by Harker Moore
“I want to remember,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “Tell me again about the accident … and the tunnel.”
His fingers ceased their motion on her skin. She sensed his smile, his eyes intent upon her face, as if he guessed that her purpose was delay. “It was in the tunnel I remembered,” he began, and wrapping her in a large towel, he lifted her from the tub and carried her back to the bedroom.
She lay where he placed her on the bed, the towel spread beneath her. He turned her to face him, where he sat beside her, and began to rub her body with a warm and scented oil. He continued to speak—his hands kneading her skin—of the kinship they shared, she Zavebe and he Gadriel, beings of pure spirit who had once shared a union unimaginable to humans. A union they would soon share again.
She flinched when the blade touched her, moving first in the hollow of her underarm. She let his voice become a droning. Withdrew into the light. It was the light that glided above her skin with the razor. The light that purified the act, even to the shaving of her pubis.
The singsong of his recital stopped. The feel of the towel was raw reality. “You had little body hair.” His words as he wiped her down, removing the residue.
He sat her in a hard straight chair, draping some covering around her shoulders, securing it under her chin. Words she could not believe whispered in her ear: “I will not hurt you.”
She did not understand what was coming, her mind reaching for every bit of information, every detail she had gleaned of Jimmy’s case. But it was none of that. Her only warning was the sudden grind of metal near her face, the scythe sound of the scissors beginning their harvest.
It was a kind of cleansing, he explained, this further mortification of her body. When he was done, when she was shorn, he brushed the clumps of hair from her neck and her cheeks, then removed the cover carefully from her shoulders.
“You are yet beautiful, Zavebe.”
She nearly broke. Some part of her yearned for an end to it, to let go, to dissolve to nothing inside his madness. But in this moment she was still alive, the child within her still alive. In this moment, and in this moment … and this.
Sakura had driven through the brittle sleet with a single string of words playing over and over in his head: Let her be alive, let her be alive. The precipitation had stopped, leaving behind an unwholesome stillness and a flattened sky.
He was losing sense of time again. But he knew it was well more than an hour since he’d left Willie at the hospital and moved out of the city onto the interstate, into the denseness of upstate New York and the Hudson River Valley. Kelly had checked in to say they were headed north and would expect him to call if and when he had an exact location.
He shifted in the driver’s seat, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, the stubble of a beard grown darker, the fear in eyes barely recognizable. One hand clamped hard on the steering wheel, the other reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, withdrawing his handkerchief. No longer clean, he sought some remnant of laundered freshness inside the linen. Breathing deeper, he at last found a ghost of the starchiness Hanae had sealed into the cloth. Imagining her pressing perfect creases into the square, a part of him wanted to cry into the new worn and wrinkled folds, cry for the miserableness of his failure, cry for what in the end might be lost to him. As a small boy on Hokkaido, when he had felt most alone, he had cried. Had cried when he ached for a father, who kept between them land and ocean. But this pain, this anger, demanded more of him.
The wings in the locker had confirmed Adrian Lovett as the killer they had sought for so many days. Willie’s witness proved it had been this serial who had attacked her and Michael. Yet he had no certainty beyond his instincts that this same man had Hanae. But who else? And if so, why Hanae?
Willie had tried to explain how Lovett selected his victims. Auras, she had said, he sees auras. So if he were to save his wife, he must accept that from inside his madness Adrian Lovett had seen an aura around his Hanae, believed her to be a fallen angel.
Or is Hanae’s abduction merely revenge against me? With this thought he permitted self-loathing and guilt to join fear. Yet why had she not been murdered in their apartment? Was Lovett, as in Lucia’s case, seeking greater isolation in which to draw Hanae into his fantasy, to take her life? And his own?
His headlights reflected off the sign. Chatwell. He glanced down at the photo on the seat and drove into the frame of the snapshot. Ahead, diffused illumination filled his windshield. A convenience store was open for business.
