The Lazarus Heart (13 page)

nothing. After a moment there was the unmistakable sound of footsteps, someone walking across the creaky pine floors on the other side of the door, and Stanley Hudson went to work on the dead-bolt.

"I don't... know... what you're talking about," Michele slurs, his voice thick and syrupy from the numbing drugs the man has given him to keep the pain to a dull and distant roar. Michele has begun to think of the pain as The Pain, as a starving, fire-eyed thing with too many heads and too many mouths, chained to a wall, and the chain slowly coming free of the masonry. It seems now as if The Pain has been with him all his life. He knows now that there is only one way it will ever finally tear itself loose and gobble him up, like the Big Bad Wolf and he's just Little Red Riding Hood with an Adam's apple and a dick and there will never be peace anywhere again except in the acid darkness of its belly, the dissipating pit of its gut.

"I don't know..."

The man stops cutting then, abruptly, as if he's finally accepted that Michele is telling him the truth. The scalpel clangs loudly into the metal tray with all the other instruments and the man's red latex hands pass between Michele's eyes and the parts that have been cut loose and hang on hooks above the table where he can see them, has to see because the man took his eyelids right at the start.

"Of course you don't, child," the man says gently. Then he is filling a syringe with a clear liquid. He plunges the needle into the exposed muscles of Michele's abdomen, and The Pain lunges forward one last time. The sounds of its claws and the crumbling stone are very loud, drowning the raw world of meat and steel.

"But even unknowing pawns have their uses, Michael," says the man. Then he whispers indistinctly, something that sounds like "Forgive me," before The Pain opens its jaws wide and Michele slips easily, gratefully, down its gullet.

Stanley Hudson had thought he would find both the twins waiting in the apartment above Ursulines and was disappointed that there had been only the boy. It was the girl who had recognized him, who had violated him with her smirking, triumphant stare. But he would catch up to her later, he told himself, when he was finished with the boy named Benjamin.

He paused in the room where every surface was stained in complementary shades of red and black, paused and corrected himself. He would catch up to
it
later. Benjamin had told him everything he wanted to know, had confessed how his identical twin brother had gone to Trinidad,

Colorado, six years earlier for the surgery, the final step in the conversion, surrendering its humanity for whatever dark rewards They promised Their disciples.
It is approximately 260 miles due south from Trinidad, Colorado, to Roswell, New Mexico,
he absently reminded himself, glancing once again past the slaughter on the canopy bed to the print of Jared Poe's
The Raven.
The dead boy still stared out at Stanley Hudson from the photograph, but any menace that face might have harbored had been negated by the cleansing rites of the knife.

He leaned down, reaching into the leather satchel at his feet, and removed the pages he'd cut from
The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe.
He silently counted the lines as he scanned the opening stanzas of the poem. When he reached the twenty-sixth line, he marked it with a yellow highlighter pen he'd found earlier in Jared Poe's office. And then he read the line aloud.

'"Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before... '"

Twenty-six times two,
he thought, is
fifty-two,
and he counted down to line fifty-two and subtracted six lines, one for each year since the living twin's conversion, and read line forty-six out loud as he traced over it in neon yellow.

"'But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door-'"

Stanley Hudson sighed wearily and stared again at the photograph watching him from the other side of the room.

'"With mien of
lord or lady,'"
he repeated slowly, satisfied that his message would be understood, that They would know he'd caught on, had made all the appropriate connections. He stood and walked around the end of the bed, stepping carefully over the boy's bowels and kidneys, the upper portion of his liver, and used a piece of Scotch tape (also borrowed from Jared Poe's office) to stick the highlighted pages to the blood- speckled glass protecting the photograph. Then he left the yellow pen in the mess heaped in the center of the bed, removed his surgical gloves, and went to the apartment's bathroom to wash his face.

