Perish, p.4
Perish, page 4
The maps app said it was forty-five minutes. It was so close. How convenient.
I set my phone on the coffee table. All the possibilities the letter implied swept over me—that Infinitum was not dead, that I had not killed them all, that they had found me.
I wasn’t going to visit a house simply because some girl supposedly sent me a letter. It would be sheer stupidity to respond. The best approach would be to do nothing, to stay inside, except at night when I hunted. That was survival.
I slid the letter back into its envelope and placed both beneath the couch. I checked the time, made sure my gun was in my pocket, and left.
CHAPTER 4:
BACK AGAIN
Annette’s letter was an itch that begged to be scratched, but the price of scratching it might be death at Alex’s hands in a house only forty-five minutes down the road, whether or not Infinitum still existed.
I turned my attention back to the life I wanted to build. I wanted an education devoid of Cyrus. I yearned to know what real people learned in the real world, outside the grip of a manipulative and power-hungry man. The fall semester at New York University was approaching, and I began researching how to create a fake identity—a proper one, not like the bullshit name I gave the Alexan, knowing no one would attempt to verify my details because they already had their money.
Eventually I dared to venture outside in the daylight, to step between the architecturally gorgeous buildings of NYU. Being outside unsettled me, even more so when I neared the school, surrounded by people whose lives were so different. Still, I became determined. I researched the dark and deep portions of the internet where it seemed anything was available for purchase, including a new identity, a new life.
More letters, though, from other children arrived from all over the country, bringing reverberations of a reality that threatened to swallow me whole. Over four weeks, I received twenty-seven of them, and these letters threw me from my plans. They were magnets, threatening to drag me from my new life in New York.
Three of the letters Annette had signed. The others contained different writing, from different children. I hollowed out a large copy of Moby-Dick, and each time I received a new suspicious letter from some child asking for my help, I opened the tome, gazed down into the carved-out pages, and placed the new letter on top of the others.
The style of the letters varied. Some were thin, like business letters. Others were thicker, greeting-card sized. Some were written in black ink, some blue, some red. All requested the same thing—to help them, these children who could not find a way out from the abuse and murder and death, escape.
Always children. Always the same request.
I closed the book and placed it back on my bedroom shelf.
That’s not your life, I thought. At one time, it might have been, but it’s not anymore. You take care of yourself. When Alex comes, kill him. That’s all you have to do.
Besides, it’s a trap. It’s too perfect. You wanted to save the children Cyrus sent out to bomb buildings, and with the help of the ferrics, you did. What better bait to lure you with than letters from more children needing help?
Late at night, though, as I lay in bed, I wondered, was it actually fake? All of it?
Looking around at my new apartment, at the computer where I might purchase a brand-new identity, I knew I should forget the letters. There was no reason for me to leave all that I was building behind. I was becoming more than just anti-Cyrus. I was starting to become myself.
But another part of me, a deeper, animal part, a reptilian part, the part not ready to stop destroying Cyrus, the part that wanted to keep landing blows and slide into familiar old ways, did not like the potential that Cyrus’s cult was still alive and well. I felt pure, ice-cold horror and rage at the idea there might be children still being harmed. This part of me was more familiar, and it spoke to me.
It said, Maybe you have more buildings to burn. Maybe it is not yet time to retire.
And that voice, so loud, so deep, tugged at me.
Until I suppressed it, suppressed it, suppressed it, and fell asleep.
The final Monday evening of October, near Halloween—a holiday I began to assess as particularly useful for someone in my line of work—another letter arrived, addressed to me. It listed no return address. When I opened it, a bulky little item plopped into my palm.
I stared at the little piece of plastic that resembled a Lego. A flash drive.
My breath stopped. I trembled. A curious rage rose inside me.
Don’t fucking do it, a voice warned. Don’t look.
But it might be from Alex.
I returned to my apartment, staring at the flash drive in my hand. I knew I should burn the thing, smash it, chop it into itty bitty bits, and be on my way.
Still, I entered my apartment, locked the door, and sat at my computer. With a deep breath I slid the drive into the slot on the left. My computer screen woke. A window popped up with an option to open the drive’s contents. I reached forward, placed my hand on the cold mouse, and moved the pointer to the drive. I double clicked.
The folder contained only one file—a.wmv. A video.
My mouth became cottony, and chills coursed along my skin. I broke into a cold sweat, and I craved the dulling, sleepy gift of opium.
In near pain, I slid the mouse over the untitled.wmv file, and I double clicked. After a few seconds of a black screen, an image came into view.
It wasn’t Alex.
A girl with dark brown hair and a tear-streaked face stared into the camera. She spoke in broken sobs. If I hadn’t been listening as though my life depended on the message, I would not have understood her. “I am Annette Canton,” she said. Beside her, a man stood. He wore a black, button-down shirt and gray slacks. The camera was positioned too low to catch his face or head.
He spoke next in a voice deep and unidentifiable. “This is the price our followers pay for disobedience.”
A knife emerged, shimmering nearly white in the light of the computer. He lifted it up, and, quicker than I could blink, pressed the tip of the knife to the girl’s throat, pressing until it pierced deeply. He pulled the blade across, as if cutting a cake. Blood sprayed the camera, reddening the whole screen.