He pulled over, grabbed the photographs, and entered the store. A woman sat behind the register, reading a magazine. She looked up as he walked to the counter.
“Can I help you?” She worked a wad of gum.
“I hope so.” He handed her the picture of Lovett astride his cycle. “Recognize this guy? Name’s Adrian Lovett.”
She drew up glasses from a chain around her neck and hooked them onto her nose. “Can’t say as I do. But that don’t mean nothing, since I usually pull the night shift. He a local?”
“No. Probably visits only on weekends and holidays. Has a place somewhere around here.” He showed her the best shot of the house.
“Can’t tell much from this…. Hey, Leroy.”
A guy in his late twenties came from the back. He shifted the stem of a cigarette between his lips. The cashier handed him the two photos. “You work days. Know this guy on the motorcycle?”
Leroy grinned, showing off a mouth full of bad teeth around the cigarette. “Would give my right arm for that hog.”
“You know him?”
“Comes in to gas up the Harley once in a while. Dude’s wife was killed a while back,” he said, finally removing the plug of cigarette. “Filled up that Land Rover of his the day of the accident. Heard she was decapitated.” He sliced a finger across his neck.
“Know where he might have a house around here?” Sakura shifted the photos in Leroy’s hand.
“Big house.” He angled his head. “But that figures. Rich guy like that.”
“This would be a second home. Name’s Lovett.”
Leroy pressed the cigarette stub out on the floor. “My guess, it’s on the lake. Lots of nice houses built ’round the lake. Primo real estate.”
“How do I access the lake from here?”
“North end of the lake is fronted by a public road. You can catch it half a mile down. But that might not do you much good.”
“How’s that?”
“The big houses are around the south side. Head-on you can’t see nothing but woods. Got to pick your way through. There’s a gravel road that works its way in. But the offshoot roads are mostly private driveways. It’s gonna be hit or miss.”
“Will I be able to connect with this gravel road from the public access?”
Leroy nodded, handing back the pictures. “Why you looking for this guy? He in trouble?”
“Maybe. Thanks for the help.” He moved to leave.
“Hey, mister. If you talk to this Lovett, ask him if he wants to sell that cycle.”
The sheet and the blanket drawn up about her, Hanae sat in the bed and listened, making sure that she was really alone. She shuddered inside the covers, pulling the fabric tighter as if to blot his touch from her skin. But the shudder gave way to a trembling she could no longer stop. She had done what she had done. Had not resisted while he bathed her, shaved her, and cut her hair. Had been grateful for the water he had offered.
Adrian Lovett had been her friend. She still felt the connection. It would not help to deny what was true. She had played on their friendship, had listened to his madness. Patiently. Agreeing with him when she could. Not challenging, but reasoning against their imminent deaths, even offering seduction as the price for her life and her baby’s.
But her strategy, she feared, was not working. Adrian was moving to his own internal clock, though he did seem to crave her understanding and consent. She must try, at least, to use that, to keep him engaged in explanation.
A willing pupil who must be brought along.
If only she had told Jimmy about her new friend. But she had told no one because she had been ashamed of the way she behaved…. That kiss. She had been very foolish, but surely her life and the life of her child were too great a price to be paid. She loved Jimmy. She had never lost hold of that. She knew that he was searching for her now. She wound that belief around her as tightly as the covers until her trembling ceased.
The light remained within her, pulsing like a bright beating heart. Her blood beat and the child’s. And Jimmy coming closer.
The owl flashed out of nowhere. Sakura had a sudden sense of it dropping, swooping in from the trees. Dark wings in a glide, talons grazing his windshield. Chasing something.
His foot hit the brake reflexively, and he swerved, nearly skidding off the gravel before he straightened out. His heart raced, not with the adrenaline rush of a near accident, but with the consciousness of time running out. How long since he had found Hanae missing? It seemed like days. There had been hours between Lucia’s abduction and her death. He had to believe that he still had time, that his hunch about this house was correct.
