Chapter 16
PANIC
It was as if a spell had been cast, throwing people out the windows and doors. Bodies were bolting every which way, spinning, sparkling, screaming. It was like everybody was possessed, but not by demons.
It amazed me that, in such a short period, everyone, no matter how high or horny, had forgotten their drugs and sex. It was fabulous, instantaneous change, like the flick of a switch. I wished in that moment I had such power, and then I thought of the bright man again and clutched my stomach softly.
In the night, people tumbled out onto the lawn like colorful kerchiefs from the laundry. I watched them collect like decorative balls for a collage, while I stood beside one of the many cars on the lawn. When my heart slowed from its remarkable pace, I lit a cigarette, tired suddenly of the night. At least he didn't see, I had thought. At least Cyrus can't feel the new heat in me. I touched my stomach again, wondering how I was going to get rid of whatever was inside me.
And then, after a flicker of moments, Cyrus was beside me. "I got separated from Meredith," he said. "I can't find her." A gust of wind hit us, and I heard a scream in the distance. Everybody turned savagely, wondering if whatever it was had followed us out in the night, but in the end it was just the wind, and a woman had simply been spooked. It is that kind of night, I thought. It is that kind of woman.
I sighed, refusing to talk about the obvious for a moment. "You said inside that you fucked Meredith because she wanted it. Because most people appreciate their saviors. But I did save you, you know? And I have never felt as thankless as I did tonight." And I continued inside my head, I'm not so sure I would choose to do it again.
"That might be true," Cyrus assented quietly, "But Havinger saved my life once as well. You saw what happened to him."
I could say nothing to that.
"I'll continue looking," Cyrus told me, and he walked away.
I watched the commotion, and in the midst of it I wanted to sleep. I wanted to go home, but I remembered that there was none. Then I'll sleep in the woods, part of me thought. In the pines, where the sun never shines. And I'll shiver the whole night through. But that wasn't possible, of course, because something in the world wouldn't let me be. If I had gone to the woods, the place would soon be a swamp of blood, too.
Minutes later, when I had finished another cigarette, I walked amongst the gentlemen and ladies, their hair in a fluff and their clothes asymmetric, but slowly being smoothed back into place, and I found Roland and Cyrus talking. "Meredith isn't here," Cyrus said to me finally. "I've been all over. I've talked to everyone. I think she never left the house. Someone... will have to go back inside."
Roland whistled lightly, and it sounded more like air than anything else. "Someone will have to go in there, anyways. These people aren't going to leave without their purses and jackets, and nobody is volunteering. They're all just agitating. That's a problem in and of itself."
I looked at him. "Are you afraid, as well," I asked, "of going in?"
"I'm wary," he said.
"You're immortal."
He smiled. "Immortal in the hands of a deadly little child? Yes. But there are other kinds of killers, and other types of death. I'd rather not find out unless it's necessary. But I... guess it is."
"No worries. I'll protect you," I said. We both smirked, but it was a sad communion.
Cyrus briefly left us to speak with a group, and when he did, Roland whispered to me, "If you want to survive, you won't go telling Cyrus to do a damned thing to that box," he said.
I delved into Roland's brown eyes and skin, searching him for explanation. "Why?" I asked.
"Why do you think?"
I had no answer for him, and I touched his arm gently. "The man I was sent to kill today, the one with lightning in his body... he said you knew him. Is that true?"
Roland whispered so slightly, "Shhh. Now is not the time, nor the place." And then Cyrus was beside us again, and I was silent.
"Let's go," Cyrus said, motioning towards the lighted house next to the darkling sky.
With a collective sigh, we followed.
"God," Roland whispered, and he massaged his bony face like an old man. I had never heard him utter that word before. "That damned box is opening itself. And it isn't ever going to shut again. I told him... I tried."
When we entered the house, it was as if the air had turned stale, bottled, paused. There was no perfume or potpourri. No smell of fear or sweat. No anything. Just... blank. It made me think of the rooms without color, except that this time it was the hue of the air that was missing. It was all a vacuum.
Walking beneath the banners of masks, they no longer looked friendly as they drooped down in the hallways and arches of entrances. They looked, rather, like they were cut from a black void, not black velvet. I felt that if I were to reach out and grab one, my hand would slip through into another world, and the mask would grab me.
Other things in the house were just as stained with this supra-reality. The candy sculptures no longer looked sweet, but poisonous rather, the patterns in them resembling those of venomous snakes and fish.
There were strings of pearls on the floor from someone's broken necklace, and these to me squealed like maggots. Pillows on many of the couches held unkind eyes in their creases. We walked round and round these things, calling for Meredith, but ultimately, feeling that staying in a group would slow us, we split up to find her.
