Maybe he was hallucinating it all. This world seemed as tangible as the other: he had felt the sting of Sammy’s needle going into his arm, smelled the fresh blood and raw sewage stink of the bodies. But he was on an unfamiliar drug. Who knew what could happen? Maybe he would enter his bedroom and see his own body asleep on the mattress, curled around Zach. Maybe he could get back through.
You came for answers, he reminded himself. Did you think they would be written on the walls in blood? Are you really ready to go back to the real house, to the empty house? Are you ready to stop trying to fit yourself like an odd piece into the puzzle of your family’s deaths, to fly away with Zach, to start your own life?
He didn’t know. There seemed to be an invisible barrier between him and all he saw, as if the house were letting him look but not touch, telling him You were never a part of this as if he needed to hear it again. The dead were linked in a terrible intimacy, and Trevor was the living, the outsider, You never had anything to do with it. Bobby left you out completely. They all left you. Go back to the one person who cared enough to stay.
Trevor found himself standing before the closed door of his own room. He felt as if he were walking a thin line between his past and his future. If he fell, he would have neither. Balance was everything.
As if in a dream, Trevor saw his hand reaching out, his fingers closing on the knob. Very slowly, he opened the door.
The man sitting on the edge of the bed looked up. His eyes locked with Trevor’s, ice-blue irises rimmed in black, pupils hugely dilated. His gaunt face and his bare chest were smeared with blood. His ginger hair was matted with it. In his right hand he held a rusty hammer, its head glistening thick sticky red, its claw a nightmare of tangled blond hair, shredded skin, pulverized brain and bone. Slow rivulets of blood ran down the handle, coursed in dark veinlike patterns over his arm.
Trevor was dimly aware of someone else in the room, a small still form on the mattress, breathing deeply, shrouded in covers. But he could not focus on it; the membrane seemed to shimmer and grow opaque at that point, like a wrinkle in the fabric of this world.
For a long, long moment he and Bobby simply stared at each other. Their faces were more alike than Trevor had remembered. Then Bobby’s trance seemed to break a little, and his lips moved. What came out was a broken whisper, hoarse with whiskey and sorrow. “Who are you?”
“I’m your son.”
“Didi and Rosena—”
“You killed them. You know me, Bobby.” Trevor advanced a few steps into the room. “You better know me. I haven’t stopped thinking about you for twenty years.”
“Oh, Trev …” The hammer fell out of Bobby’s hand, landed with a heavy thunk on the floorboards less than an inch from his bare toes, but Bobby didn’t flinch. Trevor saw tears coursing down his face, washing away some of the blood. “Is it really you?”
“Go look in the mirror if you don’t believe me.”
“No … no … I know who you are.” Bobby’s shoulders slumped. He looked ancient, desolate. “How old are you? Nineteen? Twenty?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Do you still draw?”
“Goddammit!” Trevor remembered the drift of shredded paper on the mattress, the pillow, their bodies. “You ought to know!”
Very slowly, Bobby shook his head. “No, Trev. I don’t know anything anymore.” He looked up again, and Trevor saw by the naked pain in Bobby’s face that it was true. A terrible suspicion drifted like a cold mist into his mind.
“Why didn’t you kill me?” Trevor asked. He had been waiting so long to say those words. Now they sounded flat and lifeless.
Bobby shrugged helplessly. Trevor recognized the gesture; it was one of his own. “I just kept sitting here,” Bobby went on, “looking at your drawings on the wall, wondering how in hell I could hit you with that thing, wondering how I could bury that chunk of metal in your sweet, smart brain, thinking how easy they’d been compared to you. They were like anatomy lessons. The body is a puzzle of flesh and blood and bone … you understand?”
Trevor nodded. He thought of the times he had wanted to keep biting Zach, to keep pulling and tearing at Zach’s flesh just to see what was under there. Then he thought of fighting at the Boys’ Home, of slamming the older kid’s head against the tiles of the shower stall. Of tendrils of blood swirling through warm water.
