, for here was surrealism: encountering four faces so wholly similar, staring back. It was academic to see pictures; visceral to enter a home and see a quartet in which individuality appeared sacrificed to a prevailing stigma.
She caught her breath. See them, and one could find it too easy to believe in a purpose underlying their births. Given the suspicion and hostility in at least some of those eyes, perhaps it was precisely as Clay had said. There was something eerily more than human in all those streamlined faces turned her way, like lizards catching sound of a threat.
"Are you sure you're in the right place?" the girl asked. Ellie. Her name, Timothy had said, was Ellie.
"No doubt." Sarah took another step, hands fisted into the slash pockets of her down vest. "There's no other place like this, is there?"
Across the room, their elder rose from the chair in which he seemed to have been brooding for a while. Patrick Valentine had a glare that could cause ulcers.
"Who are you?" he asked.
Adrienne lifted her hand toward Clay, framed against a glass door, a skyline, a thickening snowfall. "I've been Clay's doctor since September."
"Rand. Oh, right." Valentine spared Clay a perfunctory glance, then regarded her with dismissal. "How proud you must be. He looks wonderful."
She ignored him, or tried, because he was obviously the sort of man who would miss nothing, who understood what would hurt and how to exploit it, a man who knew where all the nerves lay. Don't listen to him. There was only Clay here, she decided, and spoke his name but nothing more, for everything had abandoned her. All logic, all persuasion … gone.
But maybe it was better this way. Maybe she belonged mute. She needed to say nothing for Clay to see how far she had come, how low she had fallen. He would realize why they had come — that no matter what he did, she still refused to let hope die.
It should have been a simple decision for him. He obviously had come here and found more unhappiness than answers.
And yet…
He hesitated.
"Do we need to talk," she said, finding resolve, "or would that even do any good any more?"
"It's not that simple," said Clay, and why did he insist on making it so difficult for himself? Couldn't he for once just admit the mistake and redress it by taking the quick way out? But no, he couldn't bring himself to make it that easy.
Sarah caught her eye then, Sarah sad and emptying right there beside her. It's us, Adrienne realized. It's the way he sees us, to him we must seem so complete together, that to be with us magnifies every bit of stability and unity he's lacking. He's reminded of it every moment he's with us, and he doesn't see the disagreements or the squabbles, but even if he did it might make everything even more genuine, because he'd realize they never last long…
It's us. We're as much at fault as anyone.
Sarah fumbled blindly for her hand, ever intuitive, sensing that sudden failure in her. She took a step forward to pick up the slack.
"As long as you never see the sun," she said, with a smile — if anyone could turn his awful pallor into a gentle joke it was Sarah — "would you like to come back with us as a consultant? I've got this wild idea for part of my thesis, I want to go looking for cave paintings in old shut-down factories, and you're the only expert I know."
Clay's face softened, wistful, transported to another day. He looked almost hopeful. "Where are you going to start?"
Sarah shrugged. "South Dakota, maybe? If you think it's worth the trip. I figure it's worth a look."
Adrienne didn't immediately catch on. South Dakota? Then the memory fired: Where Erin went home to, and if Sarah was the one to talk Clay down from here instead of her, fine, more power to her, whatever worked. And it appeared that she really might, for he looked upon Sarah with as much trust as she had ever seen him grant.
None of which was lost on Valentine. He would look for these weaknesses as a rule. Soft underbellies were made to be torn.
"And what then, Clay, a week from now, a month?" he said. "Is she going to marry you? You think you're going to set up some happy home in the mountains? Raise normal babies?"
&nbs
p; Adrienne stared. Whatever's passed between the two of them … Valentine doesn't understand it at all. He can't read it right because he's probably never had a friend in his life.
"If you think anything even remotely like that is going to happen for you," Valentine said, "you're living in a fantasy world that'll destroy you when you get burned out of it."
Bristling, Sarah appeared to have had about enough. "You're the last man on earth to lecture anyone on fantasy worlds," she told him. "You're the little man behind the curtain in Oz."