For normal people, this separating might have been a grave error, but there was an unspoken consensus that we were not so fragile as 'normal people.' It was not that we weren't afraid to die, but rather that there was, and had always been, an understanding that such atrocities came with our occupation.
If Jack was found hanging in the living room of the west wing later, well, that was just part of it. If Cyrus was drained and dismembered by morning in the bathtub, such was life. In a way, we were at home with the oddity, at home with the fear. The horror was more comfortable because it was so common. We had made it common.
"We'll meet back here in twenty," Cyrus commanded when we were in the kitchen. Cyrus had cut to the North, Roland to the East, and I to the West - to the side of the house where we conducted our lives. For a small while, I could hear them calling, opening doors, and as I called, I knew they could hear me as well. As we went on our own paths, though, it was simply silence or the sound of my own voice that met me.
I decided I would visit the White Room first - the one where I had first spoken to Roland as a child... which I had now, in the face of such a vast expanse of white rooms, called the White Womb - and it was here that I realized there were no echoes. When I called down the long hall in front of the White Womb, "Meredith!", no sound returned. It was as if the laws of reality had forgotten me and abandoned Cyrus's home.
Meredith was not in that hallway, however, nor was she in the room. I checked beneath the pool table, the desk of Cyrus's, thinking she may have hidden herself, but nothing. She was not behind the curtains or in the closet, either.
I checked the other rooms along that same corridor, including the Game Room, where a giraffe, lion, many deer, wolves, and bobcats sneered at me. The bear wore a black mask, I noted, and I figured that some drunken lunatic had probably adorned him.
I surveyed the indoor swimming room and the exercise room, but not a spot of pink showed to me from beneath the bars, nor was any floating in the water like a jellyfish in the Caribbean, nor dripping like a watered flower in the steam room.
It was then that I began to wonder if I would find Meredith alive.
A chill washed against my tender and tired stomach as I continued walking amongst the many halls, calling out her name. Again and again, I said "Meredith," until the word had no more meaning, and I hated hearing myself call her. By this point, I had trekked almost the entirety of the West Wing, except for Alex's room, my room, and Cyrus's, and I slowly made my way to where we had all been before the sound ever arose. Maybe, I thought, she is hidden in Cyrus'
s room. This was a useless hope, I knew.
When I turned the corner and saw Cyrus's double-door entrance at the end of the hallway, I immediately headed towards it, noting that the light was still on and that, from what I could see, the four-poster bed was empty.
Then a movement caught my eye, and I paused just ten or so feet from Alex's door on my left, and a mere five feet from my own door on my right.
It was a hand.
A pink, gloved hand protruded from a crack between the door and the doorjamb to my room. I could see nothing in the blackness beyond the door, for my light was off. There was only the pink arm that stretched into the hallway, the hand palm up, diamond bracelet attached at the wrist.
It was in my room, I noted again, not Cyrus's. And then, I asked myself, Had it moved? It had been at the corner of my eye, but I thought it had indeed shifted. My heart fluttered as I tried to remember. Now that I stood staring at the arm, though, I couldn't perfectly recall. Maybe the bracelet had simply sparkled, I thought, when I was walking. Maybe I had blinked and the movement of my lid had somehow melded with the sudden vision of the color, and I only thought it was movement. Maybe I had breathed just a little bit deeper than I normally would, and that made my head bob and the whole hallway shift. Then again, maybe the damned thing twitched. I didn't know.
It hit me suddenly that this was Meredith's hand. It had probably moved because she was most definitely alive - just hurt, maybe. I started to call out to her and move to grab that fallen hand, but something stopped me, and it wasn't a movement or a sound, but a change.
I watched the glove as it shivered. That was the only way I could describe the image. It was as though the tiniest fibers of the glove wiggled. Though, that was not really it at all.
As the shivering progressed, the glove slipped from a lovely bright pink to a faded, dull brown-orange, like the arm had slipped into an old photograph from the seventies. Then, I realized, the orange was changing again. It was yellowing, and then blanching, like an invisible ink pen that has just begun to dry, or like a bit of silk on which was splashed a bit of bleach. The glove drained of every centimeter of color. It lay on the floor as platinum as ever existed.
"Shit," I whispered.
Pityingly, I said her name. "Meredith." That was when the pointer finger closed towards the palm. The movement was so slight, so slow, that I almost believed I was imagining it. But then the movement sped up, and when the tip of the finger touched just below the thumb, it released, and then pulled down again. And then again. And again. It was mechanical.
