Slayer

by Karen Koehler

  There. A shadow fluttered like a wing not a hundred feet ahead and a little to his right. He stopped, gauging its size and speed. Small. Childlike. Christ, but he hated doing the kids.

  A pair of catlike eyes studied him out of a pocket of utter darkness, red and reflective.

  "Who are you?" he said, swinging his sword overhead. "Speak, and I might not tear you apart."

  He was about to corner it when it did the unexpected and strode gallantly forward like a priestess cloaked in awry shadows. He did not move, did not react. The sword and his arm were suddenly disconnected for the first time in his life. His instinct, for either flight or fight, was gone. His breath was gone. The alley of which he'd been the expert on only a moment ago whirled around him in a lightless tempest. Bosch. Bad melee of studies in half-light. From somewhere on the avenue came the severe throb of music. Rhapsody of my heart, he thought.

  But then everything grew still and devoutly quiet before the phantomlike figure floating toward him, the face the finely chiseled chinabone craftswork of a doll, the hair frayed black flamelike silk, the mouth red, the eyes red, Snow White, Rose Red.

  Alek's mouth rasped open over no words and no voice. He dropped his sword; then he himself dropped to his knees.

  Debra had returned at last and she was going to kill him.

  8

  His earliest memory was of a pallid room, the last in a long line of pallid rooms which came to be his and his sister's prison for the first eight years of their lives. The dormrooms of McEnroy Home slept four apiece and in each corner of each room was an iron-framed bed with a white chenille spread and white pillows. Drapes and valences were colorless and sexless and the air of the Home smelled perpetually of cold hospital antiseptics. And then there was Ms. Bessell, the dorm mistress, and in his earliest memory she was scolding some kid--his name was Louis or Lenny or something--because he had gotten a bloody nose from picking it and there was blood on the white laundered spread now and the blood was bright and warm and fascinating to Alek, a single island of life in the midst of the apocalypse of seamless whiteness.

  These were the things he remembered first, the things that stood out farthest in the most distant part of his mind.

  It was said that it was the Home cook who'd found them, he and his sister, swaddled in newspaper and cradled in a cardboard box on the back stoop of the Home under the eaves. No note or keepsake, so went the legend, only themselves, waxen foreheads touching, their faces androgynous and similar. The eleventh set of twins forced upon the Home that year, the social worker in charge of their case scratched the surname Knight on their records in true Dickensian tradition and yanked their given names, Alek and Debra, from the skin rag hidden in the pencil drawer of his desk. After that, he handled them in terms of paper only.

  It was Cook, a big dark woman with a great laugh and the fearsome habit of smoking lavender cigars, who saw to it that the twins were not separated and placed with their own sex. And in time they came to occupy their own room exclusively, though Cook had little to do with that. The year was 1950 and though postwar America was prospering from oversea's fortunes and Ipana toothpaste ads were telling the baby boomers that in America no child had so bright a future, twins were still especially difficult to place and it wasn't expected they would be. So this token by McEnroy Home was like a consultation prize.

  But it was more than that. Cook knew it; they all did.

  The twins were special. Magic, some said. Some said things about the twins, wondrous and strange things, things which scarcely deserved imagining. They learned all their lessons quickly because they were clever, and they made everyone think of them as thoughtful because they were. But there was a subconscious degree of separation that no one in the Home seemed able to measure or rightly label. They were almost never seen apart, and their soft, silent looks weighed things between them constantly. But of course to the other children who could not hear their thoughts they were a mystery. They did not exchange secrets in the showers, did not pass or receive notes during class, did not join any of the playground clichés that grew and constantly reformed. And the torment the older Home children wrought upon the younger--the books knocked from desks, the legs outstretched In aisles, the pillowcases full of shaving cream, the braids knotted and dunked in school ink--these things somehow passed them by completely. Cook called them her little blackbirds because of their clever obstinate eyes and soot-black lashes and their habit of perching on the breadboard and waiting patiently whenever she was putting in the gingerbread, and the name stuck as names will, but the name carried with it no stigmas, no disgrace.

