by Doug Johnson
Kitty stood with her back to him, heart pounding so hard in her ears that the sound of the loppers was nothing but a murmur in a maelstrom. She mindlessly slipped a fillet knife from the table. The dazed and terrified expression on Sian’s face sketched itself over and over in her mind like the scrawls in her binder.
“No, the cleaver,” Lazarus said.
Kitty jumped, startled back to reality. “Sorry?”
“Put the knife back. You need a cleaver. Let me show you.”
Lazarus picked up the lamb splitter from the cutlery roll and Kitty placed the fillet knife back on the table, trying to remember when exactly she’d even picked it up. She turned and watched him grasp Sian’s pale, severed arm and position it palm-up before laying the blade on the inner side of the elbow joint. He raised the shark-head to his temple then brought it whizzing back down with a self-assured thwack. The blade neatly severed the arm and buried itself in the thick wooden tabletop.
“Always go for the joint. Makes it easier.”
He rocked the blade from the table, squeaking back and forth between the bones until it released. He handed it to Kitty, who quickly realized it would be a two-handed endeavor. She gripped the long, wooden handle and placed the edge of the blade against the ball of Sian’s kneecap.
“No, roll it over.”
Kitty did as she was instructed. She flipped the leg, heel-up and used the foot as a sort of kickstand. The blade rested on the tendons behind the knee. She entertained no second thoughts. Once Katherine Van Winkle put her mind to something… that was it.
She raised the lamb splitter over her head and brought it down like a seasoned headsman’s axe. There was a moment of silence as the two of them just stood there in amazement staring at the leg pieces that lay there like sausage links.
Then she laughed.
“I knew it!” Lazarus cried out. “The moment I saw the glee in your eyes when you tazed me, I knew.”
“What?”
“You like it.”
“No I don’t”
Lazarus nodded as he slid the leg sections aside and positioned Sian’s other arm. “You do.”
Kitty smirked as she freed the blade from the wood. “Okay. Maybe a little.” She brought the heavy splitter up over her head and dropped it on its mark, chopping the arm in two.
“You are a truly special girl. It almost makes me sorry.”
Kitty set the cleaver down and turned toward him in profile. It wasn’t unintentional. The frosted plastic suit clung to the sweat on the curves of her body. It was like he was seeing her through shower steam. Her face glowed with a crimson flush, and Lazarus felt his pulse race.
Pretty poison, he thought again.
“What does?” she asked. A wicked smile curled across her blood red lips. She knew he wanted her now… and truth be told, she wanted him too. Right there on the table.
When she turned to him, Lazarus swooped a clear plastic bag over her head and with astonishing speed, secured it with a zip tie around her neck. Less than a second later, Kitty’s wrists were shackled in her own handcuffs, and she was kicking and clawing to drag out the final moments of her life.
“Shh,” Lazarus whispered against her ear. “Sleep, my love.”
CHAPTER 17
Once Kitty was dead and sectioned, Lazarus methodically wrapped each piece in a plastic trash bag and secured it tight with tape. In total, there were fourteen parcels. The torso was the largest of course, but Lazarus didn’t care to section it further. It simply wasn’t worth the ensuing mess when it was so much easier to just dig a bigger hole.
Well, to be precise, in total there were forty-two packets. Fourteen each for Kitty, Sian and Dylan. Lazarus had never dismembered a male before, and had vacillated over whether fourteen or fifteen packets should be used. In the end he decided that, at least in Dylan’s case, a fifteenth packet really couldn’t be justified, and stayed with tradition. He stacked them all on the table in a sort of pyramid that resembled the seized contraband of a major drug bust. All that set the effect apart was the thick-soled, tar black pair of size six Doc Martens boots that sat empty before it.
Lazarus packed up the protective suits to be burned, and bathed standing naked in the basement kitchen as he always did. Pouring buckets of water over his head and watching the blood wash away from his body and swirl down the very same floor drain that Kitty had tripped over nine hours ago.
