“Get started anywhere,” she tells you. Her voice is low and, for a woman, almost gravelly; not unerotic. “That’s the one thing about this place, the work’s never done.”
“I … I don’t understand.” At least you’re being honest. You think.
And she laughs, fisting her arm another inch into the man. “I remember when I was like you.”
“How? Like how?”
She grins again. “Asleep.” Then she tilts her head back, and you know her eyes must be closed in something like ecstasy. Her mouth curls into a sneer, lips skinning back, and she’s gritting her teeth, little gray pegs that rim her jaws.
“So few innocents,” she says, “and so much time.”
The man cries out, suddenly and sharply, and with the thick sound of membranes giving way she yanks her arm out. It glistens, and in her hand is clutched what may be his heart. It’s so hard to tell, though — you think it should be red, but mostly it’s clotted black, as if riddled with disease.
“Thank you,” he breathes, head lolling back, and at last his leg drops prone, exhausted, spent. “No more, please, no more…”
She rests the organ on the sparse gray mat of hair sprouting across his sunken chest. “You know better than that. With men like you, there’s always more.”
She has her arm back in up to the elbow before you can turn to run, run from the building into the welcoming night, where you have no name, no longer even a face.
*
In the months since she died you’ve frequently found yourself driving the Landry Expressway, even when you have no good reason for being here. You drive it one direction, turn around at an exit chosen at random, drive it the other. Giving in to a need to linger where your one true love met her end, you suppose. Or perhaps your need is baser still — tempting fate, catch me if you can.
Red-eyed, red-faced, you burn gas this night as if there’s no tomorrow. And maybe there isn’t. The world has surprised you, has shown you things that a year ago might not have even been allowed through the filters that all brains keep in place to strain out whatever can’t be tolerated. Now, though, you’ve been prepared, and it will take so much more to surprise you.
Traffic has been thinned by the lateness of the hour, but here you are in white line fever. When you see something hurtling at you from above you don’t even swerve. The windshield implodes, a brief storm of pebbles of safety glass showering your bed, your home, the final sanctuary left to you. The brick ricochets off the passenger seat, slamming into the ceiling, then the dashboard. Surprisingly, you feel little fear, knowing that you can’t be killed. Not here, not like this. You’ve come too far. Something has invested much cruel effort on your behalf.
You’re standing on the brakes. The car spins out across two lanes of screaming traffic, and then you’ve broadsided a chainlink fence that shears apart to let you through. You’ve barely come to rest on the other side before your equilibrium is restored and you scramble from the car. Others have slowed to look, to marvel, as you emerge as unscathed as anyone can expect. Dusting yourself clean of glass, seizing the brick that was meant for your head…
And you run.
Backtracking, running parallel to the expressway, you pound toward the ramp that lets drivers on from the overpass. The city, the night itself, has turned red in your eyes, and you wonder what they’re saying about you in those cars that swerve to miss you on the ramp. They notice you now, don’t they, these people who once were you.
You crest the rise, stand for a moment beneath a sky full of gathering clouds. Down below you can see the fresh loops of rubber left by your tires, and on the other side of the overpass you see them, two figures running from the scene of the crime, and now you obey the purest and most instinctive impulse you’ve ever felt.
Whatever has filled you, they’re no match for it. Run as they might from the expressway, deeper into mazes of brick and asphalt and corrosion, you gain on them in a matter of minutes, until they are close enough to bring down like deer before a wolf. You hurl the brick while yet on the run, and it arcs past the shoulder of the nearer fugitive, toward the leader, thudding solidly into the back of his head. Was there ever any doubt? Something guided it there, as surely as it was first guided through your windshield.
They go down in the street, one tripping on the other. The one you’ve struck doesn’t get up. The other scrambles for his feet but you’re there, upon him. He rolls over to face you, eyes feral in their terror. He can’t be more than fourteen years old.
He thrashes beneath you with skinny stick limbs and unkempt hair, and you retrieve the brick. In your grip it feels light as a dream, heavy as an anchor. With the first downswing you crunch the boy’s eye socket. The second unhinges his jaw. The third staves in his forehead and stops him from moving after one final, frenzied convulsion. He makes a much easier target, until there’s no more point left to hitting him.
The other one is trying to crawl away by the time you finish, legs dragging weakly behind him, knees too weak to support his weight. The back of his jacket is already slick with the cascade of blood from where the brick first connected. You wonder who his parents are, how they let him end up like this, with no more regard for other people than bugs on which they might drop stones out of boredom. You wonder if they’ll miss him. Or instead shed a few token tears, then go on their way, creating other monsters, other demons who haunt these lands, these canyons, these buttes.
Demons. Yes, that’s it. That’s what he must be. You know what they look like now. You know what makes them. And most of all you know why they’re needed.
He doesn’t give you any trouble at all.
And soon after you stumble away from them, the rain begins, disgorged by swollen black clouds, falling to rinse you clean, and to wash away the worst of the slick you’ve left in the street for rats and other eaters of the dead.
*
There’s no longer any need to scan the windows for a glimpse of she who has been luring you for longer than you even realize. You know just where you’ll find her, where she’s waiting, and if you don’t quite yet understand why, you’ve learned that everything comes to you in time.
What a life you’ve led. What a life you’ve been liberated from. What a life into which you’ve been sent, not like a lamb to the slaughter, but the one who holds the knife.
The universe, after all, creates what it needs.
The immense building stands as solid as a fortress, its stone walls gleaming black in the rain. Her window is vacant, but that’s all right. You have faith, and so must she. Your only welcome comes from the gargoyles, watching as you near this one place in the world where you belong.
Does the rain fall harder just before you enter? Maybe. Maybe it does.
At the last moment you cross a weed-choked lawn to the corner of the building, where three floors up a squatting gargoyle serves as a downspout. From its mouth vomits a continual deluge of water, and for a timeless respite you stand beneath the flow, to let it wash clean the last of whatever clings to you from what you used to be. There you stay, until the final tears are rinsed from your eyes, and you can no longer grieve for a lost love whose only purpose was to teach you those things that truly begin tonight.
And then you turn for the door, to join the fellowship of gargoyles, to confront your reason for being, to assume your place in the scheme of all things in heaven and on earth.
A Loaf Of Bread, A Jug Of Wine
The only great figures among men are the poet,
the priest and the soldier.
The man who sings, the man who sacrifices and
the one who is sacrificed.
All the rest are good for the whip.
— Baudelaire