The Sin Eaters

by Aaron Summers

  “You’re less…”

  “Appalling?” Michael’s face hardly moved as he offered the description.

  “Yeah. You’re less appalling now that I’m looking at you. Seeing you. Will this go away eventually?”

  “For some, yes. For others, it strengthens.”

  Tim uttered a low groan.

  “The investigation is not for Michael, Eliza. Despite your instinctive revulsion, he is quite healthy. Robust even, as he approaches his 106th birthday.”

  It was another lure. She felt her lip curl at the corner but looked to Michael for explanation.

  “I am the, ah, director, for an organization headquartered in Peru named the Grupo de Pachakuti. As you may have surmised, we study unique humans. There is a subject at our compound named Charlie who is of great interest to our research. Unfortunately, we have reached an impasse and require assistance.”

  It was easier to observe him now. Yeah, he sounded more like a Mikael. There was a lingering Eastern European lilt in his speech, suppressed in a way meant to obscure the suppression. Every word was precise. She tried to calm herself. It wasn’t working.

  “To do what?”

  “To reconstruct his genealogy so that we may continue our research.”

  “Why don’t you just ask him?”

  Michael smiled, a gesture that seemed to split the mask that was his face with a wide slit. She tried not to smile. He had missed her point.

  “Philip, there is no time for this. You have no more information regarding Helena’s location?”

  “Unfortunately not. She is out of contact since Madagascar.”

  “As with us.”

  Eliza bolted from her chair.

  “You’ve been working with Helena? Since when? She never mentioned you.”

  “As was appropriate,” Michael said. “Such things are not to be broadcast.”

  “Why is there no time?” Tim asked.

  His voice startled Eliza. He was still staring into his hands but they no longer shook. Working the puzzle had helped him, too. It was a good question.

  Michael froze, becoming the marionette in an instant.

  “Why is there no time for this?” he asked again.

  He looked to Eliza and then to Behema, who stared at Michael from behind his steepled fingers. The gaunt man scowled.

  “There is no time because the subject is losing his grip on sanity. Already, he considers himself thousands of years old. He speaks of Norse expeditions and Aztec sacrifice as though they are things he himself experienced. Even among the more…” Michael gestured to himself.

  “Unique humans,” Eliza said.

  “Among the more unique humans, yes, such claims are indicative only of a ruined mind.”

  “What kind of research are you doing? Why is he so important to it?”

  “So you are interested!” Behema rose from his desk. “This is a milestone in our professional relationships. You are interested, Eliza. Go and find out.”

  “Go? Where?”

  “Peru,” Behema said. “To the Grupo. Continue Helena’s work.”

  “I can’t… I can’t do that.”

  YesYouCanYesYouCanYesYouShouldGoDoSomething

  “Why?”

  “Because my life is here. My job is here. Research.”

  The words faded as she spoke them. None of those things mattered. They hardly even existed. What life? This consolation prize of a job? She hadn’t scribbled a single research note since before her dissertation.

  “Those things will continue. I will see to it. As department chair, I enjoy certain resources. Call this your field research. Take the fall semester. You only teach three introductory courses. We will find substitutes.”

  “I can’t just go to Peru.”

  It was becoming easier to reject the offer. She just had to say No a few more times and then it would be real and she could stay and let her new life take root and become something, even if it wasn’t the something she wanted.

  “I can’t.”

  “Philip, I must go. Doctor Reyes has declined…”

  “And I’m not a doctor!”

  Her nails dug into the scarred flesh of her palms until it hurt too much to breathe.

  “But you could be, “Behema said. “You could be. This work, Eliza, this effort, this culmination of decades of research, lifetimes, if you were to bring this to fruition… it would stand as your thesis. It would require no defense. You have glimpsed mere fractions of the world in which Michael lives and already, I imagine, it is weirder and more interesting than anything you’ve seen.”

  He moved around the desk until he was beside her. She could smell the coffee on his breath, see his thumb polishing the wedding band on his finger, count each stitch in his sweater. Her mind was alive, electric, vibrating so fast that it became solid. She could win her degree. She could become Doctor Reyes, have another chance, bite her tongue this time. She could fix this. She could finish Helena’s work, and maybe understand why she left. At least then she would understand why one person had left.