If he could find the house.
He regretted not having his badge. He’d made up a story about being a representative for an insurance company to the few people he’d spoken to since the convenience store clerk. If anyone remembered Adrian Lovett at all, he or she remembered the accident that had killed his wife. None of them knew exactly where he lived.
The last man he’d talked to had sent him down the possibility of yet another branching road. It was a rabbit warren back here, the houses older and smaller as you moved away from the lake. And spaced much farther apart. But even here most homes stood dark and empty, owned apparently by “summer people” who wouldn’t return for months.
He saw a light through the trees. A porch light. The rough-timbered house, set back from the road, was occupied. The multicolored lights of a Christmas tree filtered through the sheerness of a curtain.
He pulled into the drive and walked up the stairs to the porch. He could see now that the Christmas lights were the old-fashioned big ones, reflecting in silver-tinsel icicles that shimmered thickly in the branches of the fir. There was no bell. He knocked.
The door was opened immediately by a woman who seemed to have been waiting. Probably she’d heard the car.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I’m looking for the Lovett house.”
A young boy pushed through to stare at him. The cookie in his hand matched the baking smell, which was no doubt coming from the kitchen. Sakura smiled at him and the woman, waiting for her to say something—gearing up for the photo and the story about insurance.
“Down there,” she said, pointing up the way he’d been going. “Gravel road turns back toward the lake. Big place. You can’t miss it.”
“Thank you,” he remembered to say. He was already moving toward the car.
Adrian Lovett touched the shiny steel tip of the hypodermic needle, then ran his finger along the measured surface of the glass vial. A crystal cage that would at last release him from this earthly existence. No more cleaving to the flesh. No descent into corporeal mortality to move backward into space and time.
Even now, he had only glossy intimations of his fully realized nature. His most expansive trips on LSD could not return him to that instant of his awakening, to that absolute purity of moment when he understood who and what he was. So he had drifted into what might seem an addiction, a struggle to capture that time in the tunnel before resuscitation had clamped its iron jaws around him. Each time he took the drug, it had moved him closer to some infinite orgasm. Yet always he remained stranded and frustrated at the lip of the explosion.
He believed this veil that blurred his illumination would regrettably outlast the relinquishing of matter, his separation from substance. The return to full experience would have to await the others who came after, await Samyaza and the crushing of the barrier.
Or am I a fool? Was absolute actualization possible without union with that which he perceived as enemy? Could any one of the Fallen be an angel separate from God?
The two empty vials were not yet filled with the potassium chloride. He closed his eyes, imagining the pinch of the needle into spongy flesh, its jellyfish sting. The end of breath, the end of the thump, thump, thumping of the four-chambered heart. Then the flat-lining of the brain.
The edge of his thumb caressed the dark green velvet that lined the case where the two syringes rested snugly between small collars. How many months ago had he purchased the instruments? Relics from the past, they recalled a time when family doctors made house calls, their pills and potions, their devices and implements tucked like small jewels inside peeling black bags.
He snapped the case shut and looked at himself in the mirror. He was a freak. An unearthly thing trapped inside human flesh. A prisoner of desire. He reached for the straight-edge razor. Would that he could sever away the skin with the hair.
He ran his hand over the stubble of new growth. Each time less and less hair grew back. In some ways he was more than ever conscious of his humanness; in others, he had become more and more detached. The endless contradictions were damnable.
He smoothed the warm-scented oil over his body, though the ripeness of his own flesh could not be subdued. The straight-edge, like the syringes, was a throwback to the days before safety blades and electric razors. He flicked the side of the blade with his thumb. A fine line of blood erupted. Reflexively he brought his finger to his mouth and sucked. He gagged on the rich metallic flavor.
Over the mounds of his pectorals, across the planes of thigh and calf, over the slopes of his arms, inside his groin, he drew the straight-edge. His naked flesh shone like polished marble under the light. He had lost weight the last couple of weeks, and the tips of his fingers pressed through to the frame of ribs just beneath the muscles of abdomen.
