The Lazarus Heart (2 page)

But not yet, for here comes the last and worst memory. He's climbing the stairs to their apartment on Ursulines, his and Benny's apartment, and he doesn't want to see but it's already out before there is any hope of denying the acid rush of images. His key wrestling with the stubborn lock, the door swinging open on so much red, red like lipstick and roses and carnations, oh, God just let it be
anything
but what he knows it is. The groceries he's carried from the French Market slipping through his arms, scattering across their foyer that smells like a slaughterhouse. The same smell as the time he did a shoot in a slaughterhouse, the red stench that had stayed in his nostrils for weeks afterward.

"I won't, I won't, I won't," he mutters, a helpless litany to gods he has never believed in. "
I will not see this again."

The coffin bursts, shatters like something made of Elmer's glue and Popsicle sticks, and Jared is falling. A very short fall to the stone floor as hard, as cold and senseless, as the sight of Benny scattered across their bed, his hands and feet still neatly trussed, thoughtful Boy Scout knots joining wrists and ankles that are divided from everything else, from the careless litter of limbs and organs...

"Oh, fuck, oh, fuck me," Jared whispers through ragged sobs and oily tears that drip from his face and pool on the marble floor. "Benjamin," he sighs, and there is more pain in those three syllables than his body could ever hope to contain. The coffin shrapnel raining down around him clatters like brittle bones or jackstraws.

He isn't sure how much time has passed since he opened his eyes, since he began to breathe again. The tiny stained-glass window set high above the mausoleum door has gone from the darkest shades of green and cobalt blue to black, so he knows only that it's night now. Another night in this little city of the dead, and night in the world of living men beyond. Jared sits with his back against the stone wall and stares at Benny's coffin. This is all he has done for all the minutes or hours he hasn't bothered to count. He hasn't been able to bring himself to touch it, the mahogany glinting faintly in the gloom, the brass and rotted spray of flowers on its lid. He doesn't need to touch it to know it's real.

There comes the faint, sharp sound of scratching overhead. Jared looks up, realizes he's been hearing the sound all along, ignoring it the way he has ignored the aching emptiness in his stomach, the dryness in his throat. The way he has ignored everything but Benny's coffin, still sitting undisturbed beside the ruin of splinters and twisted metal that was his own.

Jared closes his eyes again. There are no more tears left in him to cry, only the hurt that rolls over and through him in endless ebony waves, battering him as smooth as the stone at his back. There is only hurt and loss and the bottomless, churning anger.

As he sits listening to the restless sounds above, busy little claws like Morse code or impatiently drumming fingers, Jared begins to comprehend that it is precisely this anger he must embrace now. This anger that will get him up and moving, that might hold some purpose. There can be no response to the loss he has suffered, no sane answer but oblivion, and now that's been stolen from him too. But the rage is a thing beyond him, a thing that wants out, a hungry beast that can be fed and sated.

All these things he hears hidden in the scratching at the roof of the mausoleum. Now he remembers the dream of midnight wings, the dizzying dream of flight, and he rises on legs as stiff as scarecrow sticks. He stands in the dark and listens to his heart, to the faint rumble of traffic on damp streets, and the black bird calls to him.

If the door to the mausoleum was bolted, the crow has seen to that too, and as Jared pushes at the metal he feels the first hint of a physical strength he never knew in life. The tall door swings open as if it is made of plywood, disused hinges squealing loudly for a teeth-gritting instant. Then there is only the gentle sound of the light rain again, gathering on the roofs of the voiceless inhabitants of Lafayette Cemetery.

Jared looks back once, his eyes running over Benny's elegant coffin and the shattered mess where his own lay, before he steps out into the night. He pushes the door shut so he can't see anymore, so that nothing can get in. He lingers there a moment, his face pressed against the cold, wet metal, taking some vague comfort in the steady warmth of the raindrops. Then the bird caws, loud and harsh, and he turns around. The four steps leading up to the mausoleum are decorated with a scatter of votive candles and flowers in various stages of wilt and decay.
Someone still comes here,
he thinks. Lucrece, and maybe others-perhaps the core group of fans he retained after the incident, what the press called the "sicko contingent."