“And when you kill the people you love, you watch what your hands are doing, you feel the blood hitting your face, but all the time you’re thinking Why am I doing this? And then you get it. It’s because you love them, because you want all their secrets, not just the ones they decide to show you. And after you take them apart, you know everything.”
“Then why …” Trevor could hardly speak. It was true what he had suspected all along: Bobby hadn’t loved him enough to kill him.
“Why did I leave you out? Because I had to. Because I sat here watching you sleep, thinking all that. And then you came in, just now.
“And I can’t do it, Trev. If I have any talent, any gift left at all, it’s in you now. I can kill them, I can kill myself, but I can’t kill that.”
He picked up the hammer again, stood, and walked toward Trevor.
“Wait!” Trevor put out his hands, tried to touch Bobby. Bobby stopped just out of reach, and his hands closed on air. “Are you seeing … Is this …” He didn’t know how to articulate what he wanted to ask. “What about Birdland? What happened to it for you?”
“Birdland is a machine oiled with the blood of artists,” Bobby said dreamily. His tone was as detached as if he were giving a lecture. He came closer, held out the dripping hammer. “Birdland is a mirror that reflects our deaths. Birdland never existed.”
“But it’s right outside that window!” Trevor yelled. “It’s where I just came from!”
“Yes,” said Bobby, “but I stay in here.”
He pressed the hammer into Trevor’s hand. Then he spread his arms wide and wrapped Trevor in an embrace that felt like warm damp fog. His outlines were blurring. His flesh was softening, melting into Trevor’s.
“NO! DON’T GO! TELL ME WHY YOU DID IT! TELL ME!!!”
“You don’t really want to know why,” he heard Bobby’s voice say. “You just want to know what it felt like.”
Trevor felt the viscous fog seeping into his bones, curling up in his skull, blotting out his vision. He felt blood running down the hammer handle, coursing warm and sticky over his fingers, mingling with the blood from his own scars. From the corner of his eye he saw his drawings fluttering on the wall like trapped wings.
“Tell me,” he whispered.
You’re an artist, the voice whispered back. It was deep inside his head now. Go find out for yourself.
Then the world blinked out like a blown bulb.
Zach was plummeting through cyberspace. Imagine, he thought dazedly, I never needed a computer at all; you can get here just by drinking a cup of coffee and having someone hit you in the head hard enough to knock your eyeballs out.
He was going faster and faster, at the speed of light, of information, of thought. Beyond that there was no consciousness, no identity. There were no federal spooks, no United States, no New Orleans or Missing Mile, no one named Zachary Bosch. There was no such thing as a crime, no such thing as death. He felt himself dissolving into the vast web of synapses, numbers, bits. It was complex but unemotional, easy to understand. It was comforting.
It was so cold …
Zach struggled against the web in sudden panic. No! He didn’t want to stay here and be assimilated into cyberspace, or Birdland, or the void—whatever it was, he did not want to become a small part of a greater good or evil, a streamlined fragment of information that meant nothing on its own. He wanted his troublesome individuality, with all its attendant difficulties and dangers. He wanted his body back. He wanted Trevor.
With every particle of will left in him, Zach strained toward the waking world.
He felt a cold electric flash, became a
ware of his body’s weight and the mattress under him, felt his heart hammering in his chest. He was uncomfortably sure that it had just started back up. Blood was draining from his nasal cavities into his throat, nearly choking him. His head buzzed and throbbed. His hands felt as if someone had gone at them with coarse sandpaper.
Either everything he remembered had really just happened, or this was one intense motherfucker of a trip.
Zach forced his eyes open and saw Trevor sitting on the edge of the bed staring vacantly at the opposite wall. His tangled, sweat-soaked hair streamed over his naked shoulders and down his back. His arms and hands were still bloody, but the scars seemed to have closed.
Clutched in his right fist was the hammer, glistening with blood and other matter. Zach knew Trevor hadn’t hit him: if all that gunk was his, he wouldn’t be breathing now. But what had Trevor done? And what did he think he had done?
He propped himself up on one elbow, felt his head spinning, his vision going blurry. He realized he had lost his glasses somewhere. “Trev?” he whispered. “Are you okay?”