Then he rinsed down the entire room, filling bucket after bucket from the rusty tap and scrubbing each surface with a healthy measure of Bartender’s Friend and bleach until he and his luminol were both satisfied with the results.
After a proper, scalding shower upstairs, Lazarus finally poured himself a Glenfiddich and built a fire in the parlor to warm himself. There was a chill he couldn’t shake, a numbness in his toes and fingertips that kept him shivering. Probably from the damned stun gun.
He’d brought in the clothes he’d worn that evening and once the fire had reached a suitable roar, he tossed in the tee shirt with the red ring on the shoulder from Kitty’s perfect little white teeth. He tossed in the jeans, and it was not without a stitch of regret that he did so.
“Note to self. Mustn’t wear my favorite jeans next time a visitor stops in.”
He picked up the double-hooked fireplace poker and jabbed at the clothes to keep them from falling through the grate.
“What a waste.”
Taking a seat on the floor at the hearth, Lazarus scooped up the scattered IDs and passports. He flipped through, reflections of flames licking the faces of the young women whose photos graced them. One by one, he tossed them back into the metal box, each bringing a memory, and a smile, to his face.
Last in the stack was a Canadian driver’s license. It was a plain but pretty girl whose face sparked no memory because Lazarus had only known her after her the wildfires of life had forced a rebirth upon her. There was something behind her eyes, though. Something familiar. Something dark. Mysterious.
Damaged.
Lazarus looked down at the name. Lacey Van Winkle.
“What do you know,” he chuckled. “You were one of mine.”
He tossed the driver’s license into the box, then Kitty’s passport on top. Standing up, he walked to the dusty curtains and threw them open, allowing a few rosy beams of dawn light into the room. He looked down at his wrist but the clunky watch was not there. The grandfather clock lay in sad repose on the parquet floor, and with no small effort, Lazarus was able to right it. He slipped the metal box back into the case and swung the glassless door shut.
The spade-tipped hands still showed eleven o’clock, the hour of its great collapse. Kitty had felled it like some giant beanstalk. Christ, Lazarus thought, it certainly had spilled its magic beans, hadn’t it? He undocked his iPhone from the Krell and finally found the time.
5:19 A.M.
He felt a bit like Ebineezer Scrooge, having survived the night with his own three bloody ghosts and living to turn the leaf on a new life this morning. Yes, perhaps a new leaf was exactly what he needed.
After the sun came up, he trekked out to the back acreage with his iPhone in search of a signal. The morning was chilly and damp with a low-hanging fog, but the sun began to burn it off slowly as he climbed the long, easy hill. Even so, he couldn’t see much yet as he walked. He could hear plenty, however. The world was teeming with sound: the moaning of sheep already grazing the grassland sward, the rapid-fire knocking of a Great Spotted Woodpecker on some long-dead and rotting apple tree, the fire-blistered voice of Dovie Walker, his long-dead mother, sawing inside his head. Perhaps when he got back to the house he would crank up the Marshall and blast the infernal screech of that witch back to hell where it belonged.
Lazarus held his phone up and out in front of him as he meandered with a goal but no destination. After fifteen minutes of aimless roaming, he found himself back on the road and suddenly two bars popped up on his screen.
“Thank God.”
He almost soiled him
self when a car shot out of the fog and nearly clipped him, shattering the rural tranquility with a needlessly long bleat of its horn. Hand trembling, he dialed the only number he knew from memory.
“Hello? Yes, I need a delivery. That’s right… a tree.”
Lazarus whistled as he pushed his wobbling wheelbarrow through the garden to the hole he’d dug yesterday. He set the barrow down, piled high with tightly wrapped body parts, and stretched. He cracked his back and let his gaze ride out through the two rows of trees, the spine of the garden.
“Ladies,” he spoke aloud to them, “you have some new members. Please treat them well.”