The bird lands on Jared's shoulder, damp feathers pressed against his neck as if there were some shelter there. The night stretches out before him, past the cemetery walls, stretches the way a great sable tomcat would stretch. Something out there is vaster and more confident than this fetid city and its infinite corruptions, perhaps even vaster than his loss.

Jared begins to listen to what the bird has to say.

Sometimes, like tonight, the man in the big house by the river calls himself Jordan. There is a river called Jordan in the Bible, and he likes the names of rivers. Sometimes he calls himself Joseph Lethe, for another river and what it means, and sometimes he's Stanley Hudson. But these are secret names that he never tells anyone-except those few he's chosen. Those he's sure will never be in a position to spread the word, to give away his names carelessly, like telephone numbers on filthy fag-bar rest room walls.

The newspapers do not know his names. To them he is the Bourbon Street Ripper, a flashy moniker earned for the first one the cops found, years and years ago. He is sure that name sells more papers than any of his real ones could. Lies always sell better than the truth. He always reads about what he has done in the papers, but he never saves the things he reads, the official police comments and the wild speculations of illiterate journalists. That, he thinks, would be like taking a trip to Manhattan and buying an I
(heart)
NY T-shirt.

Death is not cheap, despite what the world may believe or how it behaves. It is actually quite expensive; he has been able to finance his research only because his mother left him drilling rights to some land in Texas. Perverse to the end, she'd waited until after the oil bust to die, so there was not an enormous amount of money from the sale of the land. But it is enough. His needs are not great, except where his research is concerned. He will not cheapen death.

From his high window, the man who is Jordan tonight can see the river winding silent and powerful through the stormy night, a fat brown snake sliding between the levees. The most powerful thing in the world, a river like that.

He waits for another flash of lightning and closes the curtains before the thunderclap. There is unfinished work here, and he cannot remember what distracted him. Something at the window or down in the streets, but whatever it might have been, it's gone now and the one he brought home with him is waiting. He doesn't always bring Them home, only the very special ones, the ones who have gone all the way and so deserve more time, more attention. The ones that have the most to teach him about what They are, what abominations They have become.

Like
this
one: stretched out on the shiny steel operating table in the highest room of his house on the river. It watches him as he turns away from the window, watches him with wide eyes that are still very aware. He is always amazed at Their tolerance for physical and psychological pain. Another part of the mystery, another thing that excludes them from humanity and makes Them so dangerous.

But not half so dangerous as he. No, not even one quarter
that
dangerous.

This one, for example. This one with the Louisiana driver's license that claims its name is Marjory Marie West, that has an F recorded for its sex. This one that he's already started upon, but still it watches him, alert, aware, as if waiting for a chance to escape. As if there could ever be such a chance. Even though he sliced out its tongue before the Demerol wore off, cauterizing the slippery stump so it wouldn't bleed to death. Even though the tongue floats in its neat jar of formalin in plain sight. It's still hanging in there, this
thing,
and this is important.

The man runs bloody latex-gloved fingers through his oily black hair, pushes his straggly bangs from his flat blue-gray eyes. He selects a scalpel from his tray of

surgical instruments.

Some of the instruments he has ordered from medical supply houses or bought as sets in antique stores. Others he has made himself, the ones he couldn't buy because no one's ever needed them before.

On the table, it watches him, this sexless creature that would hide itself in the world of men and women, the black and white world of opposites and opposition. He knows it is not merely evil, knows that's the sort of shit a crazy man might think.

There is no evil. Rather, it is
alien,
viral, and he must be careful in his campaign if he is to succeed. If the world is to be free of these monstrosities once and for all.

The man who is Jordan tonight checks the restraints, the strong leather straps and steel buckles. Soon he will pull back the sheet, all that hides its impossible body now that he has removed the deceiving clothes. And it watches him, and the thunder growls its useless protest from somewhere above the house beside the river.

