by Martin Rose
“Goddamn you, Vitus. You think you’re the only one who’s lost someone?” she snapped.
Furious, I rounded on her.
“You don’t know anything about me. If you’re smart, you’d leave.”
“You’re the one who keeps coming back!” she returned and took a step forward, matching my advance. Her courage took me aback. What had I expected? A meek girl, all fear and trembling? How foolish I had been. I calculated curves and softness—behind her feminine mystique was barbed wire. Hold her close and I’d come away with rust and punctures for my trouble.
“You think I really don’t understand, do you?”
“You don’t,” I stated. I blew smoke out between us, a lazy ring. I tested her patience, and she knew it, but what I really wanted was to drive her away. If being rude and obnoxious did the trick, so be it.
“I lied to you, Vitus.”
I lifted an eyebrow. Beforehand, I believed the only thing she really had going for her was a pretty face and a nuclear figure that could melt nails. This new admission of duplicity excited my interest, awoke me to all the secrets bound within her. I took a breath.
Confession time. Here it is. She’s involved somehow.
She’d been a villain all along.
“I didn’t tell you the truth about Hawaii.”
Her words flowed fast upon the other and dismantled my suspicion and paranoia in one breath, though I did not show it. I kept myself locked within my mask as though I did not feel; but for each word she spoke, I felt everything, married with the shame that I had ever doubted her.
She told me of Hawaii. Born in the moist, tropical air. Loving parents and the waving palm fronds cradled her in youth; rills of Pacific water washing up on shore. Her pale skin, her raven black hair, all genetic gifts from a native Hawaiian mother and a father who had been stationed on a military base. This young soldier wandered off the main road one day, following a dirt trail to a communal house in the middle of palm trees, sugar cane, and celestial waters.
“It was a Lazar House, Vitus.”
I pinched the end of my cigarette with two fingers, listening to the sound of my flesh sizzle against the extinguished tip.
“You’re talking about the leper colony, aren’t you?”
They called them Lazar Houses, a long time ago in the dark ages. Even with a medical system struggling with reform in our present day, the pestilence of a millennium ago made our present-day concerns look palatial by comparison. Hard to imagine a world where leprosy was so virulent, every town in the English-speaking world had a Lazar House, lepers living together and begging for charity from strangers. Advanced stages have been known to numb limbs and open the way to gangrene through bacterial infection. Limbs rotting away. Flesh dissolving into the primal mud from which an ancient, vengeful God is rumored to have formed us. And in their time, to be a leper was to be punished by God. Hell visited you on Earth instead of troubling you to go there yourself.
No one would ever mistake me for a leper—our conditions were radically different, but equally stigmatized and displayed on our faces. Still. What was it like for her to look at my face? Did I remind her of the ones she’d left behind?
“My mother used to hold me,” she said. “Long hands. Graceful. Like a bird. As time passed, that became more difficult, because she lost her fingers to secondary infection, one by one, until all that remained were the nubs of her palms. She’d hold them together in prayer. She would sit by my bed and stroke my hair with a stump instead of a hand as though she could feel it still. And somewhere along the way my father left; hard to say if it was those hauntingly reduced hands of hers, whose bones inspired terror in the neighborhood children, likewise terror in him. When they had first met, she was whole, lithe, beautiful. But she fractured over time, like a flawed diamond, relentlessly tapped until she shattered.”
The words dried up. My cold, cold heart felt colder still. It didn’t take a special kind of moron to realize I was a decayed surrogate father figure. She took a step closer to me. I held my ground, but the mood, the moment, was steeped in volatile emotions. I dared not breathe.
“Do you know, the rotting, the gangrene, isn’t the worst of it? No one will touch them, Vitus. People fear to lay their hands, like so,” she whispered, moving in closer.
I backed up against the end table, cornered in the darkness.
We both held our breath, her palm open and approaching my face. Her touch met my skin. My cheek, rough textured as rope, as concrete, weathered with damage.
“I know what it is to be touch-starved, Vitus.”
I swallowed, metal clicking in my jaw, and did not respond with a look or a word. Her hand fell away. She faded into the background, dissolving into the darkness.
“It’s a terrible affliction to know the pain of those whom no one else will touch. She wanted me to stay, but she wanted her daughter to have a better life. She couldn’t have both. So she sent me away. And I left. And do you know what I found when I got here?”
“What?” I asked.
“I find a coward! A low-life, dead-beat junkie!”
I flinched. Somewhere inside my dark chest, my dead heart moved in eerie pantomime of a heartbeat.
“It’s not like that—” I protested.
“What was it like, then? Time and again, you thrust yourself into my life, unwelcome, unasked for, and you didn’t think telling me was important? You didn’t think you owed me the story of what happened? I can forgive whatever happened to you—I can let the past remain buried in the past. But you couldn’t even look me in the eyes and tell me—”
Before she could eject her final, bitter words, I was moving across the expanse, knocking over the end table, sending a vase of moldy water and dead flowers splashing onto the floorboards where the smell of decay persisted. I held her by the neck, pushing her back, undead eyes blazing with a jack-o-lantern glow, animated with a force beyond death. I smelled the heady aromas that constituted her, the perfume—beneath the perfume, her sweat and her tissues throbbing in erotic harmony, calling me in to take a piece, sample the flesh, taste it—
“Look at my eyes,” I hissed.
