Pivot

by L C Barlow

  I grimaced. "Why would you know about her?"

  "I know everything about you. Absolutely everything. I just want to know what you know about yourself."

  I took another drag on my cigarette. There were two very imperative questions I wanted to ask him, but I could only ask one of them. Finally, I settled on, "Why would you know everything about me?"

  "Truthfully? Because I want to. You... interest me. When I was first told about you, I merely looked at online articles, but then the oddity, sheer oddity, of your story made me want to know more. Now that I've finally met you, you are just as intriguing."

  "What is your job?" I asked.

  "Now, now. Let's keep the questions on you."

  I took another shaky drag.

  "Who is your father, Jack?"

  "I have no father."

  "Please, take me seriously."

  I paused. "I don't know."

  "I do."

  I looked at him and stopped breathing. Those two words were like a smooth cream that dipped in between my fingers and ribs and ran along the contours of my spine. I was still afraid, but my body could no longer know it.

  "Now, I have your attention, don't I?" he said. With that, he slid the folder from his side to me. "I want you to read this."

  I did.

  It was a set of instructions. A recipe, really. Take a person, put them on a block of wood, nail her hands and feet to that block. Slit her from throat to genitals, but do not kill her. Cut one six-pointed star in each breast. Wait for the blood to flow. When she is slick with it, open her up. Reach into her abdomen and pull out her uterus. Slice it open, and splay it out. Make sure she sees. Make sure she knows that this is for her sins. If she loses consciousness, use smelling salts to revive her. Skin her. Start by cutting her at the waist and pulling strips of skin up past her head. Do this slowly..."

  I didn't read the rest. I didn't need to. I knew what came next. I had seen it before.

  I looked back at the man in front of me.

  "We were supposed to do something very similar to this to you tonight," he said. "We were paid two hundred thousand to do it."

  One might think that this would fill me with fear, but it did not. I simply felt sick and weary.

  "Are you going to read the rest?" he asked.

  "I know what it says. Skinning. Dismemberment. Beheading. I know."

  He said, "Yes. So you are familiar."

  I waited for him to say more, but he did not. "Are you going to do it?" I asked.

  "No." He said this simply.

  "Why not?" I whispered.

  "Our employer is far less interested who these instructions were intended for and far more interested in who gave them."

  "You don't know?"

  "Why would we? Jobs like these are anonymous. Always anonymous."

  "But you know about me. You say you know who my father is. I don't even know who my father is. Don't you have some sort of resources?"

  He flipped his hands out to the dank walls beside us. "These are our resources." He said this slowly, lovingly.

  There was a long pause as I crushed the cigarette out on the table and lit another one. "Do you know who wrote the letter?" he asked me.

  "Why does your employer want to know?" I asked softly. I did not think he would tell me, but he did.

  "Someone he knew was murdered this way. About a year ago." The man tapped the table such that he pointed to the file before me. "We were never able to find who did it. This, you understand, was lucky... for you. So lucky. At least for a little while longer, it means you get to live. And that if we do kill you, it won't be so ornate a thing."

  I sat there thinking about that, and truly, I was grateful, for it was torture that I feared, not death. I even almost said 'thank you.' Instead I took a drag off of my second cigarette and held the nicotine in until I was sweating.

  "So do you know who wrote it?" he asked.

  "Yeah," I said. "I know."

  "Who is it?"

  "A very sadistic, blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy by the name of Alexander Harper."

  "Cyrus's son, then?" the man asked. "The one who tortured animals in the woods, including the old family pet? The one who tried to rape you?"

  I peered at the man through the smoke of my cigarette. "How do you know that?"

  "How do you think?"

  I paused. "You've read all of the hospital records. I think you've listened to the recordings of me and..." I thought of Dr. Newsom and felt a shred of nostalgia amidst the anxiety, "my Doctor." This man made me sick with his knowledge of me.

  "I told you you interested me Jack."

  I paused. "Why?" I feared the answer.

