Forty-nine
Lazarus understood nothing of what was happening. It
had been enough that Evie had survived the night, that he had resisted the
evil feeding on his soul. When the bomb went off on the hill and the
light and the thunder raged, nothing mattered to him more than escaping
with Evie before she was taken away from him by King, or by Abraham.
Nobody was looking when he tugged at Evie’s hand and led her away into the
storming night.
He hurried her through the burning ruins of Silver
Ridge. The emotional chaos tearing at him unraveled the years of his
life. By the time he reached the house, it was as he remembered it from
years gone by. He snuck in the back way so that Ma and Zeke wouldn't
see them and crawled into the bed he and Evie had shared as children.
He clung to her as they had as
children, his head swimming with fatigue and
confusion. Guilt sullied the illusion of innocence he tried to foster
about his relationship with Evie, bit it was far too late to pretend. He had
overstepped himself, destroyed Evie's trust in him, and they had become as
strangers to one another.
Memory replayed itself in the
here and now. He held Evie protectively as Zeke beat their mother in the kitchen in
another of his drunken rages. It could have been any one night of
hundreds. Evie trembled, crying out in renewed terror when Abraham joined
the ruckus. Pa always beat Abe the worst for interfering, and in his
humiliation, Lazarus knew that he would be beaten behind the schoolyard by
both Abe and Noah in retaliation for not having the courage to help Abe.
The two of them together could have defeated Zeke, except that Zeke's
meager pay at the die-casting plant fed the family and held it together.
Those miserable years of his life
had been among his
best despite Zeke's drunken episodes. That had been before puberty, before the physical changes made him
hungry to do more than just hold onto her warm little body in the dark.
Evie, too, matured, and the night came when she suffered her first
period. His hand had come away bloody from that part of her body, and
Lazarus thought he had injured her by his rough groping in the dark. Later had come the night he had tried sex for the
first time. Evie had been forewarned of the danger of pregnancy by her
teachers at school, and she had fought him in a frenzy of panic. Abe and
Zeke had come crashing through the door before it was over and had had
sent him spinning through the dark to slam against the corner of Evie’s
dresser. He had broken three ribs that night to further sully the
experience.
Even so, he could have made things right with her.
It would have taken no more than a tender word of apology. They had all
felt pity for the merciless beaten he had taken, but Lazarus burdened
himself with festering guilt for having hurt Evie, and then even worse
guilt for not having helped defend his mother when she sickened and died
in the space of a single weak. It hadn't been his fault, but guilt
all too readily turned to anger, and in Abe's presence, anger was forced
to manifest itself as sullen resentment eating away at his soul.
The commotion in the kitchen faded away when Lazarus
recognized it as a memory from the past. The past was gone and dead. Ma
and Pa were dead. And Noah. And maybe even Abraham by now. Lazarus’ awareness of his personal existence narrowed
to the sensation of Evie’s body in his arms. Evie was still alive. And
her body was the body of a woman again.
There had only been two women in his life,
Evie, his sister, and Ellen, Evie's best friend as a young teenager. Both had
enraged him to blind violence, an intensity of violence that had almost
cost Evie her life. Ellen hadn't been so fortunate. Ellen had spurned his clumsy advances.
She had laughed at him. Lazarus remembered that he had killed Ellen,
a memory he had largely managed to suppress.
Maybe Evie had sensed the terrible change in him after that incident. Ellen’s death had been
an accident for the most part, but it reinforced Evie’s fear of him on a
deep level.
And Ella May, too, had died in his arms.
How could he have committed a betrayal of that magnitude? Abe had
fed and cared for him forever, for longer even than his parents. The depth
of his guilt and the depth of his twisted lust carried him far beyond any hope of
redemption.
A new reality began to take form around him, a
synthesis of old and new. Evie began to struggle beneath him as Ellen had
done. The wrestled as they had as
children, but her fear blossomed in direct proportion to his burgeoning passion.
“Lazarus, no!”
“Evie, please! I love you!”
He whipped out the hunting knife as he had done once
before with Ellen. Chromed metal flashed in the dim light seeping through
the door from the hall. Evie gasped as the edge fell across her throat
and creased her skin. “Shut up!” he snarled. “Don’t make me hurt you!”
Guilt was acid searing his gut. He wanted to see the
blood again. It was part of the appeasement of the anger and the lust. But Evie? What would the guilt of hurting Evie be like? He
knew the answer. It would be more terrible than any man could hope to
endure.
The experience of having Evie’s life balanced upon
the edge of his hunting knife was like standing on a cliff and being drawn
forward by lethal fascination. He felt himself leaning forward, just as
once before he had lost his balance and watched the blade sink itself into
helpless flesh. Evie’s body grew rigid beneath him. Her eyes widened
in horror. It became Ellen’s face, and then Evie’s again as the first
blood seeped from along the edge of the knife.
“No!”
He jerked the blade back. The reflex was instinctive
and violent, a spasm that sent the point of the blade turning back toward
him, slicing deep into his own solar plexus. It stopped his heart in an
instant, but it had to be. Deeper in his psyche than his consciousness
had ever explored, he had meant it to be just like this.
He had never meant to hurt Evie. He had never meant
to hurt anyone. Only his own death would appease the guilt that had eaten
his soul hollow like a virulent cancer. He let himself go, and his mind
came apart at the seams and became a meaningless kaleidoscope of jumbled
memory and emotion.
A short distance away in a direction Lazarus didn’t
know to look, King witnessed Lazarus’ act of self-destruction with dull
surprise. Regardless of the depth of Lazarus’ corruption, his violent
nature and sick hungers, King had suspected all along that Lazarus Darker
would never betray his little sister and therefore would be of no real use
to him.
Love could do that to the most promising of men.