He turned. In the mirror his shoulders and back were hairless. But there was the slightest trace of growth on his buttocks. He shaved across and between the shadowy crevice of his glutes. Then turning back, he observed the last vestiges of his primate nature. The hair on his face and head.
Oiling his scalp, he made even slices across his skull, then neatly shaved the taut angles of his face. Now he arched his brows, carefully manipulating the blade to follow the sparse growth pattern. He widened his eyes. Nothing left but the eyelashes. He reached for the tweezers. He flinched as he pulled the first lashes. They came out in small clumps, his eyes tearing as he yanked. Slowly plucking at first, then quickly, until he was finally as naked as an embryo.
“Kelly,” Sakura spoke into his cell phone. “I got a location. Where are you?”
“A few miles north of West Point.”
“Good, this is what you do.” He gave the directions from the access road to the gravel road that led to the house. “First driveway after the road turns back toward the lake.”
“Gotcha. Stay put, Sakura. Wait for us.”
Sakura turned off the phone and placed it on the seat.
The moon had yet to appear when he stopped midway on the narrow drive and got out of his car. A downy fall of snow had begun to loosen itself from a surprisingly clear sky, and somewhere another owl hooted. A plaintive call to its mate. In the distance the river flowed on, unknowing, in a bed carved from ancient soil. Beyond, the dark trees rose in impartial witness. He alone stood in dread.
He listened to the sound of his feet in the soft-forming drifts. Memory does not so easily pass…. He was nine the year his grandparents had brought him to Kyoto to celebrate New Year with cousins. The last day of the old year dawning unbelievably bright and blue. Now evening wrapped itself around the shoulders of the ancient city like a dark fur. In the chill, crisp air, the great bronze bell of Chion-in tolled. He had run ahead, catching dancing flakes of snow on his tongue, his younger cousins, a parade of ducks waddling behind. Lights from overhead lanterns made warm smears on the
blue ice, and the street in that moment seemed as still as a photograph. He remembered thinking that he had felt as new as the year.
He stopped. Somewhere between the time he’d arrived home from Baltimore and now, he’d laid down his overcoat and forgotten it. Yet the cold, as on that long-ago night in Kyoto, didn’t register. Through the overhang of trees, he could make out the outline of the structure he’d seen in the Lovett photographs. The house was much larger than he had expected.
The place appeared vacant. No lights shone from the interior. But a white curl of smoke spiraled from the chimney. A dark recent-model car was parked to the side of a porch that ran from end to end of the house. The license plate glimmered like a small sheet of ice. He reached into his jacket and unholstered his.38.
He crouched as he moved up the winding drive. The structure was constructed of some kind of bleached wood, fitted with a high-pitched roof. A silver ghost in a sea of snow. Ceiling-to-floor windows broke up the exterior. A swing anchored to the gallery roof caught a sudden gust of wind. The metal chains moaned from their anchors. He stopped at the front door, pressing his ear to the wood, and listened. Silence.
The room smelled of myrrh and madness.
Hanae shivered, lying where Adrian had arranged her on the bed, bathed in the odor of incense and candles. Their buttery essence surrounded her, flickering and stirring in the warmth of their flames, cutting through the deeper odor of myrrh—tiny little tongues of scent, licking and retreating. She heard a match flare, another flame springing to existence.
It was the smell of the incense that seemed to frighten her most. She knew the place that it held in his murders, and she wondered if the letters that spelled out Zavebe were already written on the wall. She wanted to scream, felt hysteria rising. She had failed at last to keep him talking. Somewhere in his recounting of what he had planned, he had retreated into ritual. His stripping of the bedclothes from around her, his positioning of her on the bed, had been gentle. But she had no illusions of what resistance would bring. Adrian … No, Gadriel was in control.