Jim didn't understand it, but he accepted it. It didn't matter.
Mother smiled off the cobwebs of sleep. She reached for him. "Jimmy, you okay?" she said. "Did you have a bad dream?"
Jim shook his head. "No."
"Then what is it?" Concern on her face. Her beautiful face.
Jim leaned in. "You know how I took extra lemon drops without asking?"
She smiled. "Sorry I got mad."
"I'm sorry, too," he said.
"It's okay." She started to pull him in for a hug.
He resisted. "No. I'm not sorry for taking the candy. Just that you reacted so badly."
The first cut surprised her. She didn't scream, just sort of inhaled, a "hah?" sound that excited his eleven-year-old brain on a level he hadn't been aware of previously. The second cut went into her throat. Not fatal, not right away. But it tired her quickly. Her blood pumped out, soaked the sheets and the mattress.
After that she got weaker and weaker. Jim was able to grab the knife with both hands and plunge it into her repeatedly. Chest. Legs. Arms. She didn't scream. Just made a strange noise, a surprised, pained groan.
"Ung-ung-ung," she said. Jim listened to the sound. He smiled. It was the sound of an early inheritance. Of no one telling him to go to bed early, to eat his greens. It was the sound of what he wanted, when he wanted.
He decided then that that would be his job, his vocation, his profession: to have what he wanted, to take what he needed. An no one would tell him otherwise, no one would tell him no. He would have what he wanted. He deserved it. He was special.
Hadn't Mother always told him so?
She was staring at him. Looking at him with eyes that looked so betrayed, so hurt. Which he didn't understand, because he was doing the responsible thing, the only thing.
He used the knife again. Blood pooled in her eyesockets when he was done. She thrashed a bit, but not much. And she wasn't looking at him like that anymore.
Jim ran away while she was still bleeding, still thrashing. He wiped off the knife first, leaving it beside her. Tears were in his eyes, he was crying hysterically. He would be found in the woods near the house in a few hours. The poor, traumatized boy who found his mother's body after she was savagely murdered by a robber. He had already stolen and hidden several of her jewels, and he broke some panes of glass on the way out of the house.
It was perfect.
No one would ever know.
It was what he had to do. What he needed.
He ran through the door. Ran into the woods. Into the strobing lights of fireflies and winking stars.
The night swallowed him.
TWO
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Jim blinked. The woods were gone. The trees and the house of his childhood had melted back into the mists of happily hidden memory. He looked at his hands, half-expecting to see them the smooth, white hands of a sixth-grader again. Half-expecting to see them blanketed in his mother's blood.
They were his own hands. The hands of a middle-aged man. And the blood on them was not his mother's. It was Adolfa's.
A clapping sound jogged his attention back to the present. To wherever or whenever or whatever place he had found himself trapped in.
It was the man. The driver. The too-thin person in the New York transit outfit who had started all this, who had been the harbinger of this nightmare. He was standing in the middle of the subway car – what must be the first subway car, the final subway car – and clapping derisively.
"Very nicely done, Jim," said the man. He had a New York accent, a hint of the Bronx that went perfectly with his outfit. "You made it here, you made it the farthest. Kudos, cheers, and huzzah to you, my friend." He blew a raspberry in the air, a silly noise that somehow sounded obscene in this place.
The clapping suddenly felt like daggers against Jim's ears. He needed it to stop. Rage rose up, red and dangerous, in his mind.
"You did this to me," he said.
"Not at all," said the gaunt man. He kept clapping. Louder now, the clapping sounded like thunder.
"You did this to me!" Jim shrieked, and rushed at the driver. He held Xavier's knife in front of him, like a divining rod that hungered for blood, that could only be quenched by the sanguine taste of life pumping along its length.
The driver watched him come. He kept clapping. Kept clapping. Kept clapping.
Jim screamed, a wordless scream of mad frustration. This wasn't fair! He had tried so hard, so many years of doing what he had to to get ahead, so many years of work and effort to get to where he had a family, a life. His girls.
And now this man, this bastard was going to get in his way.
The knife reached for the driver. Questing for his blood.
The driver reached out, his hands pushing forward as though he hungered to be pricked by the blade. As he did so, his face changed. The skin puckered and then fell away in a bloody sheet. Only bone was left behind: the skull that Jim had seen at the front of the subway train before he stepped on the last car.
The driver's hand, also bereft of flesh, continued reaching for the knife. Finger bones clicked around the blade. Jim's hand stopped moving, its forward motion arrested as perfectly and completely as if he had run into a brick wall. He couldn't stop, though. Not completely. He kept running forward, momentum driving him onward and folding his body around the knife and the hand that held it, his breath forced out of him with an explosive puff.
Then he rebounded, his feet slipping on the metal floor of the car. He fell. And realized that there was warmth seeping across his pants.
He looked up.
The skeleton in the transit outfit was still holding the knife. It was smiling. "Fair's fair, Jim," it said.
Jim looked down. There was a long gash along his forearm, a vertical slit that was pumping blood at an alarming rate.
"What…?" he began. "What did you do?"
