by L C Barlow
"Yes," it replied.
"How? What did he ask?" I whispered.
There was a length of time just as void as the blackness that surrounded me before It spoke.
"You know," it said.
I shut my eyes, tight.
"I don't want to talk to you anymore," I breathed softly.
"The knowledge is hard to bear. I will come back another time."
"I don't want you to come back!" I yelled.
It did not respond.
My mouth dropped open, and the words that next came from my mouth were the hardest to bear. "Will I ever get out of this house?" I whispered, softer than the slowest breeze.
"I am not here to answer that."
I breathed deeply, feeling angry and yet at the same time slightly consoled. If It was willing to keep me alive, then perhaps Cyrus could not do away with me.
A long, deadly silence sat between us, and It finally said, "Until then, you will do as I ask and let the others know what I desire. Roland and Cyrus and Alex. Let them know I need the pure."
"...I will," I replied.
"And tell Cyrus, I said 'Not yet.'"
"Jack?" I heard Roland's voice from the hall. I turned to face the doorway, peering into the light. It seemed blinding. He stepped into view from my left and then stopped. He locked onto me, and I observed his face.
He looked so different, so much purer. The lines and wrinkles did not look like those of age, of a man brought back from death millions of times, but of kindness. I glimpsed his brown eyes looking at me, and then they flicked to my right.
His eyebrows rocketed up, his eyes widened, and he said softly and quickly, "Come into the hall, Jack. Now." Without hesitation, I stepped through the door's crack. As I did, he came to me and pulled me towards him. As he hugged me, the bedroom door slammed with a blow. Then, no more sounds, no more voices.
In the hall, Roland looked me over like a mother with her child. I told him I was okay and then, as he lifted my hand to look at my wrist, I asked, "What?"
"Your bruises are healed," he said, referring to Cyrus's grabbing me earlier in the evening, and he grimaced. I put my own hands to my wrist, checking for soreness and wondering if that were true, or if the bruises - like the glove - had just been bleached.
But I felt fine, healed. It horrified me. I wanted my bruises back.
I wanted to whisper to Roland, then, "We need to burn the box," but I could not, for as soon as I spoke the first word, Cyrus appeared at the end of the hallway.
"Did you find Meredith?" he asked, but as he stepped to us, Roland pointed to my healed wrist, and it was as if any scales that covered Cyrus's eyes were removed.
"She's dead, isn't she?" he said, and I nodded, pointing to my room.
"How are you not dead?" he asked.
"I think because I'm supposed to tell you something."
He did not look pleased. "What?" he asked.
I reported, and reported only, how our operations were supposed to change, the new purpose they had - to kill the moral, to darken the white. He listened to me as one would to a seer. Then he brought me brandy.
It was in a snifter that was asymmetric and baseless, and the glass rolled around on its edge as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It went round and round and round, then to and fro and back around, and I felt as though this meant something more than how it seemed. But what meaning it implicated I could not say.
That glass of brandy was the last courtesy I ever remember Cyrus providing, and he stared at me all night. As he did, his eyes furrowed further than I had ever seen on a human man before.
Cyrus simply did not believe that this was all there was to my story. He refused to accept that there wasn't something that the box didn't want him to know.
This was how our New Year began.
Chapter 17
LOVE
I looked at the house and thought, "I'm not as played out as I thought I was."
It sat like a tiny sugar castle in the night, its white paint twinkling in the moonlight. I thought to myself then that if this night went smoothly I was going to buy a box of sugar cubes and eat them all. That seemed absolutely lovely as I felt the tinges of adrenaline crawl into the crevices of my neck. But when you've got a job to do, everything and everything else seems lovely.
I looked to Patrick, and he was jumping inside. I could see it, knew what it looked like.
"We don't have to do this," he told me as we stood there.
"Patrick," I said. "We drove the hour and a half. We gave money to the homeless," as though that had any bearing at all. "It's getting done."