The video ended.
I gripped the computer mouse in my right hand. I screamed, and my voice boomed against the walls of my living room long and hard. “No!”
I chucked the mouse against the wall. It exploded into shards of plastic. I shoved the laptop off my desk. It hit the floor and cracked.
I threw everything I had purchased over the prior month—books, ramekins, cups—against the walls. My hands shook, and broken glass littered the entire floor of the living room.
Dropping to the blue rug, I scraped it with hands that had turned into claws. My fingernails bent back. I screamed in frustration, feeling the burn of my muscles and joints.
I had not believed the letters, certain they were a trap. Lutin had killed all of Infinitum…hadn’t he? Had the source survived?
This video was proof, wasn’t it?
At least twenty-eight children… twenty-seven… had written to me, and more might be seeking me out. And what had I been doing? Hiding!
The letters are real, was all I could think. Agony twisted in my center, grabbed at my throat.
I cursed everything as I flung open the doors to my balcony. I wanted to reach out in front of me and tear the city apart.
Below, the world carried on, as though a child hadn’t just been killed, not registering the evil beneath the daily norms.
It never had. Even when the city learned of Cyrus, it learned too little, too late. Already fewer news agencies reported on him and the hundreds of children saved.
My hand gripped the balcony rail, my fingers straining. I suppressed a guttural scream.
I slipped to the concrete floor and shivered. I might have thrown myself off the railing if I hadn’t resolved what I needed to do. I was going to kill the man in that video.
Evil may not register in the world, but it registered in me. Unlike others, I did not fear reciprocity.
I stood straight, all of my movements direct, comfortable, liquid. It was like I was slipping into a warm bath. I knew what I would do, and I was ready.
I did not mourn the life I lost. I did not feel anything.
Cyrus would have clapped.
CHAPTER 5:
WHITE AND GOLD
The next morning, I called a taxi to drop me off near the address Annette had listed on the back of each ignored letter. I walked several blocks to the tall, bleak house and studied it. Built in Victorian style, with a wraparound porch, it stretched toward the sky like a cathedral. Only a few orange leaves speckled the dark grass of the medium-sized yard. A wrought iron fence at least six feet high enclosed the area. The gate stood partway open, emitting tiny unnnggs and innnggs as the wind kissed it.
If someone had handed me a blowtorch, I would have burned the place down then and there.
I pushed the gate open to assess the yard. I scanned the grass, with a cold, angry determination in my heart to kill everyone and everything inside, and caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a pink glove—not a winter glove, but an evening glove, like a woman would wear to a formal banquet—near a small shrub by the porch’s left corner.
Red stains stretched up from the back of the hand to the elbow. That red might have been an embroidery design or something more ominous, but it lay too distant to tell.
The house reeked of Cyrus. The whole place seemed to be his monument. A house without hope, a building where a missing child might be found, it would swallow one whole. A familiar shiver rolled down my spine. I wished I had brought a blowtorch.
No faces peeked from the windows. No one stood on the grounds. I took a step past the gate. As soon as my foot landed, I stopped breathing.
The door of the house opened wide.
A grainy big-band swing song filtered from inside, distant, pleasant, sweet. Through the doorway, a large, brassy gramophone sat on the floor fifteen feet inside the house. Monstrously large, the shining bell loomed ominously, and, as though it knew I was looking, shifted up. It grew, widened, like a flower blooming. Something white spilled from its center.
My mouth dropped open, and I forgot myself. An invisible energy swept my feet out from under me, and I hit the cement walkway. My teeth clacked painfully, and my lungs emptied.
I slid toward the front door of the Victorian home, towed by some unseen force. The cement caught my coat and dragged it to my chest. I raised my aching head, discovering I had traveled halfway across the sidewalk.
I flipped over onto my stomach, my heart leaping, fear ricocheting through me, and grabbed at a crack in the cement. It slipped from under my fingers, and I spread my arms wide, grabbing hold of the edges of the sidewalk. I held tight. The grass tickled my burning hands. I clenched my stomach and gritted my teeth, trying to crawl forward. If I could get back past the gate, I might be free. The rough surface grated against my skin, peeling off the outer layer. As my knees pressed into the walkway, my kneecaps popped. I barely made it a few inches forward before the magnetic pull overwhelmed me. I slammed down onto my stomach as I rocketed closer to the door.
My feet struck the wooden steps and were lifted. My hands found the rim of the first wooden step, and I gripped it, hooking my right elbow around the jutting corner of the stair. I caught my breath and, for a moment, dangled.
The big-band swing sounded louder. In the midst of the gallivanting trombones arrived the glop...glop...glop...of something oozing. The music shifted. Off, out of tune, the melody melted.
The wood of the stair beneath me creaked. I held tight with all my strength. Once inside the house, it would be the end of me.
The stair broke.
Like a champagne cork, my body sailed through the air, and I landed hard just inside the doorway. I jumped forward, attempting to grab the doorframe, but something powerful pulled me further within. The door leisurely closed and locked.