He began tossing body parts into the hole. “I gave a lot of thought to this,” he continued. “If Kitty were a tree… what kind of tree would she be?”
Her “Fuck the World” skull bag went into the hole next along with the binder. “Cherry? Nah. Pear? Don’t think so.”
Lazarus dumped the charred remains of their clothing in. Ashes billowed up and he waved them away. “Perhaps I should branch away from fruit trees. Get it? Branch?” He dusted off his hands. “Yeah, that was pretty bad. I’ve settled on plum. Dark and luscious. Suits you, I think.”
The familiar heavy crush of truck tires on gravel pulled his attention from the grave momentarily. “Sorry you’ve got to share with Dylan and Sian, darling. But at least you’ll have company.”
He dumped the remaining parcels for the time being and pushed the wheelbarrow back out to the house where he set it down at the edge of the circular drive. The snout-nosed delivery truck from McGregor’s Nursery was just pulling up, and Lazarus immediately recognized the driver. It was the piss-artist himself, Clive Collins. He hoped the recognition would be one-way.
Clive hopped down from the cab to greet Lazarus and recoiled at the sight of his battered face. “Jesus! What happened to you?”
“I forgot that you shouldn’t cut a tree limb while standing under it,” Lazarus lied.
Clive winced. “Ow.”
“Don’t have to tell me.”
Clive headed for the back of the truck.
“Dylan usually brings my deliveries,” Lazarus fished. “Where is he today?”
“Think he decided to take the day off.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll tell him you asked after him. Don’t mention I said this, but he quite looks up to you. Talks about you all the time.”
Clive helped Lazarus slide a small tree into the barrow.
“Not in a stalker sort of way,” he continued. “Mentor-like you could say.”
Lazarus rubbed his lower back. “I’m flattered.”
“Yeah, well don’t tell him I said it.”
Lazarus smiled. “My lips are sealed.”
Clive stared at him for a second, as if a fleeting moment of recognition had buzzed through the empty bong he called a skull. But if it had, it was only fleeting, and then again, maybe Clive was merely star-struck himself.
“You don’t need help with that?” he asked.
“Nah, I got it.”
Clive nodded and hopped back into the truck. He cranked the engine and hung his arm out the open window, drumming the door skin twice with his hand as he pulled away. “Rock on, mate.”
Lazarus stood silently in front of the crumbling manor house, wondering just how long it could remain his sanctuary. “I will,” he told its ghosts.
Then he wheeled the barrow back to the garden, finished burying the three dead bodies waiting for him there, and went inside for an egg and cress sandwich before planting the new plum tree that would mark their communal grave.
CHAPTER 18
Lazarus always thought of a garden as a living clock. Its Westminster quarters were the seasons and their progression geared on year after year with satisfying predictability. It was an instrument of perpetual motion and its pendulum was the sun.
The manor house would remain his sanctuary for a great many years as it turned out. Timing, of course, was everything. Both the clock and the garden would protect their secrets, for Lazarus did not own them. He was merely their caretaker.
By the time autumn breezed in, the palette of the countryside was ablaze with yellows and vermillion, copper and bronze. The orchard was in full swing, and Lazarus was hauling overflowed harvest baskets to the root cellar.
He endlessly cleared fallen leaves from the garden path with a wide bamboo rake. Some he would compost, others he would burn. There was something about the aroma of burning leaves that brought him peace. It was incense in the temple of his garden.
On those crisp autumn days, Lazarus would perch his old Hacker Herald transistor radio on the windowsill of the garden shed. Truth be told, he really preferred how it sounded to the sixty-thousand-dollar Krell in the parlor.
Jesus, I really am getting old, he thought. He’d be forty next year. Those years certainly hadn’t been lackluster. Half his life had been spent suppressing his rage and half spent flooding the world with it, but one facet remained constant; Lazarus Walker buried things.
