by L C Barlow
I whispered to myself, "She's already dead. You can't kill her." He continued to scream the word, though, and I did not move.
What I wanted was to run to him, to hold him down, let this monstrous thing sink itself further into him, but I was too terrified to do anything but watch. I thought it would kill him. I hoped it would.
But Lezlie Sloan - or whatever it was within her - let him go. Her teeth unfastened, and though much of his skin was still stuck within those teeth, Cyrus pulled away, snapping the last cords that bound him to her. He pulled back, fearfully, not menacing, and that was the first time I had ever seen terror in his face.
The thing spoke in a gritty, demonic voice. "Bit off a bit more than you can chew?"
She smiled, the pieces of Cyrus's skin hanging like spaghetti across her chin.
I watched as Cyrus swung himself down, slamming his hands that had been holding his neck to his face, and bending over as a bucket of blood dropped from him. When he rose again, his nose was bleeding like a faucet spilling water. I looked to Alex, and he, too, was dropping blood all over the front of his shirt. I touched my nose. I was fine.
Cyrus and Alex bolted from the room and I heard them rush from the house. I wanted to run, to follow them, but this ugly demon stood between me and the door.
Though it seemed insane, in the back of my mind I also knew that I had come there with a job to do, and it was not yet done. I did not want to leave without bringing the children back.
I eyed the monster before me, watching its green eyes observe me, and I saw the blood run down its chin. It grinned. I felt shivers course over my body, and I had to fight every impulse to turn away, to sink down and quiver, to melt into the floor.
But then in a breath, yes, just one breath, the colors of Lezlie Sloan intensified, and then there was no more blood, no sharp teeth, no stringy skin, no anything. She was just a woman, but at the same time realer. She wasn't a woman at all.
I held out my hands to her, as though to protest. She cocked her head and smiled delicately. "Jack, not everything wondrous in this world is against you." She sounded human again, not disturbing or supernatural, just normal.
"Why didn't you kill him?" I asked.
"That's not my job," she replied.
I considered this. "I'm so sorry I killed her," I said. "And the children. But I was coming here to bring you... them, I mean, back."
"I know," she said. "And that's what you're going to do." She stepped away from me, making her way towards the darkened hallway and the bedrooms. As she stepped, the blood disappeared from the house.
She turned to me, and she beckoned with her hand. It reminded me ever so slightly of Meredith's hand in my room that terrible night.
Still terrified, I followed, but at a distance.
When we arrived at the master bedroom, both children were cleaned of blood, tucked within the covers of the bed. Only the slits at their throats remained. I looked at my reddened hands, the hands that could heal them, and the blood on them seemed out of place.
Lezlie Sloan motioned towards the children, and I touched each of their foreheads, bringing them back to life. They slept soundly.
"Cyrus is a hard one to clean up after," she said to me. "But we do it all the time."
I watched her climb into the bed beside the children, her clothing and skin now just as spotless as theirs. "Cyrus will hurt you now, you know," she said, pulling the covers tight across her chest, "so much more than he ever has. But you do have to go back."
"I don't want to. I... I can't," I said, shivering.
She looked at me as though she pitied me. "We must all do things we do not want to do. But for some of them, if we do them right, we never have to do them again.
"Besides, if you do not return to him, he will find you."
"What can I do?" I asked her.
"Find help," she said quietly.
She closed her eyes, and as I watched, her skin began to gray along her arms. She solidified along her chest and neck, up to her face. Finally, her whole body was still, gray, and frozen with rigor. The corpse was no longer possessed.
I touched the woman, felt the rush from me enter her, and then she was laying there, sleeping, warm, heated, as though the entire night had never happened.
Chapter 23
THE SHARKS THAT DON'T BITE
According to Cyrus, there is not and never will be a moment in the world as inglorious as that night.
I was proud of that failure, of course, and he knew. Cyrus knew everything, and before he ever spoke to me about it, he beat me for it.
Down in the basement he brought me, after they had dashed away from the Sloans', and I had followed.
Cyrus said so clearly, pouring his liquid lines over me, "Let's not hasten this. We have all the time in the world."
I don't think the blood ever goes away after a good beating. I'll heal any day now.
He strung me up like a piece of meat. My arms were tied overhead, and it seemed like the light bulb was swinging, but it was me.
Afterwards, my muscles were so swollen that my hands were numb for days, and I could not carry a plate of food or walk for a good week. Even now, my shoulders still pop occasionally, deep within the creases. My right knee will never be the same. My jaw aches on cold days. Though, it is what it is. And nobody lives forever.
But it seemed Cyrus thought I would, lest he beat the immortality from me. I remember one of his followers being downstairs at the beginning. He looked away after Cyrus's first few swings. Then, he left. Only Alex watched through and through, recording every moment.
As for Roland, he did not know what was happening until I had already lost consciousness, and when I woke, I was in a bed, and he was there with me.
As soon as I saw him, I said, "There is no more point to any of this anymore. He is going to kill me."
"He is not. Shhhh. We will talk about this later. But for now, just sleep," he cooed. I cried, for the first time in forever, and then I did fall asleep, yet again.