  "Because you seem to me, at least in how these files paint you, to be so perfectly on the border.

  "In my experience, there are, usually, only two types of people in the world. There are the ones who, if you will so kindly excuse the biblical reference, really do take the apple from the snake. And their bites are hearty. Their chin is always dripping with the juice. And that juice, over time, turns to blood. Yet, they keep on eating. They learn to like it.

  "On the other hand, there are those who run from the snake. They never look back, and they never try anything that even remotely looks like an apple. They have no taste for it. They recognize a jug of blood when they see it.

  "But every once in a while, I come across someone like you. Someone who, if they were set into the garden, and the snake came upon them, they would never eat, yet never run. Rather, they'd say to the snake, 'Keep talking, because this moment is the moment. I'll never say yes to you, I'll never say no. Just let me sit here, right here. That is my pleasure.' Where you get pleasure is in the border that divides. Not many get it, get you, but I do."

  After a moment I asked, "What kind of a person are you?"

  He chuckled. All five of them in the room chuckled. "My dear Jack," he said. "I have been eating for a very, very long time. You are in a room full of people who live under the apple tree. Just like you've always been."

  He smiled at me, then said, "But you can appreciate that. After all, it comes with the territory of being on the border."

  I looked at him and thought that he was right, far more than he could ever understand. I asked him, curious what he would say, "If you have seen my file, and seen the body count I left behind, how could you ever say that I was 'on the border?'"

  "That's a good one," he said. "But the question, you'll learn with time, is never, 'What have I done?' or 'What has everybody seen me do?' The question is, instead, 'What would I have rather done?' Or, perhaps more aptly for you, 'Why am I not Alexander Harper?' You were raised the same way, after all. Or trained the same way. So, why are you Jack and not Alex?"

  The question struck me silent, and I did not know how to answer it.

  "In addition," he said, "there's something that the Doctor and the court missed."

  "Missed?" I asked.

  "Yes, it's rather odd. You reported two-hundred and three people being killed by Cyrus, but Cyrus reported - and yes, he did keep records of these deaths, believe it or not - two-hundred and thirteen." This man then listed the names for me, and I could feel my heart beginning to pound as he continued. "Cyrus said he killed them all one night. The three girls were in a sacrifice, and the rest with a 'word.' Seems impossible."

  "It is," I said. "Cyrus must have been high that night."

  The man nodded his head, but it did not appear to be in agreement. "Or maybe it's something else. The fact that you would have a correct number of bodies, and a man so exacting and relentless as Cyrus would have a false number seems odd. It's made even odder by the fact that these people were tracked down by authorities, and they are indeed alive and well."

  My mouth was suddenly dry again, and I took a long drag on my cigarette, which made it all the more unbearable. I never veered away from his eyes, but behind my gaze was a brain racked with the surprise that Cyrus had ever kept a journal of his kills.

  "An odd lit
tle inconsistency," he continued, "a strange slip of reality unaccountable in the numbers. It makes me wonder... what the explanation could possibly be."

  The air stiffened and turned stale between us as I sat and mulled over his words, but as I was thinking, he asked me quite suddenly, "Is there anyone else it could be?"

  It took me a second to realize what he meant, and I said, "Oh," then, "No," then, "Wait," then "Yes."

  "Who?"

  "Anybody remotely related to the cult."

  "I thought the cult was dead."

  I looked at him, confused. "It will never be dead, I don't think. Cyrus had many followers that never lived with or near him. I am... fairly certain Alex is with some of them. They would want me dead as much as Alex would. Still, I'm fairly certain it is Alex."

  "Why would they want you dead this way?" the man asked, looking in the file.

  "It's a ritual."

  "What ritual?"

  I thought of his employer, how this might upset him, even though I found all of Cyrus's old 'rituals' meaningless. "It doesn't matter," I replied.

  "Tell me."

  I sighed. "It's not important."

  "I won't ask again, Jack."

