The Broken Sword

by Molly Cochran

  Kate shivered, feeling the evil flower within her growing, reaching out again to Aubrey's hot darkness, hating herself for wanting him so.

  "Did Bill say he wanted to die?"

  "Of course he didn't say it. In the beginning, they always say they want money."

  She turned to face him. Some of the buds fell out of her hair. "Then he didn't want to die at all. It was just you."

  "Why would I want Bill dead? I couldn't have cared less about him one way or the other." He sighed and turned away from her. "You're too talkative. I've lost interest."

  Aubrey walked, naked, over to an easel with a half-finished oil painting on it. Thoughtfully he picked up a long brush and daubed spots of yellow on it. Not very much, and not in any discernable pattern; just enough to make the painting scream.

  "The truth is, Bill was a heroin addict. He had AIDS. He was going to be sent to prison for shooting two people in a gas station last year. At thirty-one, his life was over. He was terrified of suffering a lingering death behind bars."

  "So you had him murdered."

  Aubrey took another brush and coated it with red paint. "It wasn't really for him. That is, I wouldn't have bothered to have him killed if you hadn't wanted it." He turned around, grinning. "Poor Bill. All the time, he thought he was going there to kill Zack."

  Kate's mouth was suddenly dry. "Zack?"

  "Without Zack, Bill assumed he would be able to rape you without interference," Aubrey said casually. "Bill believed he wanted that at the moment, if you'll recall." With four strokes, he created a crimson bird, at once perfect and evil. "Fortunately for you, his death wish was stronger."

  As Kate watched the painting take shape, she thought, This is unreal. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to him if Bill had lived and Zack had been killed. Or me...

  Aubrey laughed softly. "Of course it would have made a difference. I sent the other, didn't I? Bill owed him a debt, incidentally, which he wasn't about to repay, under the circumstances. Everything worked out well."

  "Stop it!" Kate shrieked, slapping her hands over her ears. "You can't know what I'm thinking! You can't!" She bolted out of bed and pulled on her jeans. "I'm calling the police."

  "Oh? And what will you tell them? That a hit-and-run was engineered by a mindreading acquaintance of yours?" His laughter rang in the room.

  She covered her face with her hands. Aubrey walked over to her slowly and stroked the little wisps of hair on her forehead. "Kate," he said as if he were speaking to a pouting child. "It's understandable that you would be confused now. This is a time of transition for you. It will pass. You'll grow to like who you are. What you are," he added in a whisper.

  "What does that mean?"

  He was silent.

  "Answer me," she screamed. "What have you done to me?"

  "Shhh. There's no need for histrionics." He pulled her back on the bed, kissing her, soothing her as if he were comforting a child. "You're lovely, Kate. Your nipples are lovely. I used to watch you on television, playing with the royal dog, or whatever that thing was, and I'd imagine what sort of nipples you'd have."

  "What have you done?" she repeated between clenched teeth.

  With his finger, he drew a reversed five-pointed star on her belly. "I've taken your soul," he said, regarding her steadily. "Do you understand what a soul is?"

  She heard her breath come out in a quiver.

  "It's the part of you that's eternal," he said softly. "The part that is reborn in life after life. Each life offers its own obstacles—troubles, tragedies, suffering, what have you. None of it is very pleasant. But slowly, as people learn their lessons, as it were, in a nearly endless series of paltry existences, their souls grow a little older, a little wiser, until at last they no longer have to look forward to another horrid seventy or eighty years of constant tribulation. They finally become free… but at the cost of countless agonizing existences."

  He retraced the pentacle on her belly until it showed red against her skin. "I've saved you that effort, Kate. Without a soul, you will never have to be reborn again. This lifetime will be your last. And in it, all your desires—everything you wish for—will be yours for the taking."

  Kate sat up slowly. "Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?"

  He shook his head. "No, Kate. Why would I joke with you?"

  "But you can't… just take my soul. Just like that."