  Alek and Debra Knight came to accept their innate separation at least as quickly as the other children did. And as the years pushed them gently but insistently out of infancy and into adolescence and their magic and reputation grew and the world changed around them from one of security and domestic bliss to a globe of cold war uncertainty and minority suspicion, they found little changed within the microcosm of the Home. Kids got big and got into fights and sometimes kids died, or were adopted and went off into mysterious corners of the city, never to be seen again. But the two porcelain-faced beauties of McEnroy Home remained year after year and found with time that while the others who remained were always nice to them and quick to praise them and sought to be near them and eat with them and talk to them and considered them lucky to be with, none chose to be their friend, for the children were afraid.

  Wilma Bessell: Bessell the Bitch.

  She was a big muscled women, strong and pale as chalk as if the sun had never touched her flesh in her whole lifetime. She smiled avidly at the children and whistled softly, constantly, as she wandered down the asylumlike halls of the Home with her open notebook and busy pen. Her eyes were tiny, clever, always bright and full of a mysterious and bottomless glee. A solid woman, she made the children on her floor--the twins' floor--hug her each night before bed. Hateful thing: hugging Ms. Bessell was like hugging a rolled-up mattress drenched in Chanel No. 5. And when she wasn't walking or whistling or otherwise driving kids crazy, she could usually be found reading old books of immense size on a bench on the playground tarmac, her back to the brick wall of the Home so he could watch the children play. The covers of the books she read were always black and faded gold, covered with long, overcomplicated titles.

  Ms. Bessell came to work at the Home when the twins were six, and almost from the beginning they sensed her demure, sometimes suspicious eyes crawling to find them on the playground, in the halls and gameroom, in class through the wire mesh panes of the classroom door.

  No one else seemed to notice. No one but Cook who snarled when Debra said something about it, Cook who called Ms. Bessell a "hoe-beech" and slammed the door of the old iron oven with a clang of utter authority. Debra smiled and went about repeating the word to everyone insistently--at least until she slipped and used the word on the woman herself and got solitary confinement for not naming her source of origin for that one. Yet not two days later Alek felt those eyes on himself and his twin and became first annoyed with it, and then afraid.

  Alek, what is it? Debra demanded to know.

  Don't look. She's watching us. Again.

  The Bitch? Debra's hand never faltered as she copied the lesson from out of their reader. Stepping Stones, the book was called, and there was a happy green pond frog on the cover that Alek had always liked, had drawn many times. They did the speaking in the back of their minds usually, where they could keep it going and use the rest for their work. Dumb hoe-beech is always watching, Alek, Debra said and turned a page of the book.

  The frog on Alek's book smiled up at him, but now it seemed horrible and open-mouthed to him. Sinister. As if it would begin to speak at any moment and say things he neither understood nor wanted to hear from it. I know, he answered her. I hate her. Cook says she ain't for real.

  How?

  Alek shrugged, only believing Cook because she was nice and always spoke softly to Debra and sneaked them treats after dark
when the kitchen was closed and no one was looking. Cook had said those very same words that very morning when she found out about Debra's confinement--She ain't fer real, chile. You best beware the beech, you hear, little bird?. And Alek had nodded dutifully even as Cook grunted and smiled through her bulldog face and wiped the raspberry stain off his face from the tart she had given him.

  Maybe she's got an awful monster inside her chewing her all up inside, Debra suggested and it was just like her. You know? Like in Thriller Theatre?

  Alek bowed his head over his work and did not answer, shutting out the Bitch's glancing smile and her gaze. It was Debra's eyes that flashed up, dark and mirrored and full of some black token of warning. Probably she was thinking about getting back at Ms. Bessell for the confinement thing by putting earthworms in her shoes or something. He saw dirt in Debra's mind, and squirming living things crawling across an expanse of bluish white flesh. He shook his head and frowned. And when, finally, he felt brave enough to join her look, he saw that the Bitch was gone.

