by John Oakes
Winton rushed himself to the airport and hopped the 7:15pm puddle jumper to New Orleans. With no luggage to wait for, he was out the doors of the New Orleans airport and on the curb by 8:05. Julius had texted that he was going to pick him up. Sure enough his sedan came around the bend, and Julius’s frame came into view through the windshield. The fact that something about the car was off didn’t register for Winton until he was already sliding into the passenger seat. The gun pressed into the top of his head, and Winton caught sight of the fear in Julius’ eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Julius said.
Winton didn’t bother looking to see who was in the backseat. The look in Julius’ eyes said it all.
TWENTY-NINE
Julius flexed his fingers on the steering wheel and looked in the rearview.
“Don’t fucking move.” The voice from the back seat was Remus’, but altered somehow, shaky and stilted, as if he wasn’t moving his mouth normally. “Do exactly as I say, do it quickly, or you die.” He pulled the muzzle of the pistol back from Winton’s head. “I still have a bead on you both. Bullet will pass through this seat like nothing. Now lock the doors and drive.”
The car had such a strong odor, Winton could taste it. Something acrid clung to his tongue and the back of his throat.
Remus had escaped the fire, but he hadn’t done so without getting badly burned.
Winton’s heart raced as he chastised himself for getting taken so easily. He had no weapons, since everything on him had to pass through TSA security. If that had been part of Remus’ plan, it was very clever indeed. Not only was the man smart, he had thirty years experience dealing in situations where he needed to control potentially violent perps at all times—biters, bigger men, drugged-out crazies. You name it, Remus would have experience tackling it and shoving it in a cruiser. Add to that his loose grip on sanity and that made for an intimidating and unpredictable foe.
Winton didn’t know what Remus wanted, but supposed it fit under the general umbrella of revenge. If he wanted to kill them, he’d take them somewhere out of the way, a place where a little noise wouldn’t provoke interest, somewhere easy to dispose of a body or two. Remus would have a good plan for that. And he’d have a plan for how to take the fight out of them.
How on earth could Winton surprise him?
They drove a shorter distance than Winton expected, only about twenty minutes north, then off into the sticks along levee roads, dirt roads, through swamp, mossy forest and farmland.
Remus made them pull into a run-down farmhouse with an old silo and barn.
“Park in front of the barn.” When Julius did, Remus told him to get out and open the barn doors wide. “You make one false move and I shoot him.”
Julius glanced at Winton, then did as he was told.
There was an open stretch of ground between the barn and another shed. Perhaps sixty yards beyond that, the tree line beckoned, dark and mysterious, but to use its cover to evade Remus he’d have to outrun him and avoid getting shot the whole way. Not a good option even if he had legs like a gazelle. And he’d have left Julius to fend for himself.
Julius returned and got in. Winton watched him carefully. If Julius did make a move, Winton had to be ready to roll out of the car when Remus fired through the seat; and Winton was beyond certain the lunatic would fire.
“Pull into the barn, and roll down all the windows in the car,” Remus said. “Then get out and close the barn doors.”
Julius drove into the barn and did as told again.
“Now take these.” Remus handed him a pair of cuffs out the window. “Put them on.”
Julius took them, much bunched up in defiance.
“Just do it if you wanna live,” Remus snarled.
Julius slapped them on, and the mechanism clicked as he tightened them down. Remus got out and Winton saw his shape now, looming large in a hooded dark sweatshirt casting his face in shadow. He jerked his pistol. Winton opened his door and slid out.
“Hands on your head,” Remus said. Winton laced his fingers together atop his scruffy hair.
“Walk toward the other end of the barn. Nice and steady.” Remus pulled Julius by an arm to follow Winton. The flood of light from the sedan’s headlights made anything straight ahead starkly visible. At the edges of that light, Winton made out the remnants of a loft running around three sides of the barn. Now it was decrepit and broken, floor boards hanging down into the space below where pens and stables had once kept animals.