  “You would give me another shot at a dissertation defense?”

  “We would go a step farther. Were you to help Michael, I would guarantee your success.”

  “I don’t want special favors. Just another chance.”

  “You misunderstand because you do not yet know this world. If you are successful, there would be nothing I or anyone in all academia could do to stop you. This work is epiphanic and the time,” he paused to consider Michael’s gothic scowl, “is now.”

  YouDontHaveTheChoiceYouAlwaysHaveTheChoiceDoItDontDoItCantDoItWontDoItDoIt

  “I’ll do it.”

  Behema clapped his hands.

  “Wonderful! I will handle the arrangements. Per Michael’s urgency, you will leave soon. Tonight, I imagine.”

  He paused, placing a hand on his desk and the other on the wall to steady himself. She saw he was grinning like a boy.

  “Yes, wonderful,” he said again.

  “But Tim goes with me.”

  WhereTheHellDidThatComeFromHardlyKnowHimCantSnatchHimOutOfSchooHellHesAnAdult

  “No.”

  Michael had risen, no, grown so tall that his head brushed the ceiling tiles. The comical suit he wore now draped from his long limbs in a chilling semblance of black wings. His refusal rippled through them. She could taste nothing but her own adrenaline.

  “Yes.” She turned to Tim.

  He was still seated and looking up at her.

  “Yes? I need your help. You’re my teaching assistant. TA’s don’t get chances like this. We can throw a semester worth of course credit at it. Gets you out of town until the season’s over.”

  The scared boy looked from her to Behema and back. His skin was still pale and clammy. He looked like he had been trapped on a plane in freefall for hours. His blonde hair darkened by sweat, plastered his forehead. But his hands weren’t shaking.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yes,” Behema added. “I will make those arrangements as well. Michael, try to keep an open mind. I do not make this recommendation lightly. The boy is invaluable to Eliza’s work. As we established, she is an upgrade, not a substitute.”

  The looming archangel shrank to almost human proportions. Had he really grown at all? Eliza looked to the lamps with their long shadows. The man was a horror, but he was only a man.

  “I will send cars for you this evening. You need pack little. We are equipped. Philip, we will talk soon.” Michael vanished into the hallways.

  The trio waited without speaking. Behema steepled his fingers. Eliza stared at the door, her mind running through the last few minutes in a pathetic attempt to catalog what she had just been told. Tim rubbed his knees. Tim! He would remember. That’s why she demanded he come with her. It made sense now. Eliza allowed a little grin. Her mind worked even when she wasn’t able to. That, at least, was comforting.

  “Philip.” Her unsteady voice broke their mutual silence. “This is a lot. Like, a lot. Wh
at all is going on?”

  “Oh, many things at all times. Resurgent volcanic activity. Monkeys crawled down from trees and made human by a million years on the ground. Chinese bunker cities built to withstand North Korean dirty bombs. Myself, yourself, your student, and this man. The world’s strangeness is inescapable and ever growing. There is nothing more for me to add that you won’t soon know, Eliza. You head for a world into which I was never invited.”

  “I was hardly invited. You forced me in, mainly because Helena went walkabout. Apparently not on a globetrotting vacation, either.”

  She jabbed a finger at her employer.

  “No! No. Helena abandoned this project. You must understand. These are not palliative words I offer. You truly are the best candidate for this effort.”

  DontFeelLikeMuchOfAnythingDontEvenKnowWhatsGoingOnRightNowBrainWontWork

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t know but can figure it out,” Tim said.

  “The boy is astute. You did well to bring him!”

  “What do you mean, Tim?” she asked.

  He counted reasons on his thick fingers as he spoke.

  “I don’t know who Helena is but she obviously couldn’t figure it out for the Grupo. That’s why she was on her research trip. Still trying to figure it out. Then she quit. And Michael wanted her, so they’ve worked together before. Doctor Behema knows her too and he thinks you’re the right person even though you don’t know what’s going on.”