  Debra smiled sincerely, took his hand, squeezed his fingers. The sensation made him wince, made him almost see the worms and the naked earth in her eyes.

  Ms. Bessell did not court Debra Knight's gaze after that. She seemed almost afraid of Debra, and for that Alek was grateful and stayed close to her because she was everything to him and she kept him safe with her words and her definite little touches. And because he was certain that as long as they were together and could speak and dream and touch and laugh about the funny names Cook made up for the Bitch everything would always be all right.

  Later that same week it happened for the first time.

  Alek was dressing in the boy's locker room when he thought he heard a gentle whistling rebounding on the dragon-green tiles of the shower walls. He froze solidly in the midst of buttoning up his shirt. He caught his breath and held it tight within himself like a secret until the whistling receded.

  Then it returned. Louder. Larger.

  He looked around, realized he was completely alone, for the other boys had finished showering and gone out to the playground or down into the gameroom the way he usually let them before emerging from behind the thick white curtain of steam and water. Once, one of the older boys had laughed at him and asked him if he planned on joining a carnival as a Living Skeleton, and since that time he never let the others see his body. Now he hated that boy bitterly. He wished Debra was near, but Debra was a girl and couldn't be here. Still, he whispered her name for comfort and because the sound of it always made him feel clever. He thought about what she would do in this situation--probably rush right out into the aisle and start chanting one of the funny little ditties Cook had taught her--and did just the opposite and retreated into a narrow niche between two lockers, hoping the Bitch would pass by with her melodious whistling and her notebook and too-wise smile without noticing him. Alek closed his eyes, did not feel or think or breathe. And waited.

  Footsteps. Whistling, long and musical. Strains of Bing Crosby

  Then nothing.

  Alek opened his eyes.

  And there was the Bitch looking down on him with small studious eyes. Her frame filled the slight opening of the tiny niche to overflowing. So much so, that for a moment Alek was certain her white flesh--fishlike pale and unmarked and unpretty when he thought to compare it to Debra's cold smooth tautness--would began to seep like Silly Putty around the edges of the lockers and drown him in all its smothery softness like the Blob or something. He thought about what Debra had said about Thriller Theatre, and looking on Ms. Bessell, he saw her the same way suddenly--as something white and dead and as desperate as one of the monsters on television. Her lips were painted overly dark for her face, like someone who had eaten too much preserves, but between those lips her jumbled teeth were as yellow and mottled as the skin of an overripe banana. The fluorescent lights had made her eyes reflective so they shone like the milky, cataract-filled eyes of a dead woman, a victim of the monster.

  "Hello there," the Bitch said as if they were meeting for the first time. She tipped her head and the backlighting threw her shadow like a cold old blanket over his face. "Alek...Alek." Bessell tapped her notebook meditatively. "Did you know your name means `savior of mankind'? No, you didn't know that, did you? Of course not. Now you do."

  Alek said nothing.

  Ms. Bessell smiled. She said, "I brought you something," and reached into the side-slit pocket of her dress and offered him the chunky magical wand of a Clark Bar.

  Alek wanted to tell the Bitch to go to hell, the way Cook always did, but he couldn't seem to find his voice. Something had eaten it all up.

  But Ms. Bessell was a patient woman and held the Clark Bar out to him to take for some time. "Please, Alek. I want to be your friend. I want you to have this. I promise I won't tell anyone. It'll be our little secret." But when he did nothing after many long wordless moments Ms. Bessell pocketed the sweet. "No?" she said with a sweet long smile. "No: I guess that doesn't interest you, does it? What does interest you, hmm?"