He looked at me like a deer ready to bolt from a predator.
I turned back to the house. This was going to be such a piece of cake. Patrick had not a clue.
I stood there and thought of the night when I dropped into a neighbor's house through a sky roof. I had nearly broken my neck at fourteen. I walked through every crisp room of that house, even the ones where the owners and their children lay sleeping. Everywhere. They never knew the difference. I hadn't known why I broke into that house at the time. I was always one step behind myself, but now I was glad of what I had done. I had gained experience, fortitude.
"Now you know one of the reasons," I said.
"What reason?" Patrick asked breathlessly.
"Why I do good before things like this."
I looked to him, and I could see him thinking. "Yes," he replied. "Yes, it... it does help." He appeared puzzled, and I left him with that.
I stepped on the soft, grey grass. Luckily for both of us, the fireplace was tucked into the back of the house, rather than the center, and so there was no need to go deep within. We would be in and out. "In and out," I said out loud.
Patrick did not lead the way.
In about three minutes' time, I had the lock picked, and we slipped through the back door. Actually, I stepped inside and waited for Patrick for what seemed like minutes. I was cloaked in the dark of the house, looking through the open door at Patrick in the bright moonlight.
"I don't know about this," I barely heard him whisper. The red in his hair shimmered and shivered, though everything else was grey.
"Oh, Patrick," I said, beckoning him inside, "This is the sort of thing you can never 'know' about." He nodded his head as would a man with wisdom, and he stepped quietly past the threshold. When he did, I turned on my tiny, but effective, Coast flashlight. It was half the size of a tire gauge and felt like a coffee stir stick in my hand.
I twisted its head and the brilliant light hugged the walls, illuminating a ruby couch, and then as I moved the light about, there was a bookshelf with various books and a tea set that shimmered like water. Next to those, there was a slim closet door, and then finally, right beside the back door, the fireplace. It seemed a mouth without a tongue in the dark. I was eager to put my hands inside.
I nodded to Patrick. "You know where it is," I said. He swallowed, and I listened to it click. Patrick went to the fireplace.
He stuck his hands inside while he knelt on the stone, and I shone the flashlight within while he did so. I cringed at every noise he made, the little scratching sound like chalk on a board, and at first I feared that he was wrong, for, though he dug his fingers around one of the bricks, it would not budge. He scraped his fingernails against it hard enough that I saw them bend back. "Fuck!" he hissed, but not in pain.
"Patience," I whispered, and I looked around again.
I could smell him in the dark. It was the smell of Winston Reds and cologne, and a human smell beneath that. I leaned closer to him and whispered, "There. Look." It was something I had seen in the split second I smelled him. There was a little crack, a little blackness amidst all the white. I brought the thin flashlight to the crevice, leaning inwards until I thought my stomach muscles would scream, and I scraped some of the mortar away. "You were at the wrong brick, Patrick." I didn't know why he hadn't seen it. Patrick followed what I said, and where I pointed, he dug in quick
ly.
He pulled the brick from the wall, and immediately, without a second's thought, money shot forth like too many feathers stuffed in a pillow. He pulled the bills out quickly, pushing green into his pockets. The ones I watched fall into the pit of the fireplace, I grabbed and put in my own.
That was when we heard it - the click. It was different than the one from Patrick's throat, and I knew from where it came - a gun. It was not the cocking of one, though, but the creaking of one.
It took me a second to realize when the lights shot on.
"What the FUCK are you doing?" a deep voice commanded, and while I turned to look at him, I thought to myself, Good. It's a man, not a woman. You can't pay off a woman, but you can bribe a man.
I could feel the energy of Patrick practically scream beside me, but before he ever said a word, I replied, "Hitting the fireplace jackpot. Would you like some of the prize?" I asked him.
That was when I really took him in. "Fat, shorty two-forty," we used to call them. There was silver in his hair and beard. He looked like a truck driver.
There was a shot gun in his hands.
