by L.C. Barlow
Chapter 20
THE DESTRUCTION OF FAITH
Ever since that first night, when I brought those men, women, and children back to the world of the living, I had yearned to do it again, and when Cyrus said that we were to murder a Minister's family for the sake of the box, I could not help but feel a little glee. It was not just that I finally had a route to disobeying Cyrus, or that returning souls felt just as fulfilling as cutting them away, but something in me was completed in those moments. When I was complete, I didn't need drugs to overcome the darkness.
I could be close to murder and death, and yet I made them shine and disappear. I fell in love with the completion.
I did not stop Cyrus as we treaded in the darkling night to the suburban home, where the wife and children slept, and I said not a word as I watched him slit their throats, one by one, silently, letting the white sheets turn black. I couldn't have stopped him, had I wanted to. He would have destroyed me just as cleanly as those young girls in the woods.
Instead, I remained silent, appeared to him nothing more than the usual Jack with the cuspate knife and the sparkle of blood in my eye. But inside, I stroked that warmth in the pit of my stomach - I petted the new power. It was a poison that undid his work, but as a poison it could only thrive if unseen and unheard.
He suspected nothing.
After Cyrus was through with killing the family, He, Alex, and I went to the cafe as usual to drink our coffees and eat gritty bacon and crunchy peppers and potatoes in the dark night.
Maria was there as usual, taking our orders, awaiting Cyrus's hundred-dollar tip. The silver owl clock ticked away the minutes, and I surveyed its silver wings, noting that soon they would rise and fall. Very shortly after they flapped, I would return to the minister's home, knife forgotten, and resurrect them all.
As we sat and talked, I licked my lips not from the food, but from the sweetness I knew I would feel in just a few hours, when Cyrus and Alex were asleep, and I could steal Cyrus's car and stall the "destruction of faith" that Cyrus so desperately wanted to commit.
"I'm sorry I doubted you," Cyrus said to me in the bright red plastic booth.
I smiled at him. "We all have our moments of weakness," I said, half in jest, all in seriousness.
"I apologize for trying to have you killed," he continued, "by giving you to that shining monster in that house. I am glad that he didn't do away with you. I'm also, I must say, curious as to why."
I gulped down a morsel of unease with my coffee. "Why what?" I asked.
"Why didn't he kill you? We have been at war forever. Usually, when he has the chance, he gets rid of my favorites. This time, it seems, he strangely failed."
"Maybe he knew I wasn't your favorite anymore."
Cyrus shook his head 'no.' "You still are."
I dabbed the corners of my lips with a napkin. "Maybe I am too young for him; he doesn't seem to have the same tastes as you, after all."
Cyrus tilted his head as though considering this. "Only if by young, you mean something else. Age doesn't matter to him, necessarily. He does not fight for what we fight for. He does not think the way we think."
"Who is he?" I asked.
"Someone who could have just as easily been on our side, but chose otherwise." He sighed. "Someone I can never get rid of. Someone who would, believe it or not, be greatly useful to me in his pieces."
I thought of the cracks in the man's body, and I wondered, suddenly, if he was indeed a living, breathing human pottery as I had first imagined. I counted again the brilliant cuts in his skin slicing all the way through him. "Why?" I asked.
"You break a piece of him off, and it's like you have programmable lightning. Cutting him apart would be like an endless Christmas holiday, with gift after gift after gift."
I felt the warmth stir in my stomach, an illness deluge me. I did not like the way Cyrus spoke of the brilliant stranger, even if that stranger had cut me open and sewed within me something against my will. In many ways, Cyrus had done the same surgery, but with a far more painful, messy, and debilitating method.
"I would like to make sure," said Cyrus, "that I am not wrong."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"I would like to make sure that he didn't save you for your innocence, or would be innocence."
I noticed the twinkling yellow lights of the cafe suddenly, and how great their glare and hum became, like my blood was suddenly filled with pure oxygen. Exaggerated was the warmth of Alex beside me and the tinkling of his fork and knife against his plate. I wanted to take his instruments and stab him.
"How are you going to make sure?" I asked.
"You're going to kill the next family on your own. Alex and I will watch, but you will be the one to do it - slit their throats one-by-one, even the children."
I shook my head as though trying to shake off his words. "What will this prove?"
"That even if there was something in you not like us, worth his saving, there won't be anymore. What we need to do is excise. Just once. Then, you can leave it all again to me as your leader."
In my unease, I touched my lips with one of my fingers and felt the dry skin like it was scales. I plucked a piece off, but it seemed another scale slid into its place, and I felt suddenly that all of the actions in all of the world were useless - that we always come back to where we started.
"It's no problem," I told him, "to do what you ask." He smiled and touched my hand.
"Tomorrow night, then," he replied. My stomach recoiled as his fingers gripped mine gently, and when I could do so without seeming impolite, I pulled my hand away.
The silver clock ticked, and the owl's wings stretched out at the strike of two with two flaps. Cyrus excused himself, left the booth, and walked towards the restroom, and as he did, I said to Alex turning to look at his blonde head, "Lucky you, you've never had to do a damned thing."
"I do lots of things," he replied, characteristically wicked. "Just in a very specific place, with a very specific people."
I exhaled a disgusted laugh and said, "I'll never understand you."
"That's because you've never had sex."
"We kill, Alex. That's our sex."
"I don't kill."
"That's right," I replied, dropping my fork, sounding as though I had been suddenly reminded, though I had never forgotten. "I suppose we're both virgins."
This did not sit well with him. He leaned close to my ear, and he whispered to me his condescension. In the midst of his insults, I watched Cyrus exit the restroom, and Alex's words came to me with the beat of Cyrus's step. "You think you're so much better than me, but you're not.
"People think you're strong, but really, you're just sly. Without a gun or a knife, you're nothing. Without our family, you would have been raped and dead long ago, just a hollow whore in the ditch we'd drive past - a junkie without a cause. You're practically a puff away from not existing. That's what you'll always be. Killing men does not make you any different from that. People kill each other every day. It's nothing special, just like you."
Cyrus squeaked into the red booth, and Alex leaned away from me and reclined next to the window as though we had not spoken.
"Are we ready to go?" Cyrus asked.
"If you are," I replied, as pleasantly and agreeably as I could. I looked to Alex, and he smiled.
But as we three evil-doers sauntered to the car, I stayed two steps behind Alex the whole way, realizing that, though there was something deep down inside me that lusted for, and now could accomplish, the full-circle completion of life to death to life, there were some people that I would never have return.
There were times when not being complete would fill my need - when failure to resurrect would be a pleasure.
I pictured a lepidopterist's collection. I saw a room filled with thousands of butterflies with shimmering blue and amber wings, small yellow ones, and brilliant orange.
Then, I imagined the magical lepidopterist himself who, with a strange power not his own,
could bring these butterflies back to life, watch them crowd his office like bumbling confetti.
Every butterfly he would make soar - all but one, that is. The poisonous one - if there was such a thing as a poisonous butterfly - would be the one more wondrous dead. Alex was such a poisonous butterfly.
I would love to have Alex as my victim, I thought, as the precious victim that would never return. Yes, though I had full satisfaction in the full circle - of the swing from up to down and then all around - there were times when not satisfying that circle would be satisfying. This was one of those times when magic was not needed, only the hard, cold tool of reality.
And the knife, yes. And the gun.