  This was not worth losing fingers over. I grimaced and said, "It's to cut off the line. The biological line. The idea is that, somehow, if this ritual is done, there will be a domino effect. One by one by one, the family dies off so that there is no more setting down roots in the world. The line can't continue."

  The man eyed me in what seemed a curious way.

  "Your employer shouldn't believe it," I said. "It's just... the Kool-Aid talking."

  He didn't respond.

  There was a long silence as he stared at a corner of the room, thinking, I believe, on what I had said, and I knew this was my only chance to state what had been on my mind.

  "If it is Alex Harper, though, I want to be the one to kill him."

  "You don't get a say." He sounded like a professor dismissing a student. He didn't even look at me.

  I felt irritated, angry. "You have no idea how much hell I have been through over him."

  "No, remember. I know. I know everything."

  "There are things that I have never told anyone," I said. "Things you don't know. He's mine to kill."

  "Let it go, Jack. That would be best for you." The last sentence had a hint of warning in it, and so I said no more, but my body screamed. I felt my blood, which had cooled in our conversation, begin to course through me again like magma. Alex was mine. They had no right to take him away from me. The man added, "Besides, we can do a much better job of killing him. A longer job. A more ornate one." That did not wholly comfort me.

  "Here it is, Jack," the man said, and he took the file from the table in his hands. "The rules of our engagement, so to speak. If you talk about us to anyone, if you go to the authorities, we will kill you. If you leave town, we will kill you. You are to stay at school and go to your dorm and Patrick's, if you'd like. Your normal locations. You are to go about your days like this never happened. And, eventually, we will contact you again. The plan is to set up a meeting with the person who hired us to kill you - or at least someone representing the person who did so - and when we do meet, we want you there."

  "And I have no choice."

  "Of course. You have no choice."

  I sighed and marveled at just how calm I had become. This was natural, I felt; I was more comfortable in that room than I had felt in years. That depressed me more than anything else.

  "And Jack," the man said, "You know who your father is."

  I looked to him and shook my head. "I don't."

  "Don't play games with me," he replied. "You do."

  Chapter 22

  RUPTURE

  Two nights later, it was the same routine. I did exactly as Cyrus had asked. He brought both Alex and me to another religious leader's house, and though I will not describe what happened at Minister Sloan's in great detail here, I indeed committed the slaughter. I showed my loyalty and killed off - as Cyrus said - whatever was in me that was salvageable to that brilliant stranger. It was the most wicked procedure I ever endured at my own hand.

  We went to the cafe again. Cyrus had his trinket - one of the little boy's toy cars - and he was inspecting the rubber wheels as we ate. He remarked upon the toy's fine quality and pushed it along the counter.

  I sipped my coffee and noticed a few splotches of blood on the arm of my jacket.

  "When do we kill the Minister?" I asked, referring to the husband and father of the first family that Cyrus had killed - the one I had resurrected.

  "Soon," he replied.

  "I think we should kill him at the church," I said.

  "Why?" he asked, finally ignoring the toy car.

  In reality, it was because I did not want him returning to the home and finding all of them peacefully alive and happy - that his arduous work had been undone.

  "It makes a better statement," I replied, "to crack him in a place where one is not supposed to crack."

  Cyrus nodded his head, smiling as though he was pleased. "I agree."

  It was settled, and I was relieved.

  * * *

  That night, just like with the first family, I swooped to the Sloans' hours after Cyrus, Alex, and I visited the cafe. I stole Cyrus's car yet again, and I crept back into the house the way we had exited - through the front door. It was another suburban home - large, fresh, new, and sleek.

  I slipped quietly into the long hallway and towards the light that was shed from a large room to the left - the Sloans' living room - and when I arrived, the bodies lay exactly as I had left them.

  This is my work I realized. And if it were not for my ability to resurrect them, I couldn't have done it, I thought. Or could I?