  “So, I don’t know but can figure it out?”

  “If anyone can,” Behema added. “If there is time.”

  CHAPTER 6 - EXPERIMENT

  The glass held back the Pacific mists that floated above the growing chasm as the van trundled up the mountain trail. Eliza tapped the van’s window. She wanted to make a fist and shatter it. Maybe Tim could do it. It would be a damn shame if he only looked intimidating. She didn’t know anything about football but weren’t the defensive guys supposed to be the big brawlers?

  They started the overland journey on a paved road back at the tarmac when the Learjet landed. It might even have been a pleasant ride to some advanced university she never heard of until a quartet crowded into their idling van and she met Alejandro.

  There was his reflection again. That’s right. She wanted to shatter the glass so that she couldn’t see him anymore. The reflection was bad enough. To actually look at the man was a saccharine torment. He made her legs quake. She had never felt that moment when her eyes connected with someone so entirely and genetically perfect for her that her limbs stopped working as all her blood rushed to her heart and groin. She hated him.

  Hadn’t she seen statuesque Latin men before? Sioux Falls wasn’t exactly a mecca for male models when she was in high school, but she had travelled and had seen truly beautiful men, even slept with one, once. What a waste. She should have waited for Alejandro instead.

  WhoaWhoaWhereDidYouGoSlowItDown

  The glass hummed. She tried to focus on it, which meant seeing less of the van’s inhabitants and more the descending Peruvian capital through swirling mists. Lima’s sprawling footprint dwindled. Soon the lights would fade as the mists consumed them. Hadn’t she heard that it never rained in Lima? Surely this mist would condense into rain. Maybe Alejandro knew…

  “And then I said to her, miss, you better leave that dress on ‘fore you cause some kind of problem in here. She started poutin’ but Emma helped her out and we left. And that’s how we met.”

  Tim was hunched over listening to the man. He didn’t seem to notice that he sat in the presence of a Greek god. Alejandro reclined into his seat to listen to the story. Eliza wanted to tell a story. It might capture his attention.

  “So then you just asked them to get on a plane and come with you from Auckland to Lima?”

  “Well Tim, that’s about right. Folks trust me. Didn’t you do the same thing here with the doc?”

  “I’m not a doctor,” Eliza growled into the window.

  “Pardon?” Jim Finch had leaned near her. “Might help us hear you if you weren’t talkin’ right into that window.”

  “I said,” Eliza finally turned to face the group, “that I’m not a doctor.”

  “Well Tim says you are!”

  “Will be! I said she will be. When this is all figured out.”

  “What’s figured out?” A woman giggled.

  Eliza wondered how she managed to actually form words while giggling so much and chalked it up to the long practice of the attractive. The woman looked like a giggler. She was pale, spotted with a constellation of freckles, draped in auburn hair that nestled in the curve of her back, and full. Eliza chewed her lip. Full wasn’t the right word.

  She tried to focus on the woman instead of Alejandro, about whom she could already describe every detail. Supple, maybe. Fertile. That was it, fertile like a caveman’s goddess carving. The woman waved her fingers in the air above her head while she lay across two seats.

  The other woman was silent. She held her hands up too, but did not move them. Eliza thought she was staring at them until she saw the woman’s eyes were closed. Emma was her name, or maybe Emily. It started with an Em. She was catatonic since boarding the van except for the movement of her hands. Both women consumed something illicit on their flight, Jim Finch had said. It must be hitting them now.

  Eliza knew nothing about recreational or other drugs. She had thrown away all the aspirin in her house years ago. The sound of pills in a bottle was too much. But the woman’s silence didn’t worry Eliza because her face was serene. Wherever she was, she enjoyed it.

  “So what makes you not a doc, Doc?”

  Jim Finch leaned back into his seat and crossed a heavy cowboy boot across his knee. They were the polished kind, hand stitched and colorful if you knew where to look. It was all ashes and dust compared to the Latin beauty beside him. Eliza averted her eyes.

  “That’s not really your business and it’s impolite to ask.”