The skull clicked its teeth together. "You've been a smart one, haven't you?"
Jim looked up at the thing, at the beast that had come for him. "I don't know what you mean," he said defiantly, even as a terrifying coldness seeped into his arms and legs.
The skull leaned in close. "Oh, don't you?" it said. And in the dark holes of its eyes Jim thought he saw something writhing, like a nest of snakes being born and being eaten in a never-ending cycle of blood and death.
The demon driver touched a single fleshless finger to Jim's chest. He felt it like an icepick, burrowing into his heart. He screamed and felt…
Memory.
Looking at Karen, worrying she might go insane. That she might lose it. "Okay," he said, "how about I care because if you go nuts that's one more thing I have to worry about in here?" And she thought he was kidding. That he was really worried about her as a person. But he wasn't kidding. He wanted – needed – her to live. Needed them all to live. Because the more people who survived, the more bodies there were to provide him with cover.
Olik wasn't the only one who knew how to sleep when wolves were around....
And then he was in a different place. Grinding the gun into Karen's head, telling himself he couldn't let her get away from the door because there wasn't time. But there was time. There was always time. He just didn't want to be the one to put his hands out the door, didn't want to be the one to be in harm's way if there was someone else to do that work....
Another place. Pulling Adolfa away from gunfire as Karen pulled the trigger on the micro-Uzi. Only now there was no disguising what he was doing. There was no charity there, no philanthropy. He just pulled her in front of him. He wasn't pulling her to safety, he was using her as a shield....
Then back in the dark subway, the skull staring at him with those terrible dark eyes.
"Everything you did was for you," said the skull. "You understood the evil around you not because you were a psychiatrist –"
"I never said I was," said Jim. He was almost gasping. Desperation coloring his voice.
&
nbsp; "No, you carefully avoided that." The skull grinned horribly. "As though not lying at this point might help you." The Bronx voice laughed. It touched Jim in the chest again, and again the pain was bright and terrible. "But you didn't need to be a shrink, pal, didja? Because you already knew about the kinds of people you were dealing with. You had been all of those people, hadn't you?" The pain in Jim's chest was almost too much to bear, but somehow grew worse.
"Why me?" he asked. His voice was almost a whimper, a weak version of the strength it had once been.
The driver seemed to find that oh-so-amusing. "My kingdom for a hypocrite," it said with a chuckle. "Why you?" It touched Jim's head. Again came the pain like someone had taken a blowtorch to his exposed nerve endings.
"Freddy was a pedophile," whispered the skull. "So he went first. Because you can't let things like that stay around."
And now Jim saw. Saw what Freddy had seen: the children that came to him in the first car, that crowded around him and surrounded him. "Make them stop touching me," said Freddy the Perv. "They're touching me, make them stop," he said in much the same way that those children had said when he touched them, when he molested them and destroyed their innocence. And no one saw them, no one saw their pain. Just as no one saw them now, when they came to exact their revenge. No one had seen or believed the children he had savaged in life, so it was only just that no one see them come for their vengeance. No one saw them as they pulled apart the fingers that had touched them, as they tore away the lips that had kissed them, as they destroyed him one cell at a time... knowing that he would find himself back in the car soon, ready for them to minister to him once again.
Jim gasped. Back in the subway car but for a moment before the skull, the driver who commanded this strange world, said, "But what's worse, I wonder: a pedophile or a serial rapist?"
Xavier. The things invading him. Like phalluses forcing into his secret places. "Get it outta me! Get it outta me!" And then a creature, born of sin and shame and rape most foul, a creature that he would bear and that would destroy him in its birthing. And that in turn would become him and his legacy, a microcosm of a tragedy played out so many times in so many places all over the world. A tragedy still being played out, just as Xavier was still being born and pulled apart by his seed, and born and dying and born and dying into infinity.
"For that was his punishment," whispered the skull. Its finger twisted against Jim's skin, bringing fresh agony.
Karen. A woman whose only life was death. A name in an anonymous inbox, a sum in a Cayman Islands account, and she would end a life. There was no emotion in her, no life in her own heart. She had killed many – had come to kill Adolfa, on the last day of her own life. Hired by Scott and Kim, who had grown tired of waiting for the old bitch to die so they could take over the "family business." The hit had gone wrong, she had taken three bullets from Adolfa's bodyguard – or thought she had, before finding herself somehow aboard the subway platform. But she took it as a sign. And another sign when Adolfa was there, too. She could complete the job. Could earn her commission.
But every person she had ever slain had appeared on her tablet. Had named her for what she was. A murderer. Her hands had run red with their blood, blood that would never come clean, would never be anything but bright against her skin.
Then they had come for her – even the little girl she'd killed for a jealous mistress – and dragged her off the subway. And now she was one with them, experiencing the pain of their lives, cut short for eternity.
"Stop," whispered Jim.
"No," said the driver. "This doesn't stop. That's the point."
Another twist. Another pain.