Iron Butterfly’s psychedelic “Fields of the Sun” grooved over the radio behind him as the rake swept through the papery leaves. It was a song he hadn’t heard in years. Lazarus was grateful they’d spared him “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” He hated having a song stuck in his head, and once you heard “Gadda” you’d be hearing it the rest of the day.
A disc jockey’s voice droned in over the outro of the song, a practice which curried no favor with Lazarus, but this was a glorious day, and he couldn’t remember when his mind had last felt this clear.
“Quick news update,” the deejay went on, “Authorities are still searching for Dylan Daly, a local man who went missing three months ago. Daly is wanted in connection with the disappearance of his girlfriend and a Canadian tourist.”
A punk guitar chord ripped through the Herald’s speaker and the deejay rode in on its coattails. “Police still have few leads on the case and a fifteen-thousand pound reward is now being offered for any information leading to Daly’s capture. On a happier note, here’s Frame the Same with ‘Dark Thoughts.’”
Constable McHenry had been out to see him eight times over the past three months. He didn’t know, of course, that Lazarus was literally the last person to see Dylan alive, but it was no secret he’d been out to the manor that day. He’d returned to the nursery, made a few more deliveries and punched out as he always did, a bit excited about something remembered Arthur McGregor, but not particularly “homicidal” so far as he could recall. It had now been five weeks since the constable had paid a call. Like those visits from police investigating the Manchester fire that burned Dovie Walker alive while she slept all those years ago, their intensity had begun like a crashing set of waves then receded back into the sea. Lazarus was always a dead end. He was, after all, vigilant.
He set his rake down and walked up the garden path toward the great, gnarled Worcester Pearmain. Tiny by contrast, Kitty’s plum tree, a Denniston’s Superb, was simply thriving. In fact, he was confident that next year it might even bear fruit fit for eating. He smiled as he approached it, and a golden, fan-shaped Ginkgo leaf spiraled laterally across the path before him. Lazarus reacted with admirable dexterity, thrusting his arm out and gently closing his fist around the leaf, catching it in mid-air. Maybe he wasn’t getting so old after all.
That’s good luck, he thought as his slipped the leaf into the breast pocket of his twill work shirt. He looked up and saw a flawless apple. It hung heavy on a low branch of the Worcester Pearmain, and wore a crown of green blushed with crimson flames from beneath as if dipped in blood. It was at its peak of ripeness, and for Lazarus, its beauty was beyond words. He was about to take a step toward it when he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye.
Lazarus turned his head just far enough to glean an impression. It was a girl. Seventeen at most, head to toe in black. She cowered by the stone wall, almost a shadow herself.
“You’re trespassing,” he said. “I’ll give you to the count o
f five, but then I’m phoning the police.”
The girl managed only a squeak in reply and dashed out the gate like a mouse.
Lazarus didn’t count to five. He set his rake on top of the leaf bags in the wheelbarrow and walked it to the shed. He disappeared inside and emerged a moment later with a shovel.
His feet crunched over pea gravel and leaves as he made his way back up the path, and he pretended not to see the girl again as she spied from her vantage behind the wall. Perhaps it wasn’t yet time to turn the leaf after all. It was all right. Leaves wouldn’t stop falling. Some would be caught by lucky hands, others by the wind. The clock would never stop ticking. He walked along the spine of trees until he passed Kitty’s plum. Dark and luscious, he thought with a pang of nostalgia. Where was there left to go after Kitty? He didn’t know. Maybe he was about to find out. He silently counted from one to five, then thrust the pointed blade of the shovel into the soil and began to dig a new hole. He breathed in the rich, sweet scent and felt alive. Was there a more glorious smell in the world? Lazarus didn’t think so. Life was a garden…
And timing was everything.
EPILOGUE
For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.
-- Genesis 3:19
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DOUG JOHNSON is a multi-talented media creator and editor with a passion for telling stories through moving visuals, dynamic sound and the power of the written word. As a freelance audio-visual designer in New York City, his skill and creativity have been showcased in works for television, documentary and film.