No response.
“Trevor?” Zach’s hand felt rooted to the mattress. He managed to lift it a few inches, extend it for what seemed like miles. His fingers just brushed Trevor’s thigh. The flesh felt cold and smooth as marble. Zach’s fingertips left four parallel smudges of blood on the pale skin.
He had scraped the hell out of his hands. There was nowhere in the house he could have done that. Of course not, he thought, it happened falling on the sidewalk in Birdland, trying not to bust your teeth out on the curb. Joe pushed you, remember?
And if he had met Joe, what had Trevor seen?
He pushed himself closer to Trevor, tried to sit up. “Trev, listen, you didn’t hurt me. I’m fine.” A wave of dizziness washed over him, threatened to become nausea without further notice. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”
Trevor turned. His eyes were like holes drilled in a glacier, black gouges going down deep into the ice. His face looked hollow, haggard, used up. His skull seemed to be trying to wear right through the skin.
“He saw me,” said Trevor. “He saw me in here.”
“Who? When?”
“My father.” There was recognition in Trevor’s eyes, but no warmth. Looking into them was like falling through the void again. “He saw me come in here that night. He talked to me.”
Oh man, thought Zach, bad trip. Bad, bad trip. “Where were you?” he asked cautiously.
“Birdland.”
Of course. Where else? “No, I mean …” What the hell did he mean? “I mean, where were you on the space-time continuum? When were you?”
“This house. That night. I saw my mother dead. I saw my brother dead. Then I came in here and Bobby was alive, was sitting on the bed deciding whether to kill me. He saw me, spoke to me, and decided he couldn’t do it. It was my own fault.”
“I don’t understand. You mean you woke up and talked him out of it?”
“NO! He saw me the way I am NOW! He talked to ME NOW, and then he went and HUNG HIMSELF! LOOK AT THIS! DON’T YOU SEE?” Trevor gestured wildly with the hammer. A tiny gobbet of gore hit Zach’s already-bloody lip. He shrank back against the wall and surreptitiously wiped it away.
“He talked to you at age twenty-five?”
“Yes.”
“He was haunted by your ghost.”
“Yes.”
“Shit.” Zach’s head was beginning to clear a little; it almost made sense. He thought of loops, which were computer programs designed to repeat a set of instructions until a certain condition was satisfied. Zach had previously suspected that hauntings, if they existed, might operate on much the same principle. This was borne out by most of New Orleans famous ghost stories, in which the ghost usually appeared in the same place and repeated the same actions again and again, such as pointing at the spot where its bones were buried or rolling its decapitated head down the stairs.
The idea still seemed to make sense somehow. This was one hell of a complicated program, but maybe Trevor had managed to break into the loop.
A drop of blood landed on Zach’s chest, trickled in a wavy line down his ribs. Then Trevor reached out and laid the head of the hammer ever so gently against Zach’s face. He traced the curve of Zach’s jawline with it, stroked the underside of Zach’s chin with the claw. The metal felt cold, slightly rough, horribly sticky. Trevor’s face was exalted, nearly ecstatic.
“Trev?” Zach asked softly. “What are you doing?”
“I’m getting ready.”
“For what?”
“The puzzle of flesh.”
Whatever that means. “Okay. I’ll help you with that if you want. But could you put the hammer down?”
Trevor just looked at him with those drilled-ice eyes.
“Please?” Zach’s voice was little more than a hoarse whisper now.
Very slowly, Trevor shook his head. “I can’t,” he said, and raised the hammer high. His eyes never left Zach’s. They were full of lust, pleading, naked terror. Zach saw clearly that Trevor didn’t want to be doing this, hated doing this; he saw just as clearly that this was the only thing in the world Trevor wanted to be doing.
He also saw the trajectory of the hammer: next stop, Zach’s own beloved pineal gland, the spot where his third eye would be. Zach slid off the other side of the mattress, scrambled around the bed, and tried to get to the door, but Trevor followed and blocked him. The hammer crashed into the wall, tore through a drawing. Brittle fragments of paper sifted to the floor.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Zach yelled.