  Alek watched in dawning horror as the Bitch reached into her opposite pocket and produced suddenly a small flashing blue sliver of a razor. No! A part of him wanted to whimper and beg. No no no! And yet there it was, the razor as bright as a cleaver under the harsh glare of the light. Move! he told himself, but his body was fastened into place, his eyes stuck unblinking on the shiver and spin of light on the piece of stainless steel.

  Ms. Bessell smiled and pressed the metal to the tip of her left pointer finger until the white skin there gave to crimson. Then the dry white hand went out to his face. He turned away, pressed his spine to the back wall and tried to make himself small, but he couldn't escape the Bitch's finger at his mouth, tracing an invisible pattern over his lips, wetting them with the warmth and ironstink of her substance, lingering on the hard ridges of his eyeteeth. He shut his eyes tight, his mouth tighter; he could hear the other children shouting and laughing down in McEnroy's belly and just beyond it on the playground, so near and yet so hopelessly far away, and all of it muffled by the strangling, rhythmic rasping of the Bitch's breath on his cheek.

  For a long time they simply remained that way, like two inappropriate statues hooked together.

  And then, abruptly, the Bitch turned and began to walk away, whistling her incessant, stupid songs.

  Alek wiped the foreign substance on his sleeve, waited a moment until the whistling had vanished from the halls completely, then ran. That night Debra cried for him. Alek turned over in the bed they shared and held her, her bones birdlike and fragile, a familiar mystery of construct, her hair tangling and lost irretrievably with his own, afraid, but trusting his fear to no one but her, because his fear had no name and they were together, but together they were utterly alone. And together and alone they comforted each other and held to each other as if they would lose themselves if they let go even a moment.

  So they spoke and wept softly and between the shelters of their tangled hair, Alek let his special teeth graze his lower lip until he felt the first stirrings of sweetness there and then offered his sister the kiss that was both a pledge and a promise. Her lips were cold and she suckled eagerly at his mouth because it was what comforted her and what they had always done when they grew too lonely and afraid and hungry for something they did not know what. And then, only when her lips were stained crimson, was she able to sleep.

  Alek kissed her once more, but softly this time. And he tasted her, tasted them, and the single creature they were in their minds and hearts, a creature so hopelessly different from every other creature here that he sometimes wondered what it was they should be called, what its name was, if he dared ask.

  Mates, he thought, his hand at her bleak, icy profile. We are mates. At six years of age the concept was almost too distant for Alek to fully understand, yet he knew it to be the only real truth.

  When the twins were seven years of age, couples began to take notice of them. Debra, particularly, because in her alabaster fa
ce she seemed like a pretty china doll that should be arranged on a bedspread or carefully preserved behind plates of dusty glass.

  The first time she was to be fostered out she stormed back and forth across their room in her white slip, the lines of the fabric mere delineation's on her ghostlike body, her arms crossed and hair trailing after her like a black silk cloak. "I won't go," she stated, not bothering with the speaking, wanting now the gruff pleasure of speech. "I won't, Alek. They can't make me!"

  He saw the Bitch grinning in Debra's mind and heard a distant echo of whistling and he nearly shuddered, held it back to be strong.

  "They can't make me leave," she hissed. "They can go to hell. All of them."

  Alek turned away from the sight of her graceful, pacing rage and studied the box of her things on their bed, the shimmery dark clothes, her sketches of unicorns and the moon and his Raggedy Andy doll he was giving her because she'd lost her Raggedy Anne in Central Park during a school outing. He looked aside, ashamed, because he wanted to weep and he knew he shouldn't, that he was a boy and he should be strong for them both, the way boys always were on TV. "You have to, Debra. They say--"

  "Goddamn them." She smiled, her hair blizzarding around her savage little face, and he was shocked to hear her say those words and to say them with such power and ease. "I hate them," she whispered, hoarse with grief, "all of them." She began to sob, and he rose and went to her, embraced her carefully, her face sinking into the cradle between his neck and shoulder like two pieces that fit exactly.