by L.J. Shen
That was the greatest compliment someone could give me. I turned to face him in bed. “I know what you’re about to do. I just need to hear your story.”
He swallowed.
“The minute it’s done, I’m leaving. I can’t let you waste your life with someone like me. You deserve more, and if trouble ever finds me, it sure as fuck isn’t going to touch you.”
Some things you just need to power through. Losing each other before we’d even had the chance to have one another seemed to be one of them. I didn’t fight him.
“Tell me,” I whispered. “I want to know why you’re leaving.”
He did.
The first time it happened, I was eight.
I’d always had the tendency to disappear. I never stood still, forever on the go.
Mom called me Houdini because I used to vanish from her sight everywhere we went—parks, malls, country clubs, restaurants, SeaWorld, Disneyland. She’d clutch my palm, nearly crushing my bones to dust, muttering about how the things we loved the most were often so slippery and hard to keep safe.
She called me her little explorer, said I’d turn her hair gray, but I was worth it. The world felt like a swollen piñata full of shit I wanted to touch and smear and eat.
That day, though, I should’ve stuck to my parents’ side.
We were at an exhibition in Paris. The gallery had a fancy, five-word name I couldn’t remember, let alone pronounce. There were a handful of children in the gallery, all of them glued to severe-looking au pairs with dark circles around their eyes. There had been a public auction for some rad-ass art pieces collectors and curators had been frothing at the mouth for. Problem was, it was stuck smack in the middle of summer vacation. My mother had been very keen on coming back home with something new for her gallery, so she’d dragged Dad and me along.
We’d go with her to hell, if need be, sans sunscreen.
Back then, I had a nanny whose job was to keep me alive and within reach. I hardly spent any time with Maggie, and when I did, it was for the odd hour here and there, when Mom needed to do something—like participate in this auction. Maggie, a fifty-five-year-old grandma who resembled Lady Tremaine of Cinderella, took me to the downstairs restaurant at the gallery and bought me a healthy pastry that tasted like wood and a carton of organic, sugar-and-taste-free chocolate milk.
The gallery was big and full of rooms I was itching to explore. I deliberately squeezed the chocolate milk against my white shirt, creating a stain the size of Texas.
“Shoot,” I said wryly, squeezing the rest of the liquid onto my hands. Sticky fingertips were my favorite.
“Oh, honey, don’t worry about it. Stay here.” She got up, patting my knee. “I’m just going to grab some napkins, okay?”
“Sure.”
The minute she turned around and made her way the counter, I jumped off the chair and raced into the nearest open room across the corridor. It was big, white, and cold—full of mammoth sculptures lurking like monsters. Their stones were dry and comforting. I touched one of them, relishing its texture. The still, human-like statues reminded me so much of death, and death fascinated me, because it was stronger than me. Even my dad.
I didn’t think anything could be stronger than my parents.
I strode easily, fingering, touching, brushing my nails against the expensive pieces, eager to make a dent. I could hear the echo of Maggie’s voice carrying into the open room as she searched for me, her footsteps fast and hysterical. A twinge of sorrow pinched my heart, but this wasn’t my first rodeo. I figured I’d get out of here before my parents were done and return to her, like I had so many times before.
No one had to know.
There was one sculpture in particular that held my attention in a vise. I ran a hand over its face and for the first time, shivered with excitement. It was brutally beautiful. Bold, menacing, yet tranquil. The sign underneath it said, Tutankhamun’s Death Mask by Edgar Astalis. It looked back at me with a hint of a smile.
I smiled back.
“You know,” a voice boomed behind me. English accent. Male. Old, at least in the ears of an eight year old.
I didn’t turn around. I hated giving people the satisfaction of getting the reaction they wanted from me. In this case, surprise.
“This is one of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. He died at the tender age of nineteen.”