  “Well, beg pardon. Hard not to ask when you go out of your way to tell us. We all been talkin’ enough and I learned a lot about Tim here. Why don’t you share a story?”

  He let his head roll back over his shoulder to look through the windshield.

  “Mountains ahead, mountains behind, and that long fall down to Lima. Looks like we got a ways to the fiesta. Unless you don’t have any stories?”

  Eliza glared at where his face should be. Her eyes skipped to the slender road ahead. She pulled back to him but found her vision settled on his gnarled knuckles as they intertwined across his raised knee. Why could she see those so clearly? A dull gold class ring, ridges in the trimmed fingernails, but not his face.

  She tried again, biting her lip hard enough to risk blood, and found herself staring at Alejandro. His Roman nose conquered the empire of his flawless imperfection. His skin was copper, no, molten bronze, to complement the slick black crown of hair.

  NoDammitNotThisAgainMakeHimStopMakeYouStopYoureNotFourteen

  “No, not Alejandro. He don’t talk much unless he gotta, on account of Lorelai might jump him again. Oh, Tim! Left the best part out of the story. So we’re leavin’ that nightclub and Lorelai here,” he nodded to the auburn-haired fertility goddess, “she makes it ‘bout half to the car ‘fore she sees Alejandro. And then she squeals and jumps him. I figured I’d have to give ‘em a minute or twenty but Alejandro’s a better man than me. He’s been dealin’ with it longer, anyhow.”

  Jim Finch was looking past them all to Lorelai. Eliza bristled until she realized she recognized the look. He was concerned for the woman. Tim was looking at her, too, except his wasn’t a look of concern. Did he see Lorelai the way she saw Alejandro? Alej…

  “No! God. Just, dammit.” She dug her nails into her palm. “Dammit. Jim.”

  “Jim Finch,” he corrected.

  “Jim Finch. What are you, from Texas?”

  “Arkansas, ma’am. Hope. Same as Bill Clinton.”

  “Right. Hope, Arkansas. Clinton, Bi
ll, Finch, Jim. What’s going on?”

  He hooked an eyebrow as he leaned in.

  “Wh...where?”

  “Here. With…” she jerked a thumb towards where Alejandro must be sitting. Lounging. Languid. “With Alejandro!”

  She realized she wasn’t breathing. That would help, wouldn’t it? She inhaled but held it.

  “Oh. He’s pretty, ma’am. Prettier than most. Is that… is that why you’ve been holed up against that window? Shoot. I didn’t even think about it. Normally happens to the Lorelai-types and sometimes to a fella who ain’t been honest with himself. Never seen it happen to someone like you.”

  “Like me? What the hell does that mean?”

  “Well, regular. Mainline. Homo sapiens.”

  He drawled the Latin names.

  “Oh.”

  She said it again, and then a final time. Each word cleared her fog a little more until her brain began to process again.

  “That’s what you do, isn’t it? You go and find people and bring them to the Grupo.”

  “Well yes’m. That’s what Tim and I been talkin’ about for the better part of an hour.”

  Eliza whirled to Tim. He shrugged at her, caught sight of Lorelai in his peripheral vision, and turned to watch her again. She started to stop him but didn’t. Who could blame him? She turned back to where Jim Finch’s slippery face must be.

  “Okay. Well, do me a favor and tell me again, since I wasn’t listening.”

  “Because of Alej…”

  “Because of him, yeah.”

  “Tell me, how strong is it? With him? I seen plenty of people act crazy around him. Did you hear where I found him? Floatin’ on a catamaran in the Gulf of Mexico. He tried to shoot me with a flare gun when I motored up. Thought I was some angry husband come to exact my revenge.”

  “It’s, ah, it’s, it’s stronger than I’d like to admit out loud.” She stared at her clasped hands. “Pretty, ah, strong. How do I make it stop?”

  “Die? I dunno. Never seen it stop with anyone. Does seem to slow down a bit once you know what’s goin’ on. Same with me. You can’t really see me, can you? Least not my face or anything you’d think back on later.”