She jerked backward, but I was unrelenting, and I hated myself for it. It must be done.
“Look into these eyes and tell me what version of the truth you’d like. You think it gives me pleasure to spend time with the woman who pieced together the remains of my wife? I look at your hands and I think of her.”
I released her with a jerk, my breath coming in quick pants. She fell backward, but her eyes were unfrightened, her expression lemon-sour.
“You think I enjoy inhabiting this rotting, decomposing body? That I could ever spend a second with you and not remember the man I’d once been? Wish I was him again, just long enough to be whatever you need me to be? Your kiss is like a knife stab. It’s just a reminder of how dead I am on the inside. I’m a corpse. I don’t have the self-respect, the soul of a leper.”
The conversation was over. She was smart enough to know it; she turned on her heel and took out a picture frame as she left. It smashed onto the floor. Glass shattered in the frame over the faces of old friends from Alpha company, guns in hand, posing for me behind the camera. Tough guys about to be dead.
I’d meant to throw that out anyway.
She opened the door, and then stopped to look at me one last time.
“A guy was waiting here for you on the porch. He wanted me to give you a message: stop looking for Owen.”
And with that, she slammed the door shut and left, the sound reverberating through the darkness.
*
What can I say?
I’d had enough of this place.
My shoes crunched over glass as I watched her through the window, descending the steps to her car parked out on the road. A black shape caught my eye: the vulture. He watched her in likewise, detached fashion, beady eyes following her from his place on the far end of the porch until her car pulled out; leaving the vulture with a sad and re
gretful air.
Or maybe I had him confused with me.
Whatever the case, I didn’t sweep up the glass or clean up the mess. I continued to stand by the window and consider my options.
Stop looking for Owen.
Who had it been? I turned away from the molten lava of my self-loathing long enough to collect my thoughts anew. At the back of the room, I engaged the computer and brought the security feed up on the screen.
Within moments, I had a visual. Security footage saved up to the last forty-eight hours, just long enough to incriminate you if you killed a hooker at your house or if you let someone in to hand out religious tracts and you wanted to get a better look at his face.
The bastard was clever, and it was my shooter, I was sure of it. He’d taken a cowboy hat, shadowing most of his face from the overhead view, and I cursed. I could tell it was him by his carriage, his steady walk, which ate distance with a persistent efficiency as he drew close and waited for me to show up.
Instead, he found Niko first. I watched as she ascended the stairs and he stepped out of the darkness, announcing himself without any indication of who, or what, he was. What interest he had in my welfare was hard to understand. One thing for sure, no one helps no one in New Jersey without something in it for them, and that includes your dear old Granny.
Stop looking for Owen.
Which, in its own way, was an admission that there was a Clay to look for in the first place.
*
I packed nothing for the journey. I thought about calling someone, as though I were a man with one day left to live. What would I leave behind for the people who had known me? I had nothing of real value, just a house full of bad memories and a well-stocked liquor cabinet.
I began to write a note with one of Clay’s old half-chewed pencils, but halfway through, it felt too much like a farewell speech. Too much like love. I picked it up and ignited the end with my cigarette tip, watched the smoke swirl over the surface and catch the flame before dropping it into the wastebasket, where it sputtered hungrily.
I regarded the vulture on the porch one last time as I locked the front door with a jingle of keys.
It’s a stupid idea. The vulture blinked lazily and his head bobbed in the wind before he returned to the business of ignoring me.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I know.”
I went anyway.
If that bird stuck around long enough, I’d have to give him a name.
*
Outside the fortune shop, a man in a sweater vest with his hair neatly combed stood by the front door. As I drew closer, the similarities to the Mr. Rogers of firefights past became all too evident, as though sweater vests were the new jogging suits of hive-mind mentality.
“Rogers?” I asked as I passed.
His eyes narrowed as he watched me, unmoving before the glass door.
“Yes, do I know you?”
I ran a hand over the brim of my hat to block my eyes and draw his attention away from my face.
“Do you guys come off an assembly line or something?”
Apparently, humor does not run in the Rogers family, because he looked at me as though I spoke a complex language he only half understood.
“Never mind,” I muttered. “You work for the lady inside?”
He did not answer, but licked his lips nervously, as though I weren’t supposed to know that.
“That must be a nice setup, huh? She brainwashes you guys. Cheaper than paying bodyguards, I guess.”
Rogers did not answer, so I brushed past him. It made me wonder how many of them there were, and I thought of the journal, Owen’s words of guardians and watchers. The Rogers? Likely, I considered, watching him pace the cracked sidewalk outside before I pushed the door open and entered with the chime of the bell.
Astra stood at the counter. Nothing had changed, and I was struck by the sensation that she had remained in that exact spot where I’d last seen her, never moving—if it had taken ten years to make up my mind and return, she would be there, still in her long skirts, incense clinging to her flesh in a thick ring.
“So soon,” she whispered.