"What the fuck are you talking about?" he asked, "You are breaking into my house. You are break-ing in-to MY HOUSE." His face was red, his chest pumping up and down like hydraulics. I had already raised my hands up, but now I shook them outward quickly, as though saying, "Hold on!"
"Patrick," I said, looking at him, "Show him."
Patrick had never taken his eyes off of Mr. Semi, and even though there was a gun involved, I saw him grimace at the thought of giving away that money. Nevertheless, he slowly - very slowly - reached into his pocket and pulled out the bills. They wafted to the floor, each like its own individual airplane. Hundreds. Tens of hundreds. Then, tens of thousands. They drifted in front of us like synthetic snow.
I saw the man's eyes shift from fright to surprise. And then, finally, after Patrick and I had poured out our pockets, I saw just a glimmer of delight. That made me feel like leaning back, crossing my legs, and taking out a Marlboro.
"Give you fifty grand if you let us go and don't call the cops," I said.
He looked at me in his gray wife beater stretched across his protruding belly and asked, "How much is there?"
I looked to Patrick. His eyes were cautious, but not defeated, not despairing, like I expected them to be. "Fifty grand exactly," he said.
The man squinted at Patrick. "You're not from around here, are ya boy?"
Patrick remained silent.
"Well?"
"I'm from Clifden," he said.
"Where?"
"Ireland."
"Ireland!" the man chuckled. His eyes darkened. "Well, let me give you a tip. The way we do things in this country... people die or go to prison when they break into peoples' houses."
Then the man swung his shotgun up on his shoulder so that the muzzle was now looking at the ceiling, which was not what I expected him to do. I felt even more relieved.
"This is my house," Patrick replied under his breath.
"What?!" the man asked, positioning the gun like he might bring it down at any moment.
"This was my house," Patrick replied heatedly. In my head, I was yelling at him shut up! but it was too late. "You bought it from my Father."
"Oh, really?" the man asked, popping his eyebrows up. "Sounds like it never really was yours if your Father owned it."
Patrick began to say something else, but I cut him off. "Sir! There is a pile of money on the floor. Do you want it or not?"
He looked me in the eye challengingly. "What says I don't just call the cops and claim this money was mine in the first place?"
"You don't want to do that," I said.
"Why not?"
I nodded my head to Patrick. "His Father is a wealthy bastard," I said. "Whether or not this money ever was yours, he'd make sure it was his by the end of it. And then he'd make sure all of your money was his. And then this house was his again... if you were to threaten his son."
"Look, if you're gonna play the daddy card..." That pissed me off, and I nearly yelled. "We are offering you fifty grand," I said. "That is the card I'm playing. That is the gold-plated deck I'm dealing."
He licked his lips, and they glistened as though covered in grease. "What's to say that I don't just kill you both now and take the money?" he asked.
I looked him dead in the eye. I could have 'played the daddy card' again, I could have played the 'we're just kids card', but instead I asked, very simply and cleanly, "Are you really ready for that?" And he knew that I knew that he wasn't. He looked away from me, and I just barely saw it in his body. The answer.
"Leave it all. Get out."
I looked at Patrick, and he did not protest. Rather, he gave a nod of his head, a teacup nod - polite, and yet deafening in its hatred.
I waited for this trailer park man to act like he would shoot us again, but he never did. We stood from the fireplace, and we walked the few feet to the door. He shooed us like we were dogs. Patrick opened the door, and I heard the sound of crickets. I turned away from fat, shorty two-forty for the last time, and we left.
We were on the highway, silent the whole way back to the University, except for one pit-stop along the way for Patrick's hysteria. He slowed the car, parked it, took off his seatbelt, and then proceeded to scream, hit, pummel, and erupt in the driver's seat.
In his tornado of movements, he hit the horn, the windshield wipers, the stereo, the lights. He broke off the rearview mirror, and there were marks in the leather of his steering wheel. I said nothing to him when he exploded, knowing that each of us deal with defeat in our own way - especially our first time - and he said nothing to me.