Horrified, I struggled to find anything to hold onto and slow my progress. A pair of shining black leather shoes appeared to my right. A pair of cream heels materialized beside them. Above me, pale and grim faces of not just one man and woman, but many of them, collected. A woman with broadly set gray eyes smiled, one gold tooth gleaming. The man beside her hugged her close, as though the image of me being dragged deeper into the house was comforting. They observed quietly as I slid closer to the gramophone, seeking any crack in the wooden floor to dig my nails into.
My shoe met something not quite solid but not quite liquid either. Gum? Paint, perhaps. Glue. The oak floorboards beneath me bleached. The orange-yellow faded, slipping, disappearing, and a pure white floor took its place. The sleeves of my jacket shifted to gray and then white.
“Fuck,” I said. And I thought, This is the end for you. That was your life.
My other foot became entrapped in the thick fluid.
Through the melting music arrived a sudden high, piercing sound, almost like laughter, like people cackling. Anger clenched in my chest. I tried one last stab at the floorboards, and my fingernails filled with splinters of wood and bent back.
The high-pitched laughing continued. The men and women stared at each other, eyes wide, mouths parted, eyebrows drawn down. Afraid. The voices were not coming from them.
The room vibrated, and the cackling overtook the jazz. The cream walls faded to white.
Something dark darted overhead.
A black bird sailed in front of me, followed by another.
The gum-like substance rose to the middle of my shins, but it did not pull quite as strongly as before. I kicked back at the goo as hard as I could, and my left ankle popped free.
Another bird appeared in the room and then ten more, swooping over me, circling, flying dangerously close to the men and women in the hallway. I craned my neck to look upward. Hundreds of birds stormed inside, all screeching.
I slapped my hands over my ears to block out the din.
Both feet free, I achieved some distance between me and the gramophone.
Two women bolted to a room on the left, while the others ran up a staircase on the right. A man fell against the mirror of a tall storage bench in the entryway, shattering it. Shards crashed to the floor, breaking into smaller pieces that reflected the hundreds of birds overhead. The screeching expanded.
I crawled, using every muscle to gain another foot of distance.
The black birds shifted to gray. Several bleached to white. As I kicked and crawled away, all of them turned white.
I managed to gain just a few more feet. The magnetism weakened, and I brought myself to my knees and stood. A tornado of white birds spiraled down into the black center of the huge gramophone, obscuring the bell. The white goo dribbling down slackened. It pooled on the floor limply, white wings and feathers and feet pinned in it.
I sprinted away, leaping out of the living room and through the hall. No one stopped me. The man in the mirror’s shards covered his face to protect himself from the birds. Bits of mirror pinned to his face poked through his fingers. Glass speckled both his arms. Several people on the staircase struck at the white birds that swooped over them, dove down, and latched onto their clothes and hair. Everyone else seemed to have disappeared into the recesses of the house.
Tearing open the front door, I jumped onto the porch and raced down the steps. I paused briefly to glance back, witnessing once more the utter chaos of birds, people, and gramophone, before the brown front door gently shut behind me.
I ran.
And ran.
I eventually convinced myself to stop running long enough to call a taxi. I waited for it, focused on making my heart slow, my movements smooth out, my eyes blink. Within five minutes, a car arrived. I got inside, now dressed all in white, and hid my bleeding fingers within my jacket sleeves. To my relief, the driver said little on the drive back to my apartment.
He dropped me off in front of my complex, and I walked through the lobby as casually as possible. My muscles ached, both from the exertion and the adrenaline. The whole world seemed shaky.
I took the stairs carefully, making sure not to tumble. It took me about twenty minutes to reach my floor. As soon as I made it inside my apartment, I pressed myself against the front door and slid to the ground. I waited until my thrumming heart slowed again. When it relented, I rose and went into the bathroom to look at myself. My whole body vibrated.
What an impossible, weird shitstorm. I never should have gone there. The gramophone, the birds, all of it. I had nearly died from some machine that worked very similarly to Cyrus’s old box. But I survived. Animals came, had sacrificed themselves, it seemed, and saved me. Right? Wasn’t that what had happened? But why? How? Such a thing had never happened when Cyrus attacked his victims.
The people in the house who clawed through the air and flung themselves into rooms to escape the birds obviously hadn’t expected that either. Something inexplicable had occurred. Someone, something saved me.
As the adrenaline drained, I stared at myself bitterly and thought one word.
Failure.
They had killed a child; I went there to exact vengeance, and I failed. I wanted to rampage through my apartment, ripping everything apart again, but I didn’t have the energy. I simply stood, staring at my white clothes stained with blood.
I pulled a bruised rib muscle as I removed my sweater and winced. The bloody cotton sweater dropped to the floor, and I turned to examine my back in the mirror. A large, raw swath covered the area just below the tip of my shoulder to the bottom of my rib cage. It’d probably need a month to heal.
The tips of my fingers were scraped red and raw, and the blood coating my split lip had darkened and dried. I ran warm water in the sink and brought a cupped handful to my lips and then another. The cut was not quite as noticeable minus the flat black scab.
