“Eddy?”
They rushed towards her voice with him in tow.
“Please…” he whispered.
(you want answers we need something in return…)
A knife was pressed into his hand.
Cassandra was coming up the steps now.
She’d heard something from above—voices, whispers—she wasn’t sure. It could’ve just been Eddy talking to himself again. Yet, she didn’t think so. And in this awful place, she would take no chances. Her head was bright, her nerves at peace. Heroin could do such things for you. She felt she could take on the world and best it without so much as panting.
“Eddy? What are you doing up there?”
No answer. Did he need help?
“You all right?” She was standing at the top of the steps now.
Eddy was coming at her, rushing at her like the wind, enveloped in a mist of starving blackness. And he was coming for her… with a knife.
She tried to cry out, but the blade had already opened her throat and she went down, tumbling down the steps and landing in a bleeding heap. She stared up at the monster coming for her with eyes mirroring confusion and no little amusement.
I’m cut, she found herself thinking. I’m fucking cut.
Her head was so fogged with narcotic delights, she couldn’t be sure of anything. Maybe it was a game. If it hadn’t been for the spreading wetness at her throat, she might have believed it.
“I’m sorry,” Eddy said. “I’m so sorry.”
Cassandra’s lips opened and closed, but no words came forth, only blood.
Eddy took the knife up again and let it dance over her flesh, watching her secrets, red and ripe, spill out over the floor in a wash of death until he was drenched in her wine. He grew hard at the feel and the smell of the blood. His heart was hammering, his breath gasping from his lungs.
He let out a scream.
“They made me do it,” he explained to her staring face as the shadows soared and screamed about him. “They wouldn’t tell me anymore without sacrifice. You understand that, don’t you, my love? They’re so hungry, my God, they’re ravenous. But with blood… oh, then they’ll talk, then they’ll tell me…”
Cassandra didn’t seem to mind.
Her lips were silent, her thoughts quiet, her pain and addiction finally at an end. She lay there, wrapped in a cloak of red dreams, cooling slowly to nothingness.
Eddy kissed her wet lips and ran his fingers over her like he used to as the red milk of death pooled around them. He eased her into stillness and soothed her life away as she’d done so many times with his worries and frustrations. Even in death, he supposed, she understood, she knew and still loved him the way only real lovers can. Never really dying, never really fading away.
But there was no more time for talk or sweet nothings or tender postmortem embraces. The shadows were starving. They demanded to be fed.
In a frenzy, Eddy gave them what they desired, hacking at Cassandra and bathing in her blood, swimming in it like a hungry fluke, orchestrating her mutilation like a conductor with a red dripping baton until the cold meat concerto was complete, until he was collapsed on top of her, welded to her with drying blood and entrails.
The shadows wove around him, heavy, drunken, and sated. There were no more screams or laughter or demands. They were bloated now, their death-bellies full of the seed of life.
Eddy lay over the violated corpse of Cassandra, muttering prayers and remembering something that he was certain was not his own memory: a clown. A clown? I never knew any clowns. But the memory persisted. A clown that came into his room at night, an obscene thing in yellow silk pantaloons and an orange ruffled shirt with pom-poms down the front. The clown’s face was painted white, the eyes black holes, the mouth thick-lipped and smeared with red lipstick. It danced around the room before it covered him with its weight as he was doing to Cassandra now. The clown’s breath stank of whiskey. Its fingers were cold. It smelled of sweat and filth and pig semen.
No, no, no, no, not that—
He shook it from his head. It seemed real, yet it was not his memory. And if it wasn’t his that meant it belonged to—
Don’t think it. Don’t ever think it.
He sighed. The memory was gone.
The shadows. They would help him find his father, they would lead him there, they would take him home like a lost child by the hand. Together they would travel those same dark and enlightening roads as his father had and ultimately, they would be with him, in soul, spirit, and flesh.
“So tell me,” he urged them later when Cassandra’s corpse was cool, drying, and sticky. “Tell me what I need to know.”
The shadows encircled him sluggishly, ready to tell tales and point the way. They began to speak and Eddy Zero, the boy who’d sprang from the loins of a deranged and delusive man, listened and learned. They told stories in voices like the wind, the stars.
When they were finished, the stink of old blood permeating the air, they fell back and began to dream.
And out on the street before that desolate and disturbed house, a wicked and depraved laughter fell like rain on the walks.
“AHA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA—”
And whether it came from Eddy or the crumbling pipes of that sullen house, it was anyone’s guess.
It had to start somewhere, so it started here. Like winter starts with a few flakes of snow or spring with a few drops of rain, it began. Eddy knew the way, he knew the dark byways he would travel, through what gutters and boneyards and theaters of suffering his search would take him.
And he went willingly.
MEMOIRS OF THE TEMPLAR SOCIETY (1)
In the days of his youth, James Stadtler sought out the underbelly of society. He kept the company of criminals, perverts, fetishists, and prostitutes. All those who had sampled life’s darker pleasures and lived to tell the tale. It was in this way he met Zero and Grimes. They were both older than he—professional men, it turned out—and equally as jaded by the experiences life and ready cash had brought them. There had to be a better way.
And together, they would find it.
He met them quite by accident in a Chinatown brothel. They had just finished with their evening’s amusement and were hanging about the bar, drinking and talking in low tones. Stadtler paid them little mind. He was waiting for his oriental flower and wouldn’t leave until he sampled her wares.
They sidled up next to him and sat quietly for a time.
“Haven’t seen you here before,” one said. “Name’s Grimes. This is my associate Dr. Zero.”
“What of it?” Stadtler said.
“And you’re…”
“Stadtler. Jim Stadtler. Again, what of it?”
The two men looked to each other and laughed. Grimes was short and stout, balding with twinkling blue eyes. Zero was tall and thin, dark-eyed, with an immaculately trimmed beard. They both wore business suits and overcoats.