Against the near wall, Ellie stuttered into laughter, and the other man — Adrienne wasn't even sure which one this was — turned on her with alarm, Shut up, shut UP! in his taut features. Adrienne had almost made a similar observation, but to Sarah alone, discreetly. How ironic: All day Sarah had been the one to preach caution, to fret about Adrienne angering this Machiavellian tyrant.
"I'll take my chances," said Clay, and moved toward his coat.
Valentine nodded, muscles bunching in his jaw. "Chance is the stuff of life."
It happened very abruptly.
Clay was halfway to his coat when Valentine went kinetic, empty hand plunging beneath his sweater and emerging full, mighty as Thor with a hammer. He swung out the revolver's cylinder, and no one could have missed hearing the clicking metallic whir as he spun it. Pivoting then, slapping the cylinder back into place and raising his hand, he thrust the pistol forward as if he were launching a javelin, every motion so smooth and fluid that Adrienne was not so much frightened as insanely curious to know how often he had practiced this.
"Snake in the grass!" he shouted as the gun reached its apex, which made no sense to her at all. She met his eyes, and no one could have looked more surprised than Valentine when the gun blasted out a single devastating shot. At once he erupted with a triumphant whoop.
With every sense raw, unguarded, sensation became immense. The sound of bullet striking skin was orchestral; the blood that splashed her felt scalding. The hand clutching her arm was a fearsome claw, and she looked over, looked down, to see the side of Sarah's throat.
Gone. Just gone.
Together they fell, Sarah's weight dragging her down. Sarah began to choke before they hit the floor, her eyes gaping and glazed in disbelief. An anemic cry warbled past Adrienne's lips as her hands trembled, then groped in a frantic attempt to staunch the flood from Sarah's throat. It sprayed, it flowed. It pulsed and gushed.
Adrienne scrabbled to her knees beside Sarah, cradled her as the mad clawing desperation in Sarah's fingers resigned to a tender stroking. They could say nothing to each other now. Words took time, and were imprecise at best, never enough to hold everything that must be said when they are needed most.
A falling shadow: Adrienne looked up in reflex — to defend Sarah’s last ragged breath? — but it was Clay falling along her other side. Coming not to steal this terminal moment but to share it. He reached, an arm sliding beneath Sarah as he helped bear the weight that had grown so slack. With his other hand he touched her face. Through the chill of shock she was aware of it, aggrieved eyes crinkling for a moment, and with a blood-slicked hand she reached for Clay's cheekbone. He did not flinch.
He's touching, Adrienne thought, the only lucid flicker in awareness that otherwise wailed. Then: Why does it take a catastrophe before it happens…?
Adrienne embraced Sarah, clutched her, felt the blood wash down her front and tried to impart her will even though it never work: Live, you, just another moment, just another lifetime, just long enough to hear me say I loved you. Live.
Adrienne raised her head, sacrificing a precious second to look about the room — could anything be done, could anyone help? — but there was nothing for her beyond the sight of three others, immobile, doppelgangers all, watching someone die.
A moment that came too soon. By decades.
The silence was total, its own world as she clung to Sarah's last bubbling breath, the final tremulous beat of her heart, the last pulse of blood. If anyone took these from her, she would show no mercy.
Ellie was first to break the silence, with a sickened cry that ripped free as if it had been trapped for minutes. She shook her head in denial, then lurched back to the bedroom, bathroom. It sounded as if she picked up speed as she went, and whether she retched or sobbed once there, it was not clear.
Like a broken appendage, her companion followed, backing out of the room while pulling off a pair of dark round lenses. Gone, then, and nothing else moved but Adrienne's lowering head.
So it had come to this.
Clay fell aside, sitting heavily on his rump with elbows on knees, head in hands. His breath came swift and shallow, about to hyperventilate.
Is this what it's like to be you? she wondered. With nothing left inside or out to go on?
How did he do it? How ever had he done it all these years?
Valentine had sat again, on the edge of his chair, so wholly absorbed in the moment that he appeared transported. His face bore the look of artists who have achieved the breakthrough to aesthetic perfection, who have transcended themselves and ride a moment that felt eternal. Adrienne knew that he would never again feel this alive.
Hate him? He was too alien to truly hate.