It was by the fifth day that the deep pit of sickness in my stomach slackened. Roland was feeding me soup and pouring water into me. He kept the light low and the covers thin on the bed. I only got up to piss.
Two days later, I awoke fully, sat upright in bed, and stared straight at my old friend as he rested in a velvet cream chair across from me.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you before," I said, referring to my ability to return the dead. "I wish I had... I'm like you, now, aren't I?"
"Yes and no," he replied.
I thought of the cross that Roland had given me all those years ago, when we had first began - the one that was shriveled into a ball. "When I met that man in the woods, your cross straightened," I told him. "It was in my pocket, and after I ran from the house, I felt for it. It was flat and perfect. But it's shriveled again." I looked round the room for it and saw that he had placed it on the nightstand next to the bed. I fondled it.
"Tell me. What you are?" I asked. "Help me understand."
Roland closed his eyes and sighed. "I am incapable of explaining it all or myself entirely," he said, "but I will give you what I know.
"Like you, a long time ago, I was sent to kill the one with fire in his veins. When I did, I failed, and he cut me open, put something inside me. It has been there ever since.
"When I returned to Cyrus, he killed me for failing, but instead of remaining dead, I returned... and returned. In my survival, in this house, I became a tool."
"How?" I asked, and Roland opened his eyes. He spoke not a word, and I knew he was waiting for me to realize.
"You mean teaching me?" I asked.
Roland nodded. "Turning you." He smiled. "It was a brilliant idea at the time - one that I gave Cyrus, just like the bright stranger suggested I do, and with it I handed over these unforeseen consequences.
"Originally, Cyrus assumed it was simple - that the bright man had cursed me. I will, as long as I live, suffer and suffer, be brought to the cusp of peace in death,
and then returned to be killed again. I am doomed to an eternity of deaths." Roland looked down at his hands and rubbed them together wearily. "There wasn't a switch to turn it off.
"I don't get to control it, unlike you. I don't get to choose not to return, and I don't get to bring back others, either. What the bright stranger gave you is something different, but part of the same plan to keep Cyrus's efforts from coming to fruition."
"What plan?" I asked.
"It should be obvious to you now, Jack. He wasn't trying to curse me - at least, not entirely. He planted me to make you - to make a killer who craves resurrecting just as much as killing, to undo Cyrus's last seventeen years, potentially destroy thousands of Cyrus's little plans before he became truly powerful.
"And, of course, to restore a conscience as much as he could to a soul who was taught never to have one.
"I just wish Cyrus had not realized for a bit more, because now, well..." Roland trailed off. He began again on a different note. "Cyrus will keep you weak. Strong enough to bring back the dead he wants returned, but weak enough to where you're never a threat, just a tool. Like me."
"I have to kill him," I said.
Roland grimly assented. "Someone must. But there doesn't seem to be a way, does there? Even at your strongest, you must admit you could do nothing. Neither can I. He is impossibly strong.
"You have your influences but... And as for me..." There seemed to be many different thoughts running through his mind.
"What?" I asked.
"Jack, I have failed as a tool to create the perfect killer for Cyrus. Instead, I have done the reverse - generated a being who can return souls, not erase them. And this - whether at the hands of the bright man or me - was no accident. Cyrus is going to kill me."
I wanted to yell and scream at those words, but all I could do was twist in the bed and say "No no no no," until Roland was beside me and holding me.
"You'll come back," I said.
"Not if I'm brought to ashes," he replied. "I can't help me then, and neither can you."
There were a thousand possible miracles between us, and not a single one would save him. Water water everywhere, but nary a drop to drink.
Roland wiped away my tears. "Believe me, though, I'm ready for it."
I shook my head. "You've got to run."
"No," he said. "No more running. No more dying. No more torture. No more anything for me. I'm ready. The cycle ends now."
I protested, and he denied. He held me close and tried to comfort me.
After a while of this, Roland grabbed my hand. He slipped his beneath my palm and lifted my arm onto his lap. He placed his other hand on top.
"We've got to get you out of this room," he said. "Let's take a walk through the greenhouse."
"We have a greenhouse?" I asked, in disbelief.
Roland helped me dress. And then, unlike what usually surrounded us in the majority of Cyrus's mansion, we were suddenly standing in colors aplenty, in a warm and hazy mist, breathing deeply, our eyes closed.
As we walked to a pond, there were lines of sweet roses on my left and lilies on my right, and I had never seen them before, such flowers. The ground beneath my feet was simple dirt and felt cool on my bare skin.
Trees beside the flowers lined the way like tall soldiers with feet planted firmly in that dirt, and I felt as I walked amongst their rows that I was not in a greenhouse, but someplace far more sacred.
I peered up and saw the ceiling stretch three stories tall, the glass open to the cloudy sky with silver metal partitioning rectangles and squares in that glass.
"It's beautiful," I said, but then I needed to rest. My feet were sore again, and so we sat at the pond together.
He held my aching hand gently, and this human touch felt so strange, because I knew it would be one of the last from him.
"I want you to know," he said, "that, though you suffer these things, they aren't pointless. At the very least, if you hadn't been here for the past seventeen years, meeting Cyrus's quota, there'd be another person - a very real, live person - in your place. In your own way, Jack, you're saving someone."
