The Lazarus Heart (4 page)

Lucas managed to shake his head.

"Jesus," his brother sighed, an exasperated sound, but he was still smiling. "You can be a dense little thing, can't you?"

"Then you don't hate me for it?" Something slipped across Benjamin's face so fast Lucas almost missed it, anger put back in its black box before it could do him harm. Benjamin shook his head. "We're both freaks, Lucas. We're nothing like these others..." he whispered, motioning at the people in the seats around them. "And that's our power."

Lucas closed his eyes. As the bus rolled off the causeway and into New Orleans, Benjamin whispered an old story, one they had invented together years ago, about two identical fairy brothers, changelings left for human children and taken to be raised by a kindly old woman in a house full of riddles and dust and fat scuttling spiders.

Lucrece is almost dozing in her chair when the tapping at the window begins, the French windows behind the bed and all its black linen drap-ings. At first she thinks that the sound must be coming from the door in the other room, someone knocking at the door to the apartment, someone wanting in, and she whispers his name before she can stop herself.

"Benny?"

Then the sound begins again, sharp, like small stones hurled against the glass, almost hard enough to shatter it. Lucrece stands up. Her legs are weak and the small hairs on the back of her neck are prickling, a cold sweat blooming wetly beneath her dress, across her forehead and upper lip.

There comes a rumbling sound like thunder, except Lucrece knows it
isn't
thunder; it is much too contained and close for thunder. It rolls slowly across the roof, and she looks up at the ceiling as the windows are blown open by a sudden violent gust. The candle flames flicker, and the room fills with the smells of rain and hot wax and ozone.

"Benjamin?" she says, louder this time. The storm seems to draw its breath, and for a moment there is only the sound of the rain coming in the window, falling on the bed and floor, peppering her face.

And then the sound of wings, and she almost screams as the huge crow lights on the headboard and the windows slam themselves shut behind it.

"Jesus Christ," she gulps. The bird caws loudly as if in reply, puffs out its black feathers and shakes tiny beads of water all over the damp bedspread. As it cocks its head to one side, beak like an assassin's dagger, Lucrece wonders what her sorrow has conjured from this haunted city, what dark spirit might have come to wonder at her vigil.

She takes one step toward it, leaning forward. The crow blinks and caws again, spreads its ebony wings. Lucrece steps back and crouches at the edge of the bed.

"Who sent you?" she asks. "Who sent you to me?"

"Lucrece," a voice behind her says, a voice as familiar and as alien as anything she could ever imagine, a voice that carries everything it's felt and everything it's seen wedged fiercely between every word. She's too afraid to turn and see, her heart going mad inside her chest, but she knows that despite her fear she will
have
to turn around sooner or later. Like Orpheus or Lot's wife, never mind the penalty of seeing. The not- seeing is a thousand times more horrible.

"Jared," she says, whispers more quietly than a whisper. "Is it. . . ?" "Yes, Lucrece," he says. "Yes," and she turns to see.

Jared has been following the bird for what seems like miles, down the wet streets of leering, suspicious faces and cars that honked when he didn't get out of their way. He thinks that the bird has put something inside him, a burning thread so bright it could blind him and blot out the rest of the world, a hungry cutting thing that has dragged him through the storm to this place he never would have come on his own.

When the crow led him to the Quarter, he'd stood for a while across the street from the apartment, silently watching the bedroom window through the rain. He wondered at the dim flickering light visible through the lace curtains, at who might live there now that he was dead. Then the bird leaped into the air from its perch on the lamp post and the wire coiled inside Jared pulled taut again, and he followed the black wings.

Downstairs the security door was standing open, so that anyone might walk in off the street, any crackhead with a gun, or thief, or killer. He'd pulled it shut behind him and the iron bars clanged hard and hollow like the door to a prison cell.

And now he stands in the doorway of the bedroom where Benny died, and Lucrece is on her knees in front of him. The crow is watching him from the bed. He feels the wire in his soul slacken and he swallows, still tastes the chemicals, still tastes stale death like a hangover, an aftertaste like old vomit and alcohol and cigarettes.