She fell inward again, the first real sob working its way up, scarcely aware that Clay had risen and walked from the room. He barely touched the floor, gliding, may have been gone a moment, maybe an hour, and when she glimpsed him again he had returned from the kitchen, flowing with smooth even purpose, a mongoose to the cobra.
She opened her mouth, mute, and what a mistake to think that she had no heart left to break.
His first slashing blow with the butcher knife caught Patrick Valentine across the forehead, opening a deep split that rained a sheet of blood across his eyes, blinding him. Two-handed, Clay plunged it down into the meat of one shoulder, then the other. The gun went thumping to the floor, and a moment later Valentine fell atop it, as Clay bore after him with a brutality primordial and relentless. His face was gone, replaced by the visage of carnivores that rolled in the spoor of their prey.
"No, no, stop, don't do that," she murmured, crawling over Sarah and slipping along on all fours until, midway there, her strength giving way to shock, she sprawled upon the floor while Clay swung the knife, and plunged it, and gouged it, and twisted it, never once looking up from the task at hand —
*
— until it was finished, forever and ever.
So here the journey ended. He could see it now, unspooled behind him. From Denver through the deserts to Tempe, then back again. To the brink of mountains and down once more, through the mounting losses, then across frozen wastes. To the savannahs within and, finally, north. All the while, sliding down the coil of the double helix, until here he was, a new being. No, not new — complete, the killer he had always been destined to be.
The inevitable quit trying so hard to impose itself, once it was accepted.
And if there were regrets, they were only for the innocent. For Sarah, and for Adrienne too, because she had dared believe he was redeemable. She had deserved better.
She had never had a chance.
Dripping, he rose from the corpse of Patrick Valentine, got as far as his knees before he saw Adrienne's eyes. In shock, she was, trembling and chilled. He knew the look, but had not realized just how horrible a creature he must truly be until he saw the judgment on her face.
He fetched a silken comforter from the sofa and draped it over her, so she might stay warmer. Stripped away his shirt, his pants and the rest, for he, conversely, was burning alive.
Knife in hand, he trod down the hall.
Their existence was intolerable, of course. He had known this all along, had tried to fight it, had tried to see it as another of nature's simple ways that were indifferent to the outcome. Much less deserving life forms than they had met with extinction; he would do his part.
Daniel Ironwood he found in the bathroom, trying with nervous hands to light more
to smoke. He dropped his paraphernalia when he saw Clay, naked and bloodied, and the knife was swift to fall. They grappled down along a peach-hued wall, a towel bar coming free, with which Daniel managed to strike a bruising blow along Clay's collarbone. He sank the knife through Daniel's lower abdomen and hung on despite the sudden burst of fetid odor. Knife grated bone, and together they twitched, and Daniel wept as his struggles grew feeble. Then nonexistent.
Oh, how he had wanted to live.
Ellie he found in the bedroom, sitting on her bed and drawn into a tight ball. He'd thought she might be the fiercest of the three, yet here she had all but surrendered, and he supposed no one was really as tough as they let on.
And Ellie knew him, knew his heart as well as he did.
"I can't help what I am," she whispered, and would neither tremble nor cry. Nor beg.
"None of us can," he said, and proved to himself just how wrong Valentine had been last night on the balcony, on the theory and practice of killing.
The third one is by far the hardest.
*
He made his way back to the living room, where Adrienne had not moved. He was spent by now. All the days, all the miles, too little sleep and precious little food — he was consuming himself from the inside. He had glimpsed his body in a mirror back there and it had looked wasted.
He fell into Valentine's chair, one foot on the man himself, and used the remote to turn on the television. Flipped around but found nothing of redemption so he turned it off. The silence left a yawning void.
Adrienne was watching him from the floor, not so certain that her own turn wasn't coming next — or so her gaze struck him — and he knew he had done far worse than kill her already. The thought made him cry and he hurled the knife away, down the hall.
Clay slid to the floor, crawled to her, and from beneath the comforter one arm extended. She raised herself enough so that they were able to fit together, her head resting against his shoulder, sticky though it now was. An arm around him next, and a hand upon his knee.