At the end of the barn, bathed in light, chains hung from two exposed support beams. And at the end of each chain hung a leather cuff with a buckle.
Restraints.
“Get him up on the barrel,” Remus said to Julius. “And strap him in. Hands and feet. If I can slip a finger under any of those straps after you tighten them, I shoot you on the spot.”
Julius looked at Winton with stooped shoulders, lip quivering from terror, anger or both. Winton looked at Remus, eyes in shadow below his hood. There was nothing but darkness there. Bad intentions. Winton figured if he got in those chains, he wasn’t getting out.
Winton gave Julius a quick, grim nod, a split second’s warning, and sprang away, dashing right past Remus toward a bank of rusted tools on the wall, leaving himself an open target for Remus. But at least he was moving, and it might cause Remus to expose his back to Julius as he aimed.
Grunts sounded behind Winton, then a gunshot.
Bang.
Winton dropped headlong to the deck into one of the old pens, sliding on ancient straw, turning it to dust with his weight. He ducked back out, saw Remus and Julius struggling on the ground and dashed for the tools. Winton plucked an old, short shovel off the wall, turned back, and ran as fast as he could toward the scuffling men on the ground. Remus, on his back, pointed a gun at Julius, but Julius bashed it aside with bound fists, and the gun went spinning away toward the chains.
Remus still held the smaller pistol in his left and Julius dove for it, but with his hands bound together, his movement was off balance. Remus pulled it away from him and made to press it into Julius’ side. Winton chopped the shovel down onto Remus’ head, but he flinched just in time. The shovel whiffed and clanged off the floor, but saved Julius from getting shot. Winton had thrown all his weight into the blow, and tumbled over his shoulder, just as Remus rolled out from under Julius onto a knee with a cry of pain. He leveled the pistol with practiced perfection at Winton and pulled the trigger. Winton flinched back and jerked the shovel in front of him.
An ear-splitting clang sounded, the shovel bashed into Winton’s head, and he fell hard onto his back.
Winton regained consciousness almost immediately, but not in any helpful way. His equilibrium was off like he’d just been thrown from a faulty carnival ride, and nothing he saw would stay in place. He was grabbed and hauled over to the barrel. When the cobwebs cleared from his head, he hung by his wrists. He felt pulled downward too and kicked his feet in their straps. His limbs were pulled so taught in every direction, though, he could barely produce a wobble.
Trapped like a bug in a spider’s web.
“No.” Winton noticed Julius laying crumpled on his side, perfectly still. He instinctively reefed on his restraints at the thought he was dead.
The headlights had been turned off, and Remus went about lighting candles all around Winton. Candles that, he now realized, had been there the whole time. Remus had clearly prepared this place. But for what?
In the growing light, Winton looked Julius over again for a telltale bloodstain on his torso from a bullet wound, finding nothing. Julius suddenly twitched, and Winton did the same.
He’d been beaten, maybe by Winton’s shovel, but he lived.
In the shimmering light of the candles, Remus finally drew back his hood, taking up Winton’s undivided attention. His face was grotesque, bright pink, shading to angry red on his left side with flecks of black dotting it, a bandage over his left eye. Most shocking, the left side of his mouth had fused togethe
r, lips melted into one blistering patch of flesh.
That explained his new manner of speech.
“Jesus,” Winton gasped.
Remus unzipped the sweatshirt and gingerly pulled it from the places on his shoulder where the cloth had stuck to oozing pus and hot, gooey flesh. The burns extended over his shoulder down his left arm and up his right hand. Both hands were bandaged with thick pads.
“How are you alive?”
“I was protected. I escaped.”
“But how have you survived these burns?”
“My. Work. Isn’t. Done.” Remus emphasized each word.
“What work?”
Remus closed his one good eye and inhaled through his blistered nose. He reached into his pocket with a bandaged hand and brought out a bottle of pills. He took one and swallowed it dry.
“Pain pills aren’t gonna be enough,” Winton said. “You need a trauma center and skin grafts like you’re trying to bring it back in style.”