"From what I am and what has been done to me," I added to his sentence.
"Yes," he replied, and he gave my hand a kiss. "More importantly though, once you are free from all of this - and yes, I have faith you will be - you can erase Cyrus's work, stamp his mark on the world away. You can return people to life, to their families, to love. I would like to think I helped with that."
"You did," I said. "You've never been like Cyrus. You've never been... evil." For the first time in my life, I realized I had never seen Roland murder. "How can that be, in this house?"
There was a long, peaceful pause before he answered. "I used to be that kind of wicked, but... I changed, Jack, much like you. The thing the bright stranger put inside me spurred it, whatever it was. And now... What's one of the first things I told you? There is a balance that must be kept. If you want to keep doing the bad, you have to do some of the good. But that balance... it means something else as well."
Roland opened his eyes and looked down at me. "My kind of darkness is a different kind, and Cyrus could never tell the difference. That's why I've been able to stay here as long as I have and infiltrate before I knew infiltrating was what I was trying to do.
"As for my kind of darkness... For one, it respects balance. For another..." Roland mumbled again. "What do you think angels are, Jack? In relation to demons?"
"They're opposites."
"No," he replied. "That is not true. Angels aren't anything but demons well-governed. They aren't anything but the sharks and the wolves and the snakes that don't bite and slither and slake. They aren't opposites. They are so very much the same. Wings will grow on anything that'll swear off biting.
"We're all sharks, no matter the person, no matter the environment. And all of us, angel and demon alike, we all start in the same place. It's just that later on... some break the pattern. Some don't."
"What pattern?"
"The pattern of your dark youth," Roland said. "When the shark stops biting, when the snake stops hissing, when the wolves stop eating their own like they've been taught to do, and they learn to desire something outside of these cycles and sinister instincts, that's something." Roland put his hands together again on the top of a lily pad. "It is better than gold. It's what people eat their hearts out for."
Hearing Roland speak those words filled me with a calm I had never before experienced; and - though it seemed that with all these recent events, that the outside forces of the world were invading me, deciding who I was, my desires, and the very fibers of my being - Roland was a force I would not have removed for anything. He beckoned me forward to a life more wondrous than the one I would have lived, had Cyrus alone raised me.
Roland had instilled within himself a sacred order akin to the circle of fifths, whereas Cyrus had, in many ways, bleached any semblance of order or intelligibility from everything he touched. Both of these - order and disorder - were my hallowed fathers, and they had carried me to and fro, back and forth, and all around. But Roland was right. I could stop the circle, I could choose the route, and I could navigate the dark waters with a map of my own making.
I reflected on the past again and wished I hadn't saved him - Cyrus - all those years ago. That I had not shot Havinger until after Cyrus was already dead. It would have been easier that way. Instead, it was Roland I had killed - the one I loved. I am cruel, I thought.
Turning again to my old companion, I hearkened to our long ago conversation on the day Alex killed Shakespeare, the family dog. "If Cyrus did die," I asked, "could he bring himself back?"
"No," Roland said. "Only you have the power to return him."
Chapter 24
EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT
When the gentlemen in dark suits and black cars dropped me off at my dorm, I wasn't riding in the trunk. Daylight was just breaking, and I only had mind to take a Clonazepam and sleep. I ended up taking two.
In my fear, I sweated more than salt, and the stench of it made me feel yellow and polluted, but I sullied my clean bed anyway, lay looking at my roommate's bed, and I realized I had not seen her in five days or more.
Then it hit me - the smell that morning in Caster Woods near Blue Brick. Yes, the stench that stole me away when Patrick had kept walking, and I lingered, staring into the trees.
It was quick lime.
I had never been more certain of anything in my life. How had I not immediately recognized it? It was so... palpable.
Jump out of bed right now! part of me yelled. You've got to go! To delve into those trees! To... find out! But I was so exhausted, and my limbs felt rusted. I closed my eyes. I needed to go to the woods, but I could not move. I slept.
There was a knock at my door, and I woke. It was night. I looked at the clock. Nine.
I opened the door, and Patrick stood there in a button-down shirt and blue jeans.
He stared at me, and then his eyes widened.
"What?" I asked.
"What the fuck happened to you?" he demanded and entered the room.
My heart exploded with fear, and I spun away from him, went to the sink, and turned on the overhead light. Exactly one half of my face was covered with dried blood. The cut was a spot at the top left edge of my forehead, and from it came a web of black crawling lines that weaved into my hair and across my nose. It was not a deep wound, but it had cried.
"Fuck," I said. I was marked with blood, in front of the only person in the world I swore I'd never show horror to.
Patrick stepped behind me. His hand reached up below my chin, and he turned me to himself. "Christ, Jack. Something hit you hard."
"I was drunk," I said. "I walked home. Must have fallen down."
"That's a lie. You didn't have a drop of liquor."
I thought quickly. "After you went to sleep, I drank as I walked home."
He bent his head down to mine, and then lower, to my neck. I heard him draw in a breath, and he stopped me when I tried to move away. "You smell like sickness," he said. "You smell like fear. What happened to you?"