After about seven or so times of it beckoning me forward like this, the arm slithered away. It slid across the floor inch-by-inch away from me until it disappeared entirely from view into the blackness of my room.
I noticed the sound of satin and the body against the floor. Then, the swish stopped, and the crack in my door opened wider without a solitary sound.
I knew what was happening. Meredith was not Meredith anymore, but a hook, line, and sinker.
"What do you want?" I asked, still in the hall, staring at the wooden door and black. Remaining in the lit hallway made me feel safe. Illogical though it was, I did judge there was a perimeter within my room that It would not spill over.
Though some might have thought I was insane for wanting reason to enter that room, for desiring it to convince me further to come inside, I did wish it, whatever it was, to speak. I wanted it to persuade me to meet its atrocious self face-to-face. When it came down to the wire, I had preferred it kill me than continue on with these ludicrous games. I was already so tired of the night.
There was no answer by way of sight, sound, or smell, and I looked back down the hall from which I came, then to Cyrus's room, and tried to make a decision as to what I should do.
But then, It, something, finally answered. "To talk."
The words were barely audible, not like a person whispering, but like a person very far away. It did not sound male to me, nor female. It did not sound necessarily human. The softness of it, though, threaded the interest of my ears, and I said to myself that this was, as well, a form of bait. When you want a person to try to listen, you say it so low, so as to make them crave more.
I stepped forward. What about your sister? a voice inside me asked. What if you die, and she's left with these men? Another, very different voice inside me said, You know you won't die, it doesn't feel that way. Then, I wondered if it ever did feel that way, if I would ever know right before that death was coming to greet me.
I stepped through the crack of the door, slid my feet delicately, like an ice skater in the dark, and I reached my hand up on the left to turn the light on.
"You should not do that." The voice was Meredith's. My hand stopped at the bottom of the switch. Yes, the voice was hers, but there was something off.
"Why?" I asked.
A pause.
"It will hinder our discussion." The voice was almost, but not quite, monotone. I fought against my body's urge to shiver.
My hand slid down the paper on the wall until it was safely again at my side. I did not enter the room any more than need be, and in fact, I kept one finger on the edge of the door. It made me feel better, though I didn't know why. I stared into the dark abyss, the light and the hallway at my back, on which such light would not shed.
"Why have you been stealing my kills from me?" I asked.
"To wake you." The reply was instant and startling. I licked my lips, planning my words carefully, like I was in the middle of a chess game with a new set of rules.
"Why?" I asked.
"You can do better. But not just you." It was indeed Meredith's voice, but some other voice as well. It was low, this other sound, and dabbed itself just here and there in the words.
"Better?" I asked. "There is no 'better.' I'm murdering."
"You're playing."
This statement confused me, and I thought of all the throats I had cut, all the bodies burned, all the teeth pulled and crushed to a powder. Do you even know who you're fucking talking to? I wondered. "Are they mutually exclusive?" I asked.
No response. Then, "Do you understand why Cyrus respects me, and you do not?"
"I see you for what you are."
"No. Unlike Cyrus, you have never seen me. The answer lies in Roland's question."
I paused, mulling over the fact that this thing had heard Roland speak to me. I recalled that moment. "If you want to survive, you won't go telling Cyrus to do a damned thing to that box," Roland had said. "Why?" I had asked.
"Why do you think?"
I felt quite cold, terrified, and bare, like I was stripped for yet a second time that night. I thought again about illuminating the room's light, but I did not flip the switch. Truly, I did not know how I would react to whatever was in the room.
What It had just told me - that Cyrus had ever looked inside the box - startled me. I thought that only unfortunate sufferers had been tortured with its contents. "I do not know," I said, "the answer to Roland's question."
"Think," it replied.
"I can't," I said. "I'm too tired."
The reply was instantaneous. "Without me, he would be just a man."
The realization caught in me like another hook to the abdomen. Of course. It made all the sense in the world. "Without you... Cyrus can't..."
"Do anything that a normal man could not do."
I bit down on my lip hard. Yes. Why would a man defend anything that could destroy him? Because it created him all the same. Or, at least he thought it did. Cyrus had refused to help me, because in return, the box would no longer help him. "What about Roland?"
No answer. Rather than prodding this Being about the contents of Roland's intentions, my mind returned to Cyrus. Images of him moving things without touching them, cutting a fire into Jim, dragging me across the floor filled my head. "Why are you telling me this?"
"You're older and aging still. You need reasons that you did not need before, for what I'm about to ask of you. I will provid
e those reasons. What I offer have good faith you will receive. As long as you follow me, you will be made like Cyrus."