No one had ever spoken to me about death before, and I wanted to gut the subject open, let every secret and fact gush out. Where did we go afterward? Did it hurt? When did it happen? Could moms die, too? I knew Knight’s mom, Auntie Rosie, was always sick. I couldn’t imagine my life without my parents, but I knew death grabbed everyone by the throat eventually. Some part of me wanted to look it in the eye and spit in its face.
Later, it’d earn me the title of daredevil—a rash, bold, careless bully.
I remained silent, my back to the stranger, but I heard his voice getting closer, his shoes clicking on the granite floor with ease and confidence.
“They made him a golden veneer called the Death Mask and installed it on his head before burial. The original mask consists of hundreds of sheets of gold and was made in less than ninety days. Its creation is so miraculous and outstanding in the art world, some believe the Death Mask wasn’t meant for Tutankhamun at all.”
I didn’t know why he was telling me this. He sounded smart. Not as cold and intimidating as my dad. Not that my dad was like that to me, but I knew he scared some people, and I could see why.
Fear equaled limitation. Restraining people, controlling them, appealed to me. There was wild, raw power in it. Infinite possibility.
“What’s your name?” The man was now standing next to me, his hands laced behind his back, both of us watching the statue.
“Vaughn,” I said.
Vaughn meant junior, or younger in Welsh. Mom said when she first held me after I was born, I was the spitting image of my father. So shockingly similar, her heart almost cracked and burst with love.
She’d also warned me not to talk to strangers, let alone give them my personal details, but I wasn’t scared. The man looked harmless: tall, thin as a shoelace, and soft-spoken. He wore an eccentric suit—green on yellow, I remember.
“I’m Harry. Do you know what mummies are, Vaughn?”
“’Course.” I scoffed, running my finger along the statue’s nose. “Tutankhamun was mummified, right? Because he was Egyptian.”
“Smart kid.”
Couldn’t dispute the obvious, so I shrugged.
“But there was something very different about the way they mummified Tutankhamun. He was the only mummy ever found who didn’t have a heart. The Egyptians never removed the heart when they buried their royals. But they did with him.”
Looking back, I could see how inappropriate the conversation was—talking about death, the removal of inner organs, and the mummification of bodies. However, I’d been fascinated. He’d told me more about the real Tutankhamun, and I’d gulped the information thirstily, struggling to keep my face bored and expressionless.
It was only when he took his first breath that I realized he was standing far too close to me, that with every fact he’d volunteered about the young prince, he’d taken a step toward me. His thigh was now pressed against my arm. I took a step back, squinting at him.
“Personal space here,” I quipped.
His face opened with surprise. People weren’t used to sarcasm from kids my age.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, moving away.
“I want to be mummified without a heart.” I pointed at the sculpture, changing the subject.
“At nineteen?” He looked down at me, smirking.
He seemed entertained by me, which was unusual. People typically said I was mouthy and had an unruly streak.
I shrugged. Sure. Nineteen seemed centuries away.
“What about your parents? They’d be sad if you died so young.”
“They wouldn’t care,” I lied. I didn’t know why I said
it. I just wanted to sound grown up and sophisticated.
“You sure?”
“Yup. Who are you, anyway?” I narrowed my eyes at him.
“I own this gallery. And you, my little friend, are in big trouble.” His tone turned frosty as he grabbed the statue of Tutankhamun and threw it on the floor. The statue broke into three pieces.
I stared at it, wide-eyed, my mouth slacking.
What. The. Fuck?
“This statue is being auctioned off for six million dollars upstairs,” the man said in the same monotone tenor one would use to discuss the weather. “My cousin’s most sought-after piece. And you just broke it.”
“I didn’t!” I gasped.
For the first time in my life, I felt something foreign, powerful, and pungent. Hatred. It was so thick I could feel it bursting on my tongue. He was going to pin it on me, and people were going to believe him, because he was older and wore a suit, even if it was a funny one. I was just a kid who couldn’t help himself and had bailed on his nanny—and not for the first time. I had trouble written all over me.
“Yes, you did. I saw you.”