“I’m finding out what it feels like.”
“WHY?!”
“Because I’m an artist,” Trevor said through gritted teeth. “I need to know.” He caught Zach’s right arm and forced him back against the wall. Trevor was only slightly bigger and stronger, but he seemed to have the mother of all adrenaline rushes pumping through his veins. He raised the hammer again.
“Trevor—please, I love you—”
“I love you too, Zach.” He heard genuine truth in Trevor’s voice, saw the hammer descending and flung himself sideways. The blow glanced off his shoulder, and the muscle sang with pain.
Trevor pulled the hammer back. Zach got his left arm up, grabbed Trevor’s wrist, locked his elbow and held Trevor’s arm away with all his strength. It was slippery with sweat and blood, hard to hang on to. He stared deep into Trevor’s eyes.
“Listen to me, Trev.” His heart felt like a ripe tomato in a blender. He gasped for breath. Trevor strained against him. “Why do you need to know how it feels to kill somebody? You have an imagination, don’t you?”
Trevor blinked, but did not stop shoving his body against Zach’s.
“Your imagination is better than Bobby’s. He might’ve had to do it to find out how it felt. You don’t.”
Trevor hesitated. His grip on Zach’s arm eased the slightest bit, and Zach saw his chance. Fight back for once! his mind screamed. Don’t think about what hell do to you if you fuck up! You’ll be dead for sure if you don’t try, and so will he. Just DO IT!
Zach let out a long wordless howl and drove his knee straight up into Trevor’s crotch. At the same time he shoved Trevor’s arm backward as hard as he could. The angle of the knee thrust was bad, but it caught Trevor by surprise and threw him off balance. Zach twisted Trevor’s wrist brutally, and Trevor lost his grip on the hammer. It sailed across the room, hit the opposite wall with a loud crack, thudded to the floor.
If Trevor went after it, Zach decided, he would make a break for the door and try to get out of the house. Maybe Trevor would follow him. Maybe things would be saner outside.
Trevor’s eyes were very wide, very pale. He stared at Zach with something like admiration, something like love. His gaze was hypnotic; Zach could not make himself move.
“Fine then,” Trevor said softly. “I always imagined doing it with nothing but my hands.”
He lunged.
Zach dod
ged aside and managed to get to the door, then through it. Trevor was right behind him, blocking the way out, driving him down the hall. He tried for the studio, thinking he could go out a window. Trevor caught a handful of his hair and yanked him off his feet. Zach’s neck snapped back. He stumbled heavily against Trevor, and Trevor pinned his arms.
“I just want to know how you’re made,” Trevor breathed in his ear. “I love you so much, Zach. I want to climb inside you. I want to taste your brain. I want to feel your heart beating in my hands.”
“It can only beat in your hands for a few seconds, Trev. Then I’ll be dead and you won’t have me anymore.”
“Yes I will. You’ll be right here. This place preserves its dead.” Like hitting a SAVE key, Zach thought, and that reminded him of loops again. Had some kind of homicidal loop been set in motion in Trevor’s head?
And if it had, how could he interrupt it?
He felt Trevor’s sharp hipbones pressing into his buttocks, Trevor’s arms wrapped tightly around his chest. For a moment the contact was nearly erotic. He thought Trevor felt it too; his penis was stirring against the back of Zach’s leg, growing half-hard.
Then Trevor lowered his head and sank his teeth deep into the ridge of muscle between Zach’s neck and shoulder.
The pain was immediate, huge, hot. Zach felt fresh blood trickling over his collarbone and down his chest, felt muscle fibers twist and rip, heard himself screaming, then sobbing. He tried to drive his elbow back into Trevor’s chest, but Trevor had his arms clamped tightly to his sides. He tried to kick, and Trevor lifted him off his feet and dragged him into the bathroom.
He’s taking me to his hell, Zach thought, and he’s going to eat me there, he’s going to rip me apart looking for the magic inside me, and he won’t find it. Then he’ll fulfill the condition of the loop, he’ll kill himself. What a stupid program.
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