“I thought maybe the enfant would survive the flames. But I couldn’t get there in time.” He shook his big burned head in remorse. “I admit a moment of weakness, hiding there in the bayou. Almost went to the hospital.” Remus looked up. “But it wasn’t time to give up. Not after everything I’ve done.”
Winton balled his fists against the pain in his side and the mounting agony in his shoulders and elbows.
“Soon, it dawned on me.” Remus slipped out a thin knife. “It was staring me in the face all along.” He motioned with the sharp-looking blade. “You.”
Winton snarled, fear mounting. He looked to Julius, but he was still out. “What do you want with me?”
Remus made a shape with what remained of his mouth. Was that a smile?
“The pharaohs of ancient Egypt surrounded themselves with dwarves, even buried dwarves with them in their tombs.” Remus waved the knife. “So many that archeologists realized they imported them. Ptah, a dwarf god, was creator of the universe. Best, a dwarf god, the deity of love, sex and birth. Creator, reproduction. Why?”
Remus hefted the knife and paced a little, like a professor with a piece of chalk. “Because the child-like state is innocent and pure. Instead of heaping pity and averting their gazes, people used to see your kind as special, fonts of vitality and wisdom. Gifted, even magical. Inca had dwarves bless their homes after construction. Such disparate cultures had this theme. I could go on.”
“So, I missed the glory days. Who the hell, cares, man?” Winton jostled at his restraints again. The feeling of immobility caused his chest to tighten in panic. “Magic dwarves?” he spat. “Sure. That’s coming from people who didn’t know not to shit where they ate.”
Remus smirked as far as his ruined face would allow. “It is an illusion,” he said emphatically, “this idea that because we are the newest generation that we must somehow be the most advanced. Technology is our benchmark? The only measure of humanity is the gadgets we can come up with?” Remus poised his knife hand on his hip. “And the gadgets help us so much they make us depressed, and sad, and cut off from one another. Social media?” He scoffed. “Please. It’s caused more discord in humanity than certain plagues I can think of.” Remus stepped closer and took a confiding tone. “I’ve seen what goes on in these comment sections,” he said. “Am I so wrong to think dying of small pox would be more dignified?”
“Sure, Remus. Whatever you say. Boo technology. Yea, lets all die at twenty-six years old.”
Remus ignored the quip and made a slow turn inside the ring of candles. “What if all the pursuits of science are aimed at crafting tangible versions of what art used to do?”
Winton squinted and furrowed his sweaty brow. “How’s that?”
“What do we need science for?” Remus asked. “To travel fast. To heal us. The rest is just iPhones being made by slaves in China.” He rolled his shoulders as if his pain pill had relieved some of his agony. “And what if in the pursuit of the next thing, refrigeration or radiation therapy, what if we lost our art?”
“When you say art, you mean magic.”
“Yes.”
He waved the knife over his bubbling flesh. “We are one, humans and art, but there exists a veil in between.”
“That’s a paradox.”
“Your first lesson, then, Winton Chevalier.” Remus’s one visible eye bored into him. “The deepest truth is paradoxical. The puzzling of art is the exact opposite of taking a pill. It is diving headlong into the mystery.”
“Why don’t you dive headlong into my ass?”
An unreadable emotion passed over Remus’s face. Humor? Anger? Both? “You are not reverent.”
“No, I’m not.”
“A man must revere something. No matter what else I am, at least I humble myself to something bigger.”
“Oh, is that what this is?” Winton asked. “Just a bunch of lapsed Catholic guilt repurposed with dead goats and golden baby bones?”
“Perhaps,” Remus admitted. “The Church is the carapace of a time when men knew art and called it miraculous, called it Jahweh. Now it’s a dead shadow of the power and knowledge available through art.”
“I’m done listening to your fucking bullshit, Remus. Either let me down out of this, or get it over with.”
Remus set his jaw.
Here it was. Big versus little. Strong versus weak. Like Darby on the ship said as he stalked Winton into a corner.