Just because the man keeps no scrapbook doesn't mean he has no memories. A scrapbook would be tawdry, tasteless. There is nothing tasteless about the records he

keeps in his head.

It's been seven years, seven long red years like a bolt of scarlet lace, since the sweltering August morning when his work first made headlines. That one had been a cross-dressing hustler known on the streets of the Quarter only as Josie, barely nineteen, though "she" could have passed for twenty-five Most of what he left was found stuffed into three garbage cans outside a tourist bar on Bourbon Street
Most
of what he left, because it had taken a lot of blood to cover the walls of the filthy alley next to the bar.

There had been no witnesses, but plenty of talk from the two garbagemen who found the dented cans crammed full of meat, and photographs of the parts he left hanging from a fire escape like strings of Christmas popcorn.

That wasn't his first, of course. Only the first that he'd wanted Them to see. "There comes a point," he wrote in one of his yellow legal pads, "when you must

show a little of yourself to the enemy in exchange for Their fear. Fear must surely weaken Them."

So four days later he left a second body in a hotel on Rampart, a fat transvestite named Petey, plump discard floating facedown in a tub of soapy water and blood, naked except for his precious lingerie and high heels. A hotel maid found this one. When the police were finally done with her, the man had read, she moved back to Chicago.

Petey's real name turned out to be Ralph Larkin, a happily married father of three who ran a hard-ware store in Metairie and was a long-standing member of a local chapter of the transvestite "sorority," Tri Ess.

The man can still remember how Petey begged for his life, how he swore he didn't know anything about the Invasion or the Cabal or even the Gay Mafia, but They all lie. Even the pretenders, the hetero pricks hiding hard-ons inside satin panties, the ones who only want to dress up in ladies' clothing and know they'll never be fit to cross over. Jordan suspects that They are all controlled by implants, nanites hidden in the sinus cavities or the rectums, miniscule robots that would look like BBs or bird shot, if he could ever find one. Jordan suspects that the nanites are programmed to teleport out of any body that is captured or killed. . . or perhaps they simply dissolve, leaving no trace.

It's almost midnight now, and the transsexual on the operating table has lost consciousness again. He has broken ammonia ampules beneath its nose three times already, shocking it back into the world, but this time it may be slipping away for good. He sighs, lays aside the speculum and the long probe with fishhooks soldered along its length, and looks down at his notes. A dark smear of gore mars the close-ruled yellow paper, making it hard to read what he's written; Jordan knows he'll have to copy the page over again later.

Its chest abruptly expands, sucking air, revealing the faint crescent scars beneath the breasts.

The scars no one is supposed to see. But
he
sees everything. When it exhales, there's an uneven, wet sound from its chest. Its eyes flutter weakly open to gaze at him one last time. This one is very, very pretty, but he quickly and expertly pushes aside anything like sympathy. He's done enough experiments to know that the compassion and regret he sometimes feels are just chemically induced reactions, triggered by genetically engineered pheromones excreted in their sweat and tears.

"It's not too late," he says, although that's a lie, of course. It has been too late for this one since he bought it a drink just after sundown. "It's not too late to come clean. I can be merciful."

And then it's gone and Jordan is alone in the room, and there's nothing for him to think about but the smell of its bladder emptying on the tabletop.

His memories are as clear as the words he puts on paper.

Sometimes, when the answers he seeks seem forever out of reach, the memories are his only comfort. Reassuring memories of his resolve and his boldness and the harvests of his dedication.

Hardly a week after the fat man in the tub, Joseph Lethe picked up one of the Quarter gutter-punks, a baby queen he lured into his car with a vial of crystal meth and drove all the way to Arabi before he pulled over and put a bullet in the kid's head. He never asked for a name and the boy never volunteered one. The boy was wearing tacky thrift store drag, '70s retro polyester and a black wig that fell off when Joseph pulled the body from the passenger seat. He chained the corpse to the rear bumper of his car and drove unpaved back roads through the bayou until nearly dawn, the lonely places between cypress and tall whispering grass, no one to see but the birds and alligators.