“That’s a lie!” I kicked the air in frustration, my throat burning. I was so angry I wanted to hit him, but I knew I couldn’t.
I heard Maggie’s voice calling my name desperately. The man heard her, too. He smiled.
“They left you with the au pair. How bloody cliché.” He shook his head, chuckling to himself.
At the time, I didn’t know what he meant. I knew now. He’d thought my parents had little to no interest in my life. That I was easy prey—a decoration they plucked out of the wet nurse’s arms once in a full moon, to show their friends and colleagues they had an heir.
“Is your father going to hit you when he finds out?” he asked me.
“What?” I spat, surprised by the idea. “No. No, he won’t.”
“But he’ll be livid that you broke it. Does he even have the money to pay for it?” He eyed me.
Maggie’s voice grew closer. She was coming. Fuck. She was going to tell on me, and my parents were going to give me so much shit. If Dad would need to pay for this, I was guessing he’d fire her, too. Maggie was someone’s grandma. That someone was sick. I didn’t know what the kid had, but I knew his name was Johnny and that Maggie needed this job. My mom sent flowers to his hospital when he was going through treatments and visited them often, but she never took me, because she said she didn’t want me to see certain things.
Everything became so complicated in one, catastrophic moment. I had no idea life could take such a sharp turn in a fraction of a second.
“You’re a liar!” I roared in his face, shoving him with all of my nonexistent strength. My noodle-arms bounced back comically, hitting my sides. Not only was I eight, I was also on the skinny side.
He grabbed my wrists and brought them to his stomach, laughing in a low, gravelly voice.
“How about we strike a deal, little man?”
“No!” I tried to resist, kicking his nuts, but he was faster, dodging my advance. I was delirious with anger, kicking without aim.
“I can make this all go away. Take the fall. Forget it ever happened and talk to my cousin. On one condition.”
I stopped struggling, frozen. Every bone in my body told me not to take whatever he had to offer, but Maggie’s voice grew even closer and more unsteady. She was in tears now, sniffling my name in panic.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“All I need you to do to make it go away is…” he trailed off, taking one of my wrists and putting my palm against his groin. “Slide your little hand into my trousers and squeeze my penis. That’s all. Just a bit.”
I’d touched myself thousands of times. Obviously not to jerk off, but me and my wiener were on good terms. Then again, my parents had told me my privates were mine, for no one else to touch.
They never said anything about me touching someone else’s, though.
“No. That’s gross,” I said on impact, pulling away. “You’re old. Besides, I only like my own penis.”
“You’ll like mine more for six million dollars, little one.” He laughed, unzipping his cigar pants but leaving them on.
Maggie was directly outside the room now, and I was wild with adrenaline. Everything could go so wrong. My mother would be crushed that I’d snuck away again, my dad furious when he had to foot the bill for this. I didn’t want them to feel that way.
And Maggie—what if they fired her? Mom wouldn’t. But Dad could and would. Even Mom wouldn’t be able to convince him otherwise. It wasn’t the first, third, or even fifth time that I’d run away when Maggie was in charge.
“Okay, okay,” I breathed out, shoving my hand into his pants. His penis was thick and big. It felt weird and unnatural. The wooden pastry made its way up my throat. I needed to puke.
“Now squeeze,” he instructed with his breezy English accent.
I did. I squeezed again and again and again, pumping it like a stress ball, wanting to hurt him badly. But the more I tried to make it painful for him, the more he seemed to like it. It all happened really fast. Ten seconds flat. His eyes rolled in their sockets, dropping shut, and he shuddered.
He pushed me away all of a sudden, a jerky reaction. I fell on the floor and watched as he took a multicolored handkerchief from his breast pocket and shoved his hand into his opened zipper. When the handkerchief reappeared, it was wet and sticky.
“Bloody hell,” he breathed heavily, wiping his brow. The look on his face when he saw me on the floor, staring at him, was confused, then angry.
“On your feet, now.” He clapped twice.
