Shifters (41 page)

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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: Shifters
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“Well would you come in! The noodles’ll get mushy!”
Locke dropped his tote, slowly entered the transformed apartment, dry-mouthed, eyes bolted open. Somehow, now, he knew that since Clare had dropped to part-time at the law firm, she’d taken to experimenting quite successfully in the kitchen.
“You didn’t forget the flank steak, did you?”
“Oh, damn, honey, I’m sorry, I forgot,” Locke mouthed, knowing nothing of any flank steak.
“I’ve got the skewers soaked in coconut milk and the grill all fired up. I can’t make satay without the meat.”
Locke walked into the living room. With some difficulty, Clare raised herself from a recliner, her hair longer but just as silken in its shine, her face bright, a beacon of smiles and beauty. A beacon…for
him.
Locke stood stunned.
“You are such an airhead sometimes,” she joked. She walked up, dressed in a simple blush-yellow housedress, and kissed him.
My God…
It was the most honest kiss in the world, just a peck on the cheek, like the casual kiss of a happy wife.
Wife…
“You should walk over to the Chevron, ask them to check your head for leaks,” she said, then issued the tiniest of laughs. “But don’t worry, I think I still have some prawns in the fridge.”
She sauntered away, giggling at his forgetfulness. Yet as she journeyed to the kitchen she did so in awkward steps, and that’s when Locke took full notice—
“Michael was kicking up a storm today, I’ll have you know. We might have a star soccer player on our hands—”
—that Clare looked about seven or eight months pregnant.
Locke could only stand there in sweet shock. His eyes roved a varnished high-boy, its top set with framed photos. Some Locke recognized but the one in the center beamed at him: himself proudly decked out in a tux, standing next to Clare in a white bridal gown on their wedding day.
This is it, all I’ve ever wanted,
he realized. Not a trick, not an
appearance.
This was his life. This was what he wanted more than anything in the world, and now it was his.
He remembered Lethe’s words when they stood on the top of the sky.
It’s your pure heart, Locke, which has led you to me. What else has it led you to?
Love of another kind, an endless love? Something beyond the limits of the physical world?
The angel?
he thought.
Locke stared at the surmise as though it were a solid object, an arcane piece of art to be scrutinized and interpreted, a crux to be solved.
Good and evil, black and white. The only thing I want is what I now know I can never have.
So I must destroy it.
Locke stared and stared.
Bring me the shark—
“Aren’t I a dutiful wife? Slaving over a hot hibachi while my husband makes the world a wiser place?” Clare had returned from the kitchen, now bearing a plate with several skewers of seasoned shrimp. “These only take a minute per side so go wash up, and make it quick!”
“You’re the boss,” Locke said. He watched her move out to the sunny balcony where the small grill gusted heat.
Numbness took him to the bathroom, immaculate now and redone in cheerful trimmings. He turned on the faucet. He washed his hands and when he raised his eyes to the mirror—
Oh for shit’s sake!
His heart nearly burst. In the reflection, standing just behind him, was Byers, now little more than a stand of bones draped with collops of organic decay.
“Don’t turn around, it uses too much juice,” the dead poet’s voice bubbled from his lips. “You know, like I told you last time. It’s this—”
“The energy thing,” Locke recalled.
A hand flayed by advanced decomposition touched Locke’s shoulder; in the mirror he noticed several maggots emerging from their casings.
“I’m not allowed to tell you,” Byers gurgled. “I’m not allowed to spell it out—I’ve
told
 you that already. You’re supposed to be using your brain.”
“What do you expect from a guy who couldn’t even remember to pick up some flank steak on the way home?”
“Stop being an asshole. You want to know why it didn’t work for me?”
“Why
what
 didn’t work for you?”
“I wasn’t honest enough. My search for truth was tainted. This whole thing’s about you, Locke. It’s about
your verity
and how it relates to
them.
 But you have a choice to make, and it’s one you’re going to have to make rather quickly.”
Locke shook his head through a frown. “I’ve already made my choice. Why should I give this up? I’d be out of my mind.”
“Here’s why…”
—images, then, shotgunned into his mind.
—chaos, ataxia, where the only order was
dis
order.
—“Lethe saved her for last…”
—mountains of corpses, yes, literally
mountains.
—millions after millions dying.
—“Lethe saved her for last because he
loved
 her!”