Her lips formed a red, pulsing, elongated heart; every word dipped in blood.
“Why wait?” I asked her. I did not mention there was no one left in the world who would notice I was missing. She didn’t have to know how pathetic my life was.
The shop was the same as when I had left it, with the same gypsy caravan decor, the same empty, musty interior. I wondered if she ever had many customers or if it was just a front, from the crystals to the cards to the hippie-inspired garb. Her makeup looked slathered on so thick it formed a separate mask from her face. An undersmell persisted; old gym socks or fermenting yogurt.
She smiled through her red heart mouth as though we were lovers with a string of trysts behind us to cement our relationship. I still wore my old ill-fitting suit, moth eaten at the sleeves, stained with my decomposing juices of years past. I shook out a cigarette and lit up. Tobacco competed with the smell of patchouli. I was pleased with the result.
“Tell me how this works, Madam Astra. You have my son at an undisclosed location, and you want me to enlist in your mind-fuck army?”
Her smile hesitated, but did not fail. Not yet. She wanted to keep her mask in place just long enough to lead me into her hive. Venomous queen bee. I remembered 1996, Hale-Bopp, all the crazies in the jogging suits who were found dead on a floor with their testicles cut off in amateur fashion. Helluva way to die. I hoped whatever Madam Astra had in mind was a little more creative, because while I may be a “zombie” in layman’s terms, cutting off my junk was just going to piss me off.
Most of it had fallen off already anyway, but it’s the principle that matters.
“Vitus, you have a way with words.”
“That’s what the strippers tell me.”
“Well, you’ll come with me, of course. And I will lead you to the congregation, who will show you the ropes, so to speak. We have a wonderful, communal place, and once you’ve become acclimated to everything, you’ll have the chance to meet Owen. We are celebrating your arrival with a special feast and ceremony.”
I laughed, a dark chuckle of white smoke issuing from my yellow, tombstone teeth.
“Do I look like a chump to you?”
“Pardon me, Mr. Adamson?”
“Don’t give me the stupid, doe-eyed look. Some ritualistic ‘ceremony’ you need my help with? You’re a tawdry villain from a B-movie, lady. You’ll lead me to some compound where three generations of inbred fools quote scripture, or better yet, say ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and await the holy apocalypse, and then I’ll find myself the focus of your human sacrifice.”
She blinked. Her expression was slack and vacant, and I sighed with exasperation. Didn’t she watch any movies, read any pulp novels? Maybe they didn’t keep those sorts of things in the “compound.”
“Far from it, Vitus. No one is sacrificed. You are the guest of honor, and you are the one for whom our holy Lord will come forth for. No blood need be spilt, no sacrifice but what you’re willing to give.”
“Or take from me.”
“No! No sacrifice, no death! Transformation.”
Now, she had my attention.
“Into what?”
Her lips curled; one second she played the supermodel with her carefully molded face and in the next, a coquette. She wore a mask for each word and tailored them for my benefit, driving her duplicity deeper. Ever-shifting and unstable. The smell of foul yogurt and rancid gym socks was stronger here.
“You know a little something about transformation, don’t you, Vitus? What they’ve done to you. Wouldn’t you like to have the chance to become something more? I’m offering something greater than your son. I’m offering the chance to be born anew, in the image of our Dark Father.”
“To be born, I must die.”
“That’s the beauty, Vitus. You’re already dead.”
She had a point.
; *
“Lead the way,” I said.
Her Trojan Horse smile articulated as though cogs and gears were at work behind it. She turned it on and off according to her mood, but the vacant look in her eyes remained. She was a hundred pounds sopping wet, but I didn’t like her. I felt intimidated without reason and threatened without cause. Something in her was colder than I was, frozen temperatures packed into a hot body.
“Come with me, Vitus. We are honored to have you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Show me my son, we’ll talk more.”
“As you will,” she conceded, frozen smile; she came around the counter and led me toward the back, sweeping aside a fabric curtain heavy with the smells of incense. I followed her into the interior of the shop, senses alert, ready for anything.
The whole business reeked of a trap, but I decided after Niko had left that my first objective was to find my son. After that, I would worry about the mess, how many people I needed to kill to get out of it, and ask the questions later. I could mend bridges I burned and make up for being a bastard when I was back on the upswing of things.
Nothing else mattered but Clay. He’d only been two on July 25, 1999, when the world fell apart, but 1999 was long ago and far away. It occurred to me that Clay would not want to come with me. If he was attached to this cult and brainwashed, I’d have to carry him out by force. And abducting a kid is a lot more complicated than getting a five-finger discount on a candy bar at a convenience store. Kids asked questions. Kids who weren’t kids anymore were adults and they’d fight back. Who was to say he’d even remember me?
I was going to leave a trail of burned bridges behind me at this rate. Sloppy work, and I didn’t like sloppy—sloppy got you killed.
You’re dead already, Vitus. What’s the worst that could happen?
Zzzzzt.
A fly alighted on the lapel of my suit coat. I paused in the dim light, as Madam Astra led the way toward the back, and glanced down at the fly. He had no inclination to move, enjoying the brittle fabric and the cold, rotten meat of my body beneath.