  "I didn't just take it. I gave you something in exchange for it. A wish, remember? I asked you if there was anything you wanted so badly that you would sell your soul for it. And you answered—"

  She backed off the bed. "You're crazy."

  "Am I?"

  The mark on her belly burned. "What about Zack?" she demanded shrilly. "Are you going to talk him into believing you've taken his soul, too?"

  Aubrey crossed his arms over his chest and assessed her, his eyes smiling. "That ridiculous creature really does mean something to you, doesn't he?" he declared with admiration. "Most women in your situation would only be concerned for themselves."

  "Yeah, well, let's just say that Zack's more easily convinced than I am, and I don't want you messing with his head."

  "Wish it, Kate," he said, taunting her.

  "I wish you'd drop dead!"

  He looked into her eyes. "You shouldn't have done that, my darling." His face went ashen. With a small sound, he sank to the floor.

  "Aubrey?"

  His breathing was labored.

  "Oh, God, what's happening?" she squeaked. "Aubrey!"

  Suddenly he sat up and grabbed her, laughing in big booming peals as he threw her on the bed. "That won't work," he said.

  She shoved him backward. "I almost believed you."

  Gently he pulled the braid of her hair forward to rest upon her breast. "Just be careful what you wish for, Kate," he said.

  It was raining on the way home from Aubrey's apartment, and by the time Kate reached her own walk-up in Morningside Heights, she was chilled to the bone.

  What I'd give for a tub of hot water to be waiting for me, she thought.

  It was.

  The first thing she saw when she opened the door was the carpet, steaming like a primeval swamp. Some books lying beside the couch were soaked through with moisture. Dark stains crept halfway up her beanbag chair. From the bathroom, she heard the sound of running water.

  "Oh, shit," she muttered, her feet making squishing sounds on the saturated rug.

  By the time she reached the bathroom, her feet were burning. The hot water had loosened the floor tiles. The wallpaper had peeled completely off, and floated in loose rolls on the two-inch-deep water. Slabs of plaster had fallen from the ceiling into the tub, where they lay surrounded by a colony of dead cockroaches. The tap, when she was able to grasp it with the aid of a towel, spun around uselessly while the water continued to pour out of the faucet.

  Finally Kate called the superintendent, who called a plumber, who turned off all the water to Kate's bathroom for the next five days.

  "All I wanted was a bath," she complained as she carried her eighteenth bucket to the kitchen sink.

  By midnight she had finished the monumental job of mopping the floor and getting the living room carpet down to the sidewalk. Exhausted and sweating, she tumbled into bed, tearing off her soggy clothes on the descent. As she was drifting off to sleep, she saw the star Aubrey had scratched into the skin of her abdomen. It was raised in a red welt radiating out from her navel.

  "What a jerk," she mumbled, uncertain whether she was referring to Aubrey or herself. She had lost two weeks of her life mooning over a one-night stand that had happened to take place on the same evening she had witnessed a terrible accident. In her freaked-out condition, she had put the two events together to create some kind of wicked fantasy, and Aubrey Katsuleris was ready and willing to play his part in it to the hilt.

  "Looks like a goddamn tattoo," she said, touching the hot red mark. She thought briefly—very briefly— about getting up to swab it with p
eroxide, but discarded the idea. If it got infected, it would be no more than she deserved for letting anyone doodle on her body.

  "I wish he'd just go away," she said. Three seconds later, she was asleep.

  "Kate!"

  Zack's pounding on her door woke her up.

  She checked the alarm clock. Nine thirty. She'd already missed two of her classes. "Oh, God," she moaned. She padded to the door, yawning.

  "I've brought coffee," Zack said, exactly as if he had brought the crown jewels of England. "And news."

  "The coffee first, please." She led him across the bare floor to her tiny dining table.

  "What happened to your rug?"

  "I had a flood." She snapped the plastic lid off one of the containers. "It's funny, in a grisly sort of way. I was coming home late yesterday, wishing..." She stared into her coffee. "Wishing…"

  "What is it?"