"Why?" he says. The voice seems to come from somewhere nearby, but not really from his throat or his tongue. Jared can think of nothing else worth asking, nothing else that could possibly matter except that one word, "Why?" and so he says it again.

Lucrece seems incapable of answering him, stares unbelieving and speechless. She looks so much like Benny it hurts to see her there, Benny's impossible, identical female twin. Jared feels as if he's falling, holds on to the door frame for some support, but there's nothing to combat the vertigo sucking at his bare feet. The apartment, this fucking room, kept like an altar because she's too weak to let go. The bird seems to smile, and he wishes his hands were around its neck.

"Why,
Lucrece?" he says in a mean growl that he can feel as well as hear. Jared closes his eyes, presses his forehead hard against the wall. He marvels that he feels the pressure of the hard wood against his brow. "What have you done to me?"

"Jared," she says again, repeats his name like something holy. When he opens his eyes, she's rising very slowly to her feet, moving as slowly as a dancer underwater.

She extends one hand tentatively toward him and he feels his knees begin to buckle, so he grips the wall more tightly.

"You should have left me
dead,"
he moans, the rage rising from his guts like puke, rage almost smothering his words. He slams his head into the door frame and Lucrece screams.

"You should have left me dead. I
am
dead and you should have left me dead." "Jared, I didn't
do
this," she says. He knows all her courage comes from the fear

that he might hurt himself again, might damage her precious voodoo prize from the grave, so he smacks his face against the wall. Something cracks and he leaves a dark smear of blood on the white paint.

"Yes,
you did!
You and your fucking magic games, Lucrece... you sent that fucking bird to dig me up."

"Jesus,
no,
I swear..." She's coming toward him as if her fear doesn't matter, as if there's simply no alternative left for her. Jared almost feels sorry for her, almost ashamed, if there was any way for him to reach those feelings through the suffocating anger. The candlelight glints off the tears running down her cheeks, off her bright, wet eyes. Then he is falling, finally, but he falls very, very slowly. Sinking, so that by the time she crosses the room, he's huddled with his broken nose squashed against the wall, tasting his own blood.

"God, Jared." Lucrece puts her arms around him, pulls him close to her. He can smell her, tea rose and spice, her clean dress, her sweat, her fear crackling around him like an electric current. She holds him very tightly and when she speaks her voice

sounds as weak as an old and dying woman's.

"I've
never
lied to you, Jared. You
know
I've never fucking lied to you..."

"But why, Lucrece? Jesus Christ,
why?"
Then there's a sudden, stabbing pain between his eyes, a raw and grating sound, and the flesh on Jared's face feels more than alive. It has begun to move and shift, and he thinks of maggots first, that maybe his skull's full of maggots where his brain used to be, and now they're eating their way out through his face. There's an audible
pop
as skin and bone and cartilage writhe. He sees that Lucrece has covered her mouth with one hand.

"Oh, Jared," she whispers, her voice swollen with terror and awe. He reaches up, expecting to find a thousand tiny larval bodies spilling from his nostrils, a cold gush of rancid fluid. Instead there's only his nose, his perfect, unbroken nose. Not even a drop of blood, and Jared stares at his fingertips as if they've betrayed him too, as if this is just another lie.

"What's happening?" she asks, her voice as brittle and jagged as a broken light bulb. He can only answer by pushing her away, shoving her so hard she loses her balance and sprawls over backward as he fights his way back to the solid, incontestable wall.

The crow is still watching him from the bed. Jared imagines that he can
see
its hold on him, the shining wire running from its livid breast to his heart, strung like fishing line, the hook buried so deeply inside him he can never dig it out.

"You,
you black motherfucker!" he screams. The bird blinks at him.
"You
did this, didn't you?" Jared's hands grab frantically at empty air, grappling for a link as intangible and undeniable as memory. "Let me
go!"
he screams, struggling to his feet. "Send me back where I belong!"

The crow only caws once, an annoyed, impatient sound, and hops a few inches farther out of his reach.