That night when Jared Poe was arrested for the murder of his lover, Stanley Hudson had just allowed himself to become Joseph Lethe again. He watched the news reports on the old black-and-white television in his kitchen while he ate his dinner of canned beef stew, listened to the anchorman's account of the boy's grisly death and a

short interview with a New Orleans homicide detective. At first he felt jealous and angry, jealous that the credit for
his
work was going to the deviant photographer, though that was what he had intended. But then the reporter asked the detective if there was any connection between the death of Benjamin DuBois and the Bourbon Street Ripper killings, and although the detective refused to comment, Joseph Lethe had seen the hopeful, guarded glint in the cop's eyes. As the anchor segued into a story about an alligator attack in Bayou Segnette, he chewed a mouthful of mealy beef and potatoes and reminded himself that there were more important things than his pride.

By killing the twin he had scored a double victory against Them, had taken not one acolyte but two. Because now the photographer, who had been chosen to spread Their monstrous images, to subliminally disseminate Their lies through his perverse "art," would be locked away in prison, useless. And if the police believed that Jared Poe was also responsible for the other killings, then it bought Joseph Lethe a lot more time. He washed the stew down with a sip from a can of warm Canada Dry ginger ale and allowed himself a cautious smile.

Joseph Lethe wraps the boy whore's body in garbage bags and binds them together with a whole roll of duct tape, until the mess is contained in a neat package. Because this one cannot be buried conveniently in the yard, because the yard is only for the ones that have gone completely across, he carries the body down all the flights of stairs that lead from his examination room to his garage and dumps it into the trunk of his car.

The thunder growls, reminding him of the storm and his visions. He opens the garage door and stares out into the storm-haunted darkness. There's still an hour left until dawn, plenty of time for him to finish the job. The fear and confusion, the dangerous uncertainty that plagued him earlier in the evening and threatened to erode his will, are gone now, washed away by the meticulous, familiar ritual of the boy's vivisection.

High above New Orleans a brilliant fork of lightning stabs down at the world.

Joseph Lethe sees the outline of a gigantic ebony bird spreading its wings wide above the rain-lashed city.
A sign,
he thinks, and a warning too. That something is coming, something new and terrible sent to stop him. Something that he must lure into the open so that he can confront it, destroy it, as he destroyed Their plans against him a year before. He closes the trunk, checks to be sure it's locked, and gets into his car.

five

"No," Lucrece says, but Jared is already through the bedroom window, following the crow. He doesn't pause to consider the unseen force that threw the windows open as the bird fluttered cawing above the bed. And he does not pause to question gravity or the distance down to the street; he moves now on instinct alone, an instinct that either he's carried back with him from the grave or flows into him from the crow. He hears the French windows bang closed behind him, shutting out the storm again, shutting out Lucrece.

There is a faint sense of vertigo, not of falling but of the risk of falling, and the commingled flapping from the long tails of the latex frock coat and the bird's broad wings.

Then there is a flat and solid rooftop beneath his feet. Jared turns, looking back toward the apartment. He can see dim, unsteady candlelight behind the curtains. He imagines movement on the other side, Lucrece coming to see if he's lying broken on the street, but the crow caws again, a harsh, demanding sound. Jared looks away, stares instead down at the bird perched on the edge of a sagging, leaf-clogged gutter.

"What now?" he asks.

The crow shakes herself, throws a crystal spray of raindrops from her feathers. She peers up at him, her eyes eager, impatient but indecisive.

"That's what I thought," Jared says, tasting the rain on his lips, the faint oily taint of petrochemicals in the drops. "You're turning out to be pretty goddamn useless, you know?" The crow blinks, squawks again, as if to say,
I already dragged your sorry dead ass all the way back from hell, didn't I?
She shakes herself a second time and looks south toward the lights of Bourbon Street.

"You can't find the guy who killed Benny, and you don't know why. Well, while you're figuring it out, I have some other scores to settle. Any chance you can help with
that?"

The bird looks away.

"I think you have to," Jared says. "Maybe you're not
supposed
to, but I can

make you. Because you know where they are, and you know they damn well deserve it."

The crow huddles into herself and emits a small, mournful croak. He sees that she is shivering, but he is no longer capable of anything like pity, least of all for this black bird that dragged him out of oblivion.