  She blinked. "Nothing."

  "So what were you wishing?"

  "I forget." She waved at the air in front of her. "It wasn't important. Well, what's your news?"

  Zack took a piece of paper out of his shirt pocket. "Aubrey sent me a telegram."

  She felt her bowels constrict. "Listen, Zack, I don't think you should see him anymore. I know I've said that before, but now—"

  "Relax. He's moved to Morocco."

  "What?"

  I wish he'd just go away.

  "He left this morning. That's what the telegram says." He began to unfold it, but Kate was choking on her coffee. He jumped up and smacked the middle of her back. "You all right?"

  She held up a hand for him to stop. "He's gone? Just like that?"

  "Yeah. Just boogied on out without saying a word. Weird, isn't it?"

  You don't know how weird, she thought. She looked up at him. "Zack," she said softly, "if you could have everything you wanted just by wishing for it, what would that be?"

  "What?" He cocked his head.

  "Just tell me, all right?"

  "Well..."

  "Besides me."

  He smiled. "Okay. Actually, it's something I just thought of last night. And the damndest thing—''

  "What is it?" she demanded impatiently. "The wish."

  Zack folded his hands primly in front of him. "I've been thinking that I'd like to open a place for people to live."

  "An apartment building?" she asked, surprised. "You never seemed like the landlord type."

  He laughed. "This would be a different kind of building. A place for people who work full time at helping others. There's a lady a few blocks from here who goes around to restaurants in midtown in her spare time collecting leftover food that she distributes to homeless shelters. And I know a couple that does errands for old people who can't get around very well. They only do it on weekends, though, because they have to work the rest of the week. I was thinking that if there were a place for people like that to live without paying rent or buying food, they could really do a lot of good."

  "A rent-free apartment building," Kate mused skeptically.

  "Not an apartment building. A center. A center for agents of God."

  Tears came to Kate's eyes. Aubrey hadn't gotten to him, after all. And never would. "Oh, Zack, I hope... no, I wish you’d get a place like that." She closed her eyes and spoke deliberately: "I wish you could have a place to show people how to be agents of God." Then she opened her eyes and smiled at him. "It'll happen, Zack. You'll see."

  "It already has." He spread the telegram out flat. "Aubrey's bought an apartment building in midtown, and he wants me to manage it. He says I can do anything I want with it, as long as I leave the basement for him. I guess he'll want to store stuff there. The place doesn't even have to make money—he'll pay me anyway." He could barely contain his excitement. "Isn't that great?"

  Kate felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. "Yeah," she said in a whisper. "Great."

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  That had been more than three years ago.

  Kate left her apartment unseen and headed across town. It was a warm night, and the neighborhood smelled of food from thousands of apartments with their windows left open after supper.

  The cup was in her handbag. It thumped against her with every step. Even through the leather, she could feel its strange vibration, throbbing, throbbing like a distant heartbeat.

  It's not the Grail, she told herself as she crossed Eighth Avenue.

  It couldn't be, because Aubrey had made an exact duplicate of it which she had placed in the old man's room when she took the original. If the Grail even existed, how would anyone—even Aubrey—know precisely what it looked like, down to the last dent and discoloration?

  The thing was probably some valuable artifact Aubrey had seen in a museum somewhere, or in a book. Something that had been photographed from every angle. For all she knew, the old man had stolen it himself. Or maybe he didn't know how much it was worth, and simply liked how it looked.

  God, she wished...

  No. She didn't wish anymore.

  She had at least learned that much.

  With Aubrey's disappearance, the group that had met at his apartment disbanded. Zack took over the maintenance of the building on West 55th, and Kate moved in. For three years, life had almost returned to normal. Almost, because Kate had never again been entirely certain whether Aubrey had told her the truth about her soul or not.

  She wished a pizza would appear one evening when she was too tired to go out, and one was mistakenly delivered to her apartment; but it was covered with anchovies and green peppers. On another occasion, she wished for an A on an exam for which she was woefully unprepared, and the professor's assistant, a geeky graduate student who was grading the papers, offered her one—on the condition that she permit him to "tutor" her in his apartment.