Olik. A man who went from pornography in his own country to a thriving international internet pornography business to a lively trade in the sex slave industry. So many families broken as he took their daughters, and sometimes sons, to quench the appetites of others. It was only appropriate that he should see his own daughters fall to the same urges. That he should have his head hung on a pole to watch their defilement forever.
Jim was crying. Screaming as more pain came.
Adolfa. A sweet old lady who runs the family business. Overseeing accounting. New "product." And running the competition out of business – and into the ground. So her punishment is to spend forever in the pain she inflicted on countless addicts. Watched over by her own "loving family," who will wait forever for her to die, not out of love, but out of greed. Selling her to buy the drugs she has built, just as so many others sold their sons, their daughters, their own flesh for the wares she offered.
She has no hope of respite. For she has reduced human suffering to a question of how much money can be gleaned before dissolution.
And in the subway, dissolution never comes.
Jim shook his head. "No," he said. "This isn't fair. It isn't fair." He looked up at the skull. "What about my girls?"
The skull's grin widened. "What about your girls?" And it touched him one more time.
THREE
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The argument. Such a silly thing. He couldn't understand how it had gotten to this point.
But here it was. Here they were.
Carolyn was staring at him, holding Maddie tightly to her, as though she were afraid he was going to hurt her, for God's sake.
"Come on, Carolyn," Jim said. He took a step toward her.
"Don't you come any closer," she shouted. Her voice was terrified, which made him feel just awful. Couldn't she see how much she and Maddie meant to him?
He stopped moving. He didn't need to run after them, anyway. They were in their bathroom, huddled in the tub. Nowhere for them to go, really. "Carolyn, please. Let's just talk this out."
"I don't even know who you are."
That stung. "How can you not know me?" he said, dumbfounded. "I've known you two for months. Forever, it feels like." He hazarded another small step forward. "I love you. You're my girls."
"What?"
"I know everything about you. I know that you love banana bread but hate bananas, Carolyn. I know that your favorite place in the world is Disneyland, Maddie. That you both want to live in a treehouse like the Swiss Family Robinson someday. So how can you say you don't know me?"
Carolyn's face changed. His heart leapt, sure at first that she was coming around, that she was remembering – was realizing who he was and that they were his girls. But then he saw confusion in her eyes. "How do you know those things?" she said. "Where did you...?" Then the confusion disappeared. "Oh my God. Tom's journal."
Jim shook his head. The conversation wasn't going how he had planned. "Carolyn, let's not –"
"We thought he lost it at the park, but you stole it. You stole it and, what? You fixated on us? On me and Maddie?"
The little girl whimpered in her mother's arms. Jim's heart fell. He didn't want her to feel bad. That would just kill him.
"No, Carolyn, I just… I knew you were…." The words weren't coming. "You're my girls," he finally said.
"And for that you killed my husband?" screamed Carolyn.
Jim didn't look behind him. Didn't look at the body on the bed. He knew from past experience that that wouldn't help anything. The key was to move forward. To get past what was past and focus on the future that could be, the future he deserved.
He stepped toward them. One more step and he could grab her. Could grab Carolyn, could grab Maddie. He'd been wanting to hold them since he saw them in the park almost a year ago. If he could just hold them, he could make them understand. He knew he could.
If he could just hold them.
One more step.
He reached out.
"You sonofabitch," said Carolyn.
That stopped him up short. "Honey, let's watch our language in front of Maddie."
Her mouth curled. Jim took another step.
Carolyn pulled something out from behind Maddie. "Sonofabitch," she said again. There was a loud sound, three claps
of thunder. Maddie screamed. Something punched Jim against the back wall of the bathroom. He slid to the floor.
Carolyn stood. Holding Maddie in one hand. A dark weapon in her other one. Jim couldn't make out what it was: everything was getting dark.
"Why'd you do that?" he said. "I can't feel my legs." He giggled.
"Go to hell," said Carolyn. She aimed the weapon at his face.
Thunder rolled once more.
FOUR
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Jim felt the pain of the bony fingers on his skin, and now he recognized them as what they were: the pain of bullets raining down on him.
The skull grinned at him. "I saved you for the end because you were the worst," it said. "Pedophiles, drug dealers, skin traders, rapists, killers. They steal your life, your body. But sociopaths, people like you… they hide beside you, they pretend to be your friends. Then they steal your soul."
The side doors of the subway train opened.
"You pride yourself on being a good man," said the skull. The driver. "You even believe it. But being a good man is easy if your test for goodness is doing whatever you want, taking what you want. Regardless of who else it hurts."
Through the doors on one side, a woman entered. Tall, beautiful. Kind. She was dressed in a nightgown. She had no eyes.
"Mother?" said Jim.
Through the other doors, a girl and her daughter. One dark, one light. Jim felt a thrill of hope as they came into the car.
They're here to save me, he thought.
But as they stepped forward, they seemed to shift for a moment. For an instant they weren't his girls. No, they were two creatures whose humanity had long since disappeared, if ever it had existed in the first place. Their faces were scaly and cold, the expressionless visages of snakes. They each had three mouths, and those mouths were lined with sawlike teeth that gnashed together in eternal hunger.
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