After the sparks flew, the flame fizzled, and he took the car out of park. We were going down the road again.
I think he was too frustrated to go back to the apartment. I think he was too depressed to go anywhere. But we did go somewhere - Blue Brick. The cafe/bar on Jordan Ave. downtown. It never closes. Going there was like finding a donut shop open at midnight. It was just the right amount of glorious.
Patrick actually parked a little ways from it, near the Caster Woods, and as we got out, a very odd thing happened. Once I stood along the woods' edge, I smelled something distinctly familiar. It woke me, as though dragging me into an entirely separate world from the night we had had.
It was just barely the whisper of a smell, and I don't know exactly what it made me feel, for the smell was too quick and too faint. Had Patrick not been there, I would have gone deeper in, walked through the slender trees to the origin, but I did not. The need for a drink, and the need to see Patrick drink, overrode me.
The first few hours were blissful. We sat on the outside deck of the twenty-four-seven cafe in the dawning morning and said nothing. There was no sun, not really, for the sky was overcast with gray.
Finally, after thirty minutes or so, it began to drizzle and rain. The moisture was nice, and it was cleansing to the air, and for a while, as we ordered drinks, we just sat and stared at the rain in perfect silence, occasionally smoking cigarettes. Patrick had brought his Winston Reds, as usual, and that was nice and made me happy to smoke because that brand was the first cigarette I had ever smoked, and I still respect its flavor.
It rained and rained, and we smoked and smoked, and as soon as a cigarette was out, you could no longer smell it. There was only the water round us.
When the rain let up, and its tough white noise lessened, we became conscious and thoughtful of each other again, though we never said it. Then, the world seemed to wake, and there were people around us having breakfast. All of them were inside, but we could hear them speaking and the clinking of utensils on plates.
We two were the only ones outside, sitting and enjoying the rain, until quite jarringly, and yet unobtrusively, we heard "Patrick!" from our left. We turned, and there were David and Marshall. They reached their arms out like they were waiting for a bro hug, and I heard Patrick whisper, "Dear God, just what I n
eed." When they walked to Patrick, he acknowledged them with a half-assed dap, part handshake, part hug, and then David and Marshall sat down, not yet realizing that the energy between both me and Patrick was not a happy one.
After many times of trying to start a conversation with either of us, they finally did realize it. Monosyllable comments do not make for fun times, and these boys were all about fun.
"What the fuck is wrong?" Marshall asked.
"I don't want to talk about it." Patrick was practically laying on the table, his hand around a half empty glass of whisky. He looked like a tired dog without a bone.
"Well, whatever it is, don't worry about it. Everyone's gone through it."
Patrick just shook his head quietly, while both of the guys ordered something to eat.
"You look like shit," David said.
Again, Patrick said nothing.
"You been shooting heroin again?" said Marshall.
Nothing.
David and Marshall looked at each other, and then David looked to me. He motioned with his hands a shooting-up gesture and mouthed the words, "Is he?" I stared at him, hoping he would understand how condescending he was being, but then I knew he would never realize it, and I gave one shake of my head to the left, and then to the right. I looked away.
"So, uh, Lisa, uh... she thinks you're hot. She asked me about you last night. I've got her number if you want it." David said this to Patrick.
Again, nothing.
The food came at that moment, and the guys started eating. Patrick ordered more drinks, for both me and him, and the waitress went away. She returned with something red for me and something blue for Patrick. I didn't even care what it was. I just drank it.
Finally, Marshall said, "This is fuckin' creepy. One of you guys needs to say something. You're fucking scaring me. I don't care what it is. Just say something."
I'm not sure Patrick even heard Marshall's words, the way he stared at the table, his hand in his hair, which looked more and more like fur as he messed with it. I could see a bit of stubble on his face for the first time, and it stood out like red needles. If it was possible, it glistened even redder than his hair.