—then millions more, and then—
—“But she could never love him, it’s an impossibility. Yin can’t love yang! The needle will never stick to the magnet, Locke!”
—billions.
—“Without her, he’s got nothing. No place for him in heaven, and none in hell. They were traitors!”
—until nothing remained alive but one man…
—“So now all he can live for is payback. But he can’t do that with
her
 here, so he’s got to kill her, and the only way he can do that is through you—”
—and the sky turned black with clouds of death.
“Did you see it?” Byers asked.
Locke shuddered from the scene, cold sweat trickling as he regained his breath and looked back at Byers’ dead face in the bathroom mirror.
“She can’t face him, it’s too risky. Don’t you understand?” The little that actually remained of Byers’ face seemed to plead in its black-green film. “Would you risk
that?
 With nothing to keep him in check, Lethe could do it. Lethe has that kind of power. He’s using you as bait.”
“Bait for what?”
“Bait for
her,
 you moron!”
Her,
 Locke wondered.
“Why do you think he uses poets and writers and people like that?”
“I don’t know,” Locke spat back.
“Because of what we’re all trying, ultimately, to create.”
“Bullshit,” Locke replied, pointing at the morbid reflection. “I’m only responsible for myself, my wife, and our child.” Then he commenced to jerk around, to shove Byers away—
“Don’t do it, Locke, for God’s sake, don’t turn ar—”
Byers was gone.
“Good riddance,” Locke sniped. “If there’s one thing that pisses me off more than a lousy poet, it’s a lousy
dead
 poet.”
He dried his hands on a soft terry towel, fiddled with his hair for a moment, then walked back out to the enticing aromas of Thai spices.
But that’s not all he walked back out to. He walked back out to his providence, not the jilted rip-off of past misery.
I’m walking back out to the life I deserve, the one I’ve earned.
Clare hurried back in from the grill, aglow in this commonplace domesticity. A happy wife elated to cook dinner for her loving husband. The quick-seared prawns on the skewers wafted still more delectable aromas into the air. Locke smiled at the gift he’d been given, and all he had to do to keep it…was
take
 it.
“And I’m going to,” he whispered.
“Did you say something, honey?” she asked, and set the plate of satay on the already set table.
“Yes,” Locke answered. “I was just saying to myself that I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth for having such a loving, beautiful wife.”
“Oh, loving and beautiful—that’s
all?
”
“And a great cook.”
“That’s more like it.” She placed her hands on his shoulders, urged him to sit. “Now sit yourself down while I get the rice noodles.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “
You
 sit down—you happen to be pregnant with our child. I should be the one hustling back and forth with dinner. But first—”
Locke put his arms around his wife, looked right into her eyes and saw all that beaming love.
Just a simple kiss,
 Lethe had said.
And then it’s all mine,
 Locke realized.
“I love you,” he told her.
“Yeah?” she teased with him. “Show me.”
Just as their lips would meet—
“You were reading my mind, weren’t you,
honey?
”
Clare retracted, her expression pinched up. “Wh-what?”
“Here’s your kiss.”
Locke snatched up a steak knife from the table.
“Richard, what on earth are you—”
Locke didn’t feel much, which surprised him considering how deeply he cut his own throat.
Very
deep. To the bone.
“
Noooooooooooooo!”
she screamed
.
“Noooooooooooooo!”
 Lethe bellowed.
The walls shook from the thunderous sound, old plaster and scabs and muck raining down. Locke collapsed to the enslimed floor, not surprised to find himself back in the malefactor’s self-made manse.
“Fooled you, didn’t I?” Locke gasped through his wet grin.
Lethe assumed his true Pre-Adamic voice, a sound less like spoken words and more like an avalanche of rocks down a mountain precipice.
“God damn you miserable worthless whore’s-son untermensch sheiss-essen scume-fliesch deliere motherfucker facie destiteure cretin dog
fokk!”
“Your mother wears combat boots,” Locke coughed.
And just as his voice had assumed its true nature so did Lethe’s face—hideous in its runnels and grooves, beautiful in its fine lines and broad flawless angles. Part-devil, part-deity, and a tint of something crafted in the image of man.
“You are a piece of shit to be sewn into hell’s fields! God damn you to hell!” the thing shrieked and then vanished.
Then silence.
Even the house had begun to vanish, a sinew and a pale plank at a time, as well it should. Just another of the magician’s props—aided, of course, by the power of belief.

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