by L.C. Barlow
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. "Mor
e 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."