Social order was just a set of empty beliefs, and all could be undone by one individual willing to take advantage.
That was how it was going to end.
How fitting.
Because wasn’t that just the story of Winton’s life? There had been some bright moments where he’d thought the sun shined down on him equal to those born tall. But this was the truth. It wasn’t paradoxical at all. It was cold and hard and as simple as the steel in Remus’ burned hands.
His burns.
Remus had been spouting about science and medicine being a reversion from the true art. He wasn’t going to a hospital. Yet, he also knew he needed treatment or he’d die. Then all the talk about dwarfism being somehow magical…
“Fucking hell,” Winton muttered and hung his head.
He was a human sacrifice.
THIRTY
Julius coughed and moaned for help, delirious. Remus unlocked one of his cuffs, pulling Julius’ wrists past a wooden post and recuffing him.
Winton pulled at his restraints again, thinking perhaps their design had a more average wrist-to-hand size ratio in mind, but they held firm. He could tug all he wanted. Strength wasn’t going to get him out. Just when hopelessness settled on him, Winton’s senses came alive, reminding him through the scent of candle wax, the rattle of chains and the racing of his heart that he was still alive. The rage was there too, like a stallion in its pen, ready to run. But Winton couldn’t let it, not yet.
He was going to have to use his oldest weapon—the wits he was born with. Wits forcibly sharpened navigating and manipulating a world not built for him.
Remus returned, and Winton kept a calm visage, though his heart wouldn’t stop pounding.
“So, you going to dip my bones in gold?” Winton asked conversationally.
“Perhaps.”
“Doubt you’ll live long enough.”
“I will if you possess the magic I think you do. I can feel it on you, maybe more than I’ve ever felt on another person.”
Winton made sure to keep up his casual wise-assery, luring Remus toward the bait. “So what, you’re just gonna stick me with the knife and bathe in my blood?” Winton held his tongue for the bevy of one liners and barbs he could throw on top of that. Before Remus could form a reply, Winton cocked his head to the side, eyes searching about as if his mind had caught on something. “Oh, my God.”
“What?” Remus asked.
Eyes widening, jaw lowering, Winton whispered, “The woman.”
“What woman?”
“The woman when I was a kid. The old woman in yellow.�
��
“Tell me.”
“No. It can’t be true. No.”
“What woman in yellow?”
“When I was young,” Winton said in a tone of wonder, “I went with a church group to Haiti. We were helping to build houses in a rural area. I went to go take a leak in the woods, and this lady shorter than me approaches through the trees, wearing a frilly yellow dress. She was old, and very dark, face all wrinkled like a pug dog.” Winton stared off for a moment, jaw hanging open, as Remus leaned an inch closer. “Well, I put my equipment away right quick, but she called to me. I wanted to run back to the worksite, but she made me come to her. Made me.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing at first. She pointed to a bandage on my thumb where I’d cut myself with the claw of a hammer. She made me follow her to this hut with smoke coming out the top. I don’t know why I followed, but something about her made me feel safe. Something about the hut felt as if I knew it, as if I’d been there before many times. She healed my cut with some sort of poultice. I only spoke rudimentary French from school, but she told me in her weird little accent, “Around in a circle goes the magic. Always in a circle.” Then she made circles around me and said, “Around you is a circle of healing.”
Remus tilted his head, his one good eye hard to read.
“I didn’t know what she meant exactly, but a week later, my spine went completely straight. First time since birth. A few weeks after that, cartilage regrew in my bad hip. My parents didn’t believe me, until I started doing jumping jacks in the kitchen to prove it. The doctor’s were shocked.”
Remus made an approving sound. Winton went on. “I’ve had a dozen major surgeries and plenty of smaller procedures. And every time the physical therapy doesn’t go well. Every time, the physio tells me I’m behind in my recovery. Then, bam, one day I’m better than new. And I think of that woman in yellow. I never knew what to think about it, but it’s almost like…”
“Yes?”
Winton swallowed, let a little fear darken his expression. “It’s almost like magic.”