"Jared, please, stop." Lucrece is reaching for his ankles, sobbing as he kicks her unwelcome hands away. "Can't you
hear
what it's telling you? For God's sake, stop and
listen
to it, Jared."

But something inside him has burst, something ripe and festering, and the dark, acidic fury is out before he knows it's found a way. It pours from him in a wild and mindless flood and he tears a picture from the wall, only dimly aware of what he's holding, and hurls it at the black bird. The frame crashes against the footboard and explodes in a shower of glass and splinters.

Now he is staring into Benny's eyes, at the face in the ruined black-and-white photograph staring back at him. The shot that was printed in the
Voice,
Benny with his hands bound behind his back, out of sight, and the softest hint of a snarl on his lips. The figure against a shadowy backdrop, blazing wings stretched wide behind him, stark projected wings that seem to grow from Benny's bare shoulders. Jared named the photograph
The Raven,
and Benny complained how obvious that was, and that it was a very dumb joke.

"Oh." His voice is just another bit of flotsam thrown out in the scalding cascade. "Oh, fuck you."

"Please,"
Lucrece says, begging now. Begging him to please stop as he seizes the Tiffany torchere by the door and throws it like a spear made of bronze and

stained glass, driving it through the center of the photograph. And he smiles for the

crow now, a vicious razor smile so wide he thinks it might split his head in half, will surely slice open the corners of his mouth. The bird squawks and retreats to the safety of the headboard.

"You think that's fanny? Huh, you think that's fucking funny?"

Then Lucrece is standing in front of him, putting herself between him and the crow, and his anger switches focus in the space between heartbeats.

"Get out of my way, bitch."

"No," she says, her voice low and firm and sounding male now, the way it sounded when Jared first met her and Benny at a gallery opening uptown. "No, I won't.

Whatever's happening here is happening for a
reason,
Jared."

"No,
Lucas"
he says, all the emphasis he can find loaded on top of that discarded name, such a simple, easy weapon lying there conveniently. Lucrece flinches but doesn't move. "It's just a fucking
joke.
Just a goddamned sick joke on all of us, by a sick-ass, twisted universe. Don't you get it,
Lucas?"

"You know it's not," she says, glaring, and the heat gathering behind her eyes is almost a match for his anger.

"Jesus, you never did have a sense of humor." Jared turns away from her and rips another of his photographs from the wall, smashes it against the floor. The glass and steel cut his hands and they heal immediately, like flesh in a time-lapse film. He turns around again slowly, raising his palms so that she can see the gashes sealing themselves closed. So that he can see the look on her face.

"Then please, darling, by all means let me refresh your memory." Jared moves so fast he knows Lucrece doesn't see it coming, shoves her stumbling back into the bed. He drives words at her like nails, each one sharper and harder than the last, as if his voice alone could crucify.

"'But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only... that
one word,
as if his soul in that one word did outpour. Nothing
further
then he uttered; not a
feather
then he fluttered-'"

Lucrece slaps him, the sound of her palm loud against his cheek, and Jared pauses in his recitation long enough to laugh at her, long enough to savor the stinging sensation her hand has left behind.

"Leave me alone," she growls. Jared slaps her back, hits her hard and she trips over the lamp and falls onto the bed. And he remembers now how good the violence can feel, the cleaning release, and he leans low over her like a movie vampire.

"Till I scarcely more than
muttered:
Other friends have flown before-'"

Lucrece drives her knee into his crotch and uses her other foot to push him off of

her.

"I said to
leave me alone,
you son of a bitch!"

Jared releases her, falls in a heap at the foot of the bed, crumples next to what's

left of the lamp and
The Raven.
Lucrece rolls off the bed, breathless, expecting another attack and ready for it this time. But Jared doesn't move, just stares blankly at the photograph, at the torn ghost of Benny still trapped inside the remains of the frame.

The crow silently watches them both from its perch on the headboard.

"I didn't kill Benny," Jared says, speaking to Lucrece or to no one at all, his anger spent for the moment. The sound of his voice makes her shiver despite the adrenaline hammering through her veins, such a flat and hollow sound, like someone speaking from the bottom of a deep, dry well.