I waited for more, but nothing came. "Meaning?"
"Any power that you could dream, I can give you."
I laughed aloud and breathed in the largest breath possible. I felt a déjà vu from just hours before in that day. Even though Meredith was not cutting into me, speaking to her... it terrified me far more than the bright man. "That sounds expensive."
There was a languid silence. "Yes."
I thought deeply on this offer. "What is it... What is it that you need so desperately for me... us... to do?
It spoke as though half-human, half-machine, and topped with something more rich. "I need healthy souls, faith destroyed. Not the murderers. Not the rapists. Not the thieves. Leave them be. But the finer ones. The priests. And virgins. The pure. The crisp. You and Cyrus and Alex are bringing me thin souls, souls of soil and bones. But it is the glistening, fat ones that... intrigue me. Not those like you. Those like your sister."
I said nothing. This thing's mentioning my sister horrified me. And it knew.
"Do not fear. Your sister is yours. Kill the ones like her, though. The children. And wives. And lovers. Go out into the world searching for diamonds, and then crush them, let their glow flow and die. Make them suffer. Scream. Torture them. Learn to desire it. This, I want, should be your love."
"And these things... why can't you do them?"
"I am your connection to things not here. You are my connection to things not there."
"So then you do need Cyrus, after all."
There was no response, and this made me smirk in just the slightest. I paused, thinking. "Why didn't you ask for the innocent before?"
"I was waiting."
"For what?"
"For you to grow. And you have. This is the final step."
I put my hand against the wall and leaned. It seemed the bright man was not the only one that had been waiting for me.
The blood was draining from me I could feel, all the sugar in my bloodstream sinking to my toes, leaving my head bare and dry.
"I don't think I can do that."
"You can," It automatically responded. "You're close. I will reward you."
"There is no reward large enough."
"There is always a reward large enough."
I laughed. "You know nothing about being human. You know nothing about suffering," I said, shaking my head.
But then it said, "With what I could give you, you could kill people by simply looking at them. You could think things into moving. You could... induce pleasure or pain in any way you wanted on anyone you wanted. You could go back in time. You could go forward. You could repeat the same moments over and over that you find you love and live there for eternity. Cut out all the parts that are meaningless. You could give objects life. Whatever you wanted."
There was one that interested me more than the others in that list. "Jump around..." I whispered to myself, "moment to moment... And what would that bring me? All of these things?"
There was a pause before It spoke. "This would allow for you what everybody in the world desires."
"What is that?"
"To disappear into perfect and meaningful oblivion. Effortlessness. Sanctuary. Bliss. Eternity. You can mix the bitter with the better until it all feels better."
"And I would have to kill the good for all of this?"
"That, and..."
"And?"
"Give me what you were given today."
I swallowed hard, fear that It knew wringing me. "What I was given today?"
"It sits now in your belly."
I cringed and rubbed my head with the weight of what It laid upon me and shook it away. "I don't even know what it is."
"You never need to. Cyrus made a mistake sending you to him, and I can repair the error. Give me what you have now, promise me you will murder the good, and that thing you feel hot within yourself, growing hotter every minute, will be gone."
I pictured the thing in the darkness pulling me down, splaying me open, and taking it. It terrified me. "I'm sorry, but you've fucked up. I don't want to replace Cyrus; I don't want to do what he does, or what you want me to do. Not only that, but even if I could stop time, relive these moments... there's nothing worth reliving. I don't know what you think I've experienced, but I can guarantee you that I don't want to see any of this again."
"You said you enjoyed the things you do."
"Yes, but I..." I paused. I knew how to answer this, but I refused. I did not wish to talk about the part of me who loved it - the piece of me feasting beyond myself - the extimate - and how that part contrasted with the rest.
"What if I promised you potential for more?" It asked.
I almost rolled my eyes. "To help you? Whatever you are? I don't think so." I looked the void up and down. "You'd have to promise me the impossible."
"I could promise you Cyrus."
My breath caught in my throat like a hook through the mouth of a fish.
"That would cement our friendship, would it not?" It asked.
I shook my head back and forth, my mind vomiting up the information It had just given to me. "What the fuck is this? Why are you doing this?"
"Would you like the proposal, or not?"
I didn't respond. At the time, I felt that this was absolutely insane. Cyrus was the only thing, the only person, that I still had in my life that was solid.
"The foundations are shaking, you know," It said.
"Because of fucking you!" I yelled. "Because you disturbed everything!"
"How do you know that Cyrus didn't ask me to give him a reason to kill you?" It asked, and this stopped me in my tracks.