  So it seemed to go. Each time something she wanted came to her, the gift was somehow twisted, tainted. She had longed for a pair of red boots in Macy's window and had paid two hundred dollars for them before discovering a flaw in their construction that cut her toe. She had helped a lost kitten find a home with a cat-loving friend, only to learn that the animal had feline leukemia and had given the disease to her friend's other pets. She had even wished for world peace, and was delighted when the evening news reported that, for the first time in more than twenty years, not a single shot had been fired in battle that day. Unfortunately, on the same day, a civilian in New Jersey had taken an automatic rifle into a crowded shopping mall and opened fire, killing seventeen innocent people.

  And so she stopped wishing. At least she thought she had.

  When she heard that her father had been shot in Tangier, Kate was tormented for days by thoughts that she might have inadvertently caused an assassination attempt on her father half a world away. Even after she learned that he was unhurt except for the residual aftereffects of a heart attack, she ceaselessly went over every moment of every day in recent memory to see if she had done something, said something... wished something.

  "Kate, your wishes aren't coming true any more than anyone else's," Zack said gently on the drive home from her parents' house after she finally confessed to him the torment she'd been suffering. "Use your reason."

  "Reason! You're the one who thinks the nut bowl Daddy saw was the Holy Grail!"

  Zack laughed. "I told him the truth. There are stories about a cup that heals wounds, and miracles do happen. If your dad was shot and a cup healed him, I'm ready to believe that was a miracle. But not everything is. If you've got a cold and you recover, that's not a miracle. You know what I'm saying?"

  "My red boots?" Kate asked sheepishly.

  "Exactly. Lots of people buy shoes that hurt their feet. Not me, of course." He pointed to the ratty sneakers he'd been wearing for the past four years. Kate smiled. "And lots of stray cats are sick. And even I was bound to get a job sometime."

  She leaned her head against his shoulder while he drove. "I always thought you were the crazy one," she said.

  "At one time,
you might have been right," Zack said. "Like those nights at Aubrey's. I really thought he was teaching us how to make our dreams come true by using magic."

  "Wasn't he?"

  "No! That's what I'm trying to tell you. He'd let everyone go on about all the stuff they wanted, and then he'd give us spells to make them happen, and we believed, we believed, we believed."

  "Well? Did they ever come true?"

  He shrugged. "Sometimes. Remember Geoffrey? The one who inherited a million dollars? He used the money to open a club. It's called Sparkles."

  "I've heard of that."

  "Who hasn't? It's the hottest place in New York. And Sean, the actor—"

  "I just saw him on TV! He won an Emmy. I thought he looked familiar." Her forehead creased. "So the spells must have worked."

  Zack laughed. "Unless you consider the others. Have you ever heard of them again?"

  "No, but... What are you getting at?"

  "The fact that some of their wishes came true, and some didn't. Just like the rest of the population."

  "Huh?"

  "That's the way life works. Sometimes you get what you want, sometimes you don't. But what I'm saying is, it's the belief that keeps you going. I think that's what Aubrey was trying to show us. And we all probably would have come to that understanding if he hadn't left so suddenly."

  "But I wished for that, too. For him to leave."

  "Yeah. You wished he'd leave. And I wished he'd stay. Either way, life went on. Here we are. Maybe that was part of the lesson."

  "He told me he'd taken my soul."

  Zack ruffled her hair. "Let me tell you a story," he said gently. "It's a Zen koan about a student who walked miles through the forest to spend a day with his teacher. By the time the session was over, the sun had gone down, and the student was afraid he wouldn't be able to find his way home.

  "'Why do you hesitate to leave?' the teacher asked.

  "The student answered, 'Because it's dark outside.'

  "So the teacher gave him a candle. The student thanked him and began to leave. Then, when he reached the doorway, the teacher blew out the flame."