  I rubbed a hand hard against my head, trying to massage understanding from myself, but nothing helpful arrived, only more questions. Was the ability to bring people back from death suddenly permission to kill everyone, even women, even children, even the pure, just like the box had wanted, since, at the end of it all, I could undo what was done?

  Was the man with stars in his body indeed at war with Cyrus, or was he a tool that Cyrus used to help further convince me to do things that I would never normally do? Was he like Roland when I was a child? And just what was Roland?

  I sunk to my knees, feeling the chaos buckle. I did not know up from down anymore. I did not know the lies from the truth. I couldn't even separate life from death in my head anymore. It was all an unidentifiable blob of reality.

  No, I suddenly thought. No, there is one thing that I understand. I can bring them back. Yes, there was a rock amidst the endless ocean. There was an ability that I could exercise, even if I did not know what reason the Universe might want me exercising it.

  I could use this power because I wanted to. I had the power to resurrect, the power to kill, the power to do both or either or neither. In action, there was meaning, and I meant to act.

  I reached my hand towards the Minister's wife on the floor, and just as I was about to touch her, I heard a voice.

  "What are you doing?" it said.

  I looked up and across the living room to its end. From the dark hall that lead to the bedrooms, out walked Cyrus.

  "I'm..." I started, but I had nothing to finish the sentence with, and so I stopped, feeling a weighty hand of defeat crush me. I retreated from Mrs. Sloan's corpse and sat back quietly on my heels.

  Cyrus began walking around the room, as though a shark considering to circle. "You know, I went back to the Rileys' tonight. Don't know why, just did. Had an inkling that there might be something interesting to see.

  "Sure enough, I looked in their windows and, for a dead family, they're surprisingly active. There's an alarm system in there now. It sounded as soon as I opened the door. Could have silenced it. But I didn't. I realized they weren't worth killing again. At least, not while you're still here." Cyrus stopped close to me. His hands were clasped behind his back. Hi
s gray hair was piercingly silver in the light - the color of a blade.

  "Is there something you'd like to tell me, Jack?" Cyrus asked.

  I shook my head back and forth. There was no point in saying a word. He knew. I knew he knew. This was all pointless. And now, right by that dead family, he was going to kill me.

  I saw movement from the dark hallway again, and it was Alex. He stepped into the living room.

  I tried to bolt. I failed.

  Cyrus was upon me, straddling me, and beating me. He was yelling curses that I could not process, for the pain was striking and everywhere. I perceived Alex walking around near us and then pausing to watch.

  After a great length of time, I was seeing black dots and I could not cough out any words to Cyrus except, "Stop!" but he never said a word, just continued to hit me and punch me, and though I kicked him, I was in no position to easily advance, and so my only choice was to let the blows descend.

  I remember hearing Alex say something. I did not know just what at first, but then he said it again, louder, with the sound of dis-ease. "The blood is... smiling, Dad." And then, just a short time later, "Dad... the children are sliding out of the room. Dad!" Then, a door slammed in the distance. Yet, Cyrus continued his rampage against me.

  Finally, there was another yell. It was Alex's.

  As he yelled, my eyes shot open to see a hand climb over Cyrus's right shoulder, clutch the lapel of his jacket like a silver claw, and pull him back. A face appeared beside my maniacal leader's neck, and it was that of Lezlie Sloan's. I gasped.

  The eyes were green. The skin was taut, bloody, and the teeth were jagged like fishing hooks. I've gone insane I thought, but I still kicked at Cyrus and pushed myself away. When I was free, I scurried backwards against the wall.

  Cyrus fought with the thing, scraping against the arms of Sloan's wife, but they would not budge, and as she looked at me and grinned with her fishhook teeth cutting her lips, she slowly and delicately, as though placing the last Ace atop a four-tier card castle, pierced her teeth into Cyrus's lily white neck, as he - for the first time in my entire life - screamed like a mortal man.

  "Die!" he shrieked, but she continued to chew and grind and nip at him, his skin now caught within the barbs of teeth. It stretched like warm cheese.