For the longest time, I didn't know how to answer. I went as far back as I could. "I... I saved him," I said weakly.
"And that's a problem, don't you think? For a god." For some reason, hearing this creature speak that sentence hurt me more than anything. "One must destroy his mortal origins to be truly immortal. Being saved would be one of those origins. In a way, you are Cyrus's parent, and he must rid the world of you."
"Did you tell him he must do that?"
"No."
I laughed, but then the laughter died to nothing, and the nothing wilted. It was pointless to believe this creature. It was pointless to even ask the question.
"Do you want me to kill Cyrus? I could do it now. He would never know the difference. As long as, of course, you promise to do what I ask," It said.
It took me forever to answer, but the fact was I could not give this Thing what it wanted, nor would I allow it to touch me, open me up, and remove the thing within my stomach, as long as I had the choice. "No." I had saved the bastard yet again.
"You want him for your own?"
"No," I said again, and this was true.
"Do you want me to protect you from him?" It finally asked.
"Have you ever protected me from Cyrus?" I asked. "I mean... Was there a time when you have needed to?"
"Perhaps," It replied.
"Has Cyrus..." I started, and I paused to seek the right wording. This question, of all questions, was one that I yearned to ask. For years, it had been burning within me. Ever since I met Roland, I had wondered. "Did you have anything to do with Cyrus and me... I mean, my creation? Did he come to you in any way for me?"
"Yes," it replied.
"How? What did he ask?" I whispered.
There was a length of time just as void as the blackness that surrounded me before It spoke.
"You know," it said.
I shut my eyes, tight.
"I don't want to talk to you anymore," I breathed softly.
"The knowledge is hard to bear. I will come back another time."
"I don't want you to come back!" I yelled.
It did not respond.
My mouth dropped open, and the words that next came from my mouth were the hardest to bear. "Will I ever get out of this house?" I whispered, so
fter than the slowest breeze.
"I am not here to answer that."
I breathed deeply, feeling angry and yet at the same time slightly consoled. If It was willing to keep me alive, then perhaps Cyrus could not do away with me.
A long, deadly silence sat between us, and It finally said, "Until then, you will do as I ask and let the others know what I desire. Roland and Cyrus and Alex. Let them know I need the pure."
"...I will," I replied.
"And tell Cyrus, I said 'Not yet.'"
"Jack?" I heard Roland's voice from the hall. I turned to face the doorway, peering into the light. It seemed blinding. He stepped into view from my left and then stopped. He locked onto me, and I observed his face.
He looked so different, so much purer. The lines and wrinkles did not look like those of age, of a man brought back from death millions of times, but of kindness. I glimpsed his brown eyes looking at me, and then they flicked to my right.
His eyebrows rocketed up, his eyes widened, and he said softly and quickly, "Come into the hall, Jack. Now." Without hesitation, I stepped through the door's crack. As I did, he came to me and pulled me towards him. As he hugged me, the bedroom door slammed with a blow. Then, no more sounds, no more voices.
In the hall, Roland looked me over like a mother with her child. I told him I was okay and then, as he lifted my hand to look at my wrist, I asked, "What?"
"Your bruises are healed," he said, referring to Cyrus's grabbing me earlier in the evening, and he grimaced. I put my own hands to my wrist, checking for soreness and wondering if that were true, or if the bruises - like the glove - had just been bleached.
But I felt fine, healed. It horrified me. I wanted my bruises back.
I wanted to whisper to Roland, then, "We need to burn the box," but I could not, for as soon as I spoke the first word, Cyrus appeared at the end of the hallway.
"Did you find Meredith?" he asked, but as he stepped to us, Roland pointed to my healed wrist, and it was as if any scales that covered Cyrus's eyes were removed.
"She's dead, isn't she?" he said, and I nodded, pointing to my room.
"How are you not dead?" he asked.
"I think because I'm supposed to tell you something."
He did not look pleased. "What?" he asked.
I reported, and reported only, how our operations were supposed to change, the new purpose they had - to kill the moral, to darken the white. He listened to me as one would to a seer. Then he brought me brandy.
It was in a snifter that was asymmetric and baseless, and the glass rolled around on its edge as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It went round and round and round, then to and fro and back around, and I felt as though this meant something more than how it seemed. But what meaning it implicated I could not say.
That glass of brandy was the last courtesy I ever remember Cyrus providing, and he stared at me all night. As he did, his eyes furrowed further than I had ever seen on a human man before.
Cyrus simply did not believe that this was all there was to my story. He refused to accept that there wasn't something that the box didn't want him to know.
This was how our New Year began.