The rain is cold, though, and he does wonder a moment that he can still feel cold. Then another wave of loss and anger washes over him, a thousand times more chilling than the storm, more bitter than the polluted rain. Hurt so big and heavy it can only

cripple him or drive him on.

"Is that
all
there is to keep me moving?" he whispers, suspecting that the bird doesn't have the answer but needing to ask anyway.
The loss and the anger,
he thinks, fingering the words like bullets, and says, "I'm wasting time, aren't I?"

The crow replies by spreading her wings and hopping from the rain gutter into the air above Ursulines Street, heading away from Bourbon. Jared lingers only a moment, glances one more time toward the apartment before he follows, moving like something only a little more substantial than shadow across the roofs and the empty spaces in between.

At first Jim Unger thinks he has screamed himself awake, but Julie's still asleep beside him, so maybe the scream never made it out of the nightmare, out of his throat. He's shivering, drenched in slick, cold sweat. He fumbles in the dark for his cigarettes on the bedside table, lights a Camel, and inhales deeply, checking the LED readout on the clock radio. It says 3: 37 a. m. in squarish phantom-green numbers. Unger takes another drag off his cigarette. His head is still too full of the dream, the red cascade of images and sounds, and his heart is racing as though he's just run a marathon.

In the dream he was back in the apartment on Ursulines, the one where his part in the arrest and conviction of Jared Poe began. Except
this
time he was the first one through the door, the first one to see the blood and viscera dripping down from the walls and ceiling. In the dream he was the one to find the pages taped to the photograph and he was standing there, reading them out loud, just the highlighted lines-he can't remember them now, but in the dream they were so fucking clear-and someone was snapping pictures. The flash went off like white bolts of lightning, one after another, and he asked whoever was doing it to please fucking stop so he could fucking concentrate.

And then there was the sound of something at the window and he turned to see.

Behind him the idiot with the camera was still snapping away,
flash, flash, flash,
and he heard Fletcher saying, "Jesus, Jimbo, don't open it. Don't let it
in
here," and Vince Norris said, "Well, ain't this some pretty faggot shit we got here? Fuckin'
sick
sons of bitches, if you ask me."

"Shut up,"
he hissed, reaching over the bits of human body scattered across the bed, reaching for the windows to open them, to let it in so it would stop making those
sounds,
like the night coming apart at the seams, like a thousand sharp beaks or claws working at the glass.

"Jesus, Jimbo," Fletcher said. "You
wanna
let it in here with us? Is that what you want?" But his hand was already grasping the blood-smeared handle, already pulling one of the windows open wide. From the other side came an irresistible grinding force, and a sudden wet flood of entrails and feathers flowed in over the headboard of the bed. He caught a fleeting glimpse of something else out there, something vast and restless on scaly stilt legs before he woke up, the scream dying on his lips, mercifully taking any impressions of the thing outside the window away with it.

Unger gets out of bed, careful not to wake his wife, not to interrupt her dreams. He crosses the room to the coat hook on the back of the closet door, the hook where he always keeps his shoulder holster and service revolver. He takes it out and checks the chambers, all six loaded, then slips it back into its leather cradle.

Just the simple action helps a little, makes him feel more real, more grounded. He takes another drag off the Camel and looks over his shoulder, across the room toward the single window hidden behind the ugly purple drapes that Julie brought with her when she moved in. He can hear the rain pounding at the glass, enough like the sound in his dream that he makes the connection. A few seconds later there's a flash of lightning.

It's been almost a week since he got the news about Poe, how some big Cuban had cut him open and he'd died before anyone in the prison infirmary was able to stop the bleeding.
Good fucking riddance,
he said.
Saves the taxpayers the cost of juicing the pervert bastard.

"You're a coldhearted SOB, James Unger. Anyone ever bothered to tell you that?" Pam Tier-ney had said that, and he looked at her and smiled, thinking,
Yeah, bitch, and everyone in this department knows you're a fucking bulldyke,
but all he said was, "Honey, I don't get paid to be a sweetheart."