I shot up the minute Maggie walked into the room. She wasn’t alone. Mom and Dad were with her, too. One look at the three of them, and any regret I might’ve had for doing what I did with this man vanished. Mom and Maggie had tears in their eyes. Maggie’s brow was dripping with sweat. Dad looked like he was about to kill someone. If they thought I’d snuck away to break a six-million-dollar piece of art, I’d be grounded well into my mid-forties.
“Vaughn!” Mom cried with relief. She ran to me, scooped me up, and held me tight, like I was a baby. My limbs flailed helplessly. I felt her heart pounding violently against my own, and the trace of something gluey in my left palm.
“God, I was so worried. What am I going to do with you, Little Houdini?”
“Chain him by the ankles and throw him in the basement until he hits eighteen, by the looks of it,” Dad commented, striding toward us and plucking me from her arms. He put me down and crouched to my eye level, his face full of thunder.
“Who is this guy?” He tilted his head sideways, motioning toward the guy who’d asked me to touch his penis, but still staring at me.
I’d just opened my mouth when the man cooed, “Emilia LeBlanc-Spencer! We finally meet. Huge fan over here.”
“Harry Fairhurst. Same could be said about you. I just bought one of your paintings.” Mom had recovered from her earlier hysteria, but still gave him a suspicious look.
She glanced at me, waiting for cues. Dad stood up, frowning. He didn’t like something about this scene, either, but couldn’t place what it was.
But me, I was ashamed.
Ashamed I’d screwed up.
Run away.
Fell into this person’s scheme.
I felt stupid and juvenile and more destructive than I ever had been, with Maggie on the line.
She could’ve lost her job, and Dad could have paid six mill for my stupidity. And anyway, I wasn’t going to see this asshole ever again.
“What was my son doing in this room with you, Fairhurst?” my dad asked.
Maggie snatched me into her arms. Mom turned to the Fairhurst guy, her body tense.
“Harry?”
He looked between them, at everyone but at me. His eyes glittered with something desperate, but I didn’t know what it was. He pointed to the broken statue at his feet, and my heart skipped a beat.
The motherfucker.
“I accidentally dropped this,” he explained nonchalantly, the smile returning to his voice. “Vaughn here heard the crash and rushed in. He said he’d help me clean up. I told him that was not necessary, that he needed to go back to whoever was calling for him.”
Lies. But I thought they worked in my favor, so I kept my trap shut.
Dad turned to me. “Is this true?”
Harry Fairhurst did not dare to breathe for the duration between Dad’s question and my answer. Mom took a step away from Fairhurst, her eyes wild with something I couldn’t read—not just worry. She was aghast. I couldn’t do it to them, not when I knew Harry still had a napkin with that wet shit on it in his breast pocket.
“Yeah,” I answered finally. “I wanted to see what happened.”
“You can tell us the truth,” Mom said quietly. She had that look, like she was going to cry.
“I am.” I scoffed. “I am telling the truth.”
That day, I unraveled two amazing discoveries:
I had the ability to destroy my parents. All I needed was to tell them the truth. The guilt and prospect of my being all fucked up about it would do the rest.
I would die before destroying them.
Harry Fairhurst was right about one prophecy, though. I was a bit of a Tutankhamun. At nineteen, I no longer had a beating heart. I wore a death mask everywhere I went, and I was thirsty for revenge.
For his blood.
There was just one, tiny problem that did not occur to me beforehand.
Namely, his niece, Lenora, who’d shoved a heart back into my chest.
Now that it was beating again, I didn’t know what to do.
Fairhurst abused me two more times.
The next was a few years after the gallery incident—on that vacation in the South of France when I gave Lenora the brownie. In the private beach’s restroom.
I came out of a stall just when he walked in, both of us in swimming trunks. He grabbed my arm, squeezed it, and smiled. I thought he was probably grateful I hadn’t told anyone about what happened.
After all, years before, in the gallery, he’d looked like he was ready to piss himself when my parents walked in and he’d realized who I was.
