Nightjack (31 page)

Faust is the torcher. You’re the one who gave him the scar on his forehead. Murder him.

“For setting fires,” Faust said. The scar was as red as the womb. “And you, you son of a bitch, I remember now, you, you stabbed me in the head!” he shouted, and hurled the burning lamp oil at Pace’s face.

Pace managed to duck and get the knife out of its sheath and up in front of his face to take most of the flaming oil. The rest splashed across the back of his hand and swept against his chest, instantly burning through his shirt and chewing into his flesh, scorching the thick scar tissue.

He cried out in agony and threw himself down on the cave floor, tearing at his blazing shirt, rolling.

There are no coincidences. The world will only have so much to do with you before it starts repeating incidents. We live to repeat the past. We wouldn’t know how to move forward even if we could.

Always on fire, always rolling.

His mind rang with Jane’s name though he didn’t call out for her. The skin of his face tightened and dust circled him, sweeping along as he thrashed.

He remembered the night of the restaurant fire, how Pacella’s hand shot forward and brushed against some silverware lying in the busser tub.

His hand was open and a steak knife leapt into it. The mad rush of gratitude for the blade and
to
the blade.

Pacella went after the torcher. There had been a great sense of speed and capability as he was ferried by the crowd in his head, people appearing around him and pressing him onward. Pacella had lunged and the guy sidestepped but not fast enough. Pacella had felt the blade scrape bone.

He had stabbed Faust in the forehead.

You went mad by fractions. The scream was still there rebounding inside his skull. It had been joined by many other voices also shrieking.

You went mad by trying to decide your next step.

You went mad with the wonder of Why.

Pace opened his mouth and a hundred tongues fell out. Disgusted, Faust drew away from them as they crept across the cave floor toward him.

The fire was out but Pace’s skin still hissed and bubbled, the centuries-old dust clinging to his wounds, the popping blisters turning it to mud. Pace dove at Faust’s legs and knocked him down.

He dragged himself forward until he had the knife at Faust’s throat.

Jack moaned through clenched teeth, wanting to feast on cooked entrails. Frying them in the same way the Greeks did before their oracles, to learn their fortunes.

Pace’s mouth watered so badly that he had to spit several times before he could speak.

Faust screamed, “Just do it. Kill me.”

“No...I want answers.”

“That’s not how Jack plays!”

“I’m not Jack. Tell me...what happened.”

“I don’t remember! Finish me. I can’t take it anymore!”

“I told you, nobody’s going to die.”

“You...you son of a bitch, you stuck a knife in my head! I killed your wife!”

Pace gasped, fighting back the pain. His flesh sang in agony. “That was Jane Pacella. She wasn’t my wife.” Pace gritted his teeth. These would be his scars, and nobody else’s. Nobody else’s, until the next guy got them. “Talk to me.”

Faust swallowed and gagged as the stink of Pace’s steaming flesh streamed into his nostrils. The torcher inside him came out and spoke quickly in a monotone, as if reciting. The words had gone around inside his head for so long, trapped there circling, that he knew them by rote.

“The consigliere got in touch with me about burning down
Emilio’s
. It was easy money, a simple job. Restaurants always are. The fire marshals can’t bitch about arson if you blow the gas main. The trick is to not go up with the place. The building was supposed to be empty. But there were still people there, in the back, scurrying like rats in the kitchen. I should’ve walked away from the job, but it was already inside me...the need to let the fire out, get it? The flames had already been stoked. I had to go through with it. I didn’t even carry a gun. I just walked in and socked the help still in the kitchen. I’d never even
punched
anybody before. I knocked them down and tied them up. It was the fire’s fault. It’s always the fire’s fault.”

The muscles in Faust’s face twitched but the voice was calm and level and barren. “I never killed anybody before in my life. Never even thought of it. I’m not like that. They don’t pay extra for that. But they were there...these people, these two Mexicans and the Greek girl, they were right there on the floor, and the more the fire spread, the more I wanted to watch somebody burn. I spritzed the accelerant around, watched them jump around. I was going to start tossing the kitchen staff in when your wife ran out covered in flame. It was beautiful.”

“Faust—”

“Do it, Will. Do it with the knife or I swear I’ll burn you again. I won’t stop until I burn you alive. Our father who art inferno!”

Pace eased his own forehead against Faust’s.

The scar pulsed, excited, and beat to its own rhythm. Pace felt all the struggling aspects, facets, beings, and beliefs in there, so much like his own. Faust’s mouth opened and he let out a keening wail. His fists came up and he beat weakly at Pace’s stomach and chest, the scorched blackened skin coming off in strips, until finally Pace moved his mouth over Faust’s scar and licked at it, savoring the different histories like seasoning.

“Don’t do that!” Faust screamed. “It’s mine!”

“No, it’s not,” Pace said. “I gave it to you. It’s mine. I gave you my affliction.”

He pressed his lips to Faust’s damage, feeling the pressure inside. Faust’s alternates slipped out from beneath the ruined brain tissue and slid over Pace’s teeth. Faust strained and went into a seizure and finally relaxed in Pace’s arms.

Pace could taste the answers to his questions about what happened after that day at
Emilio’s
.

Faust with a head wound, a four-inch-deep incision in his temporal lobe. Stumbling through the city at night as his personality leaked out behind him, step by step. He’d been paid twelve grand in cash for the restaurant torch job. The money was still on him, in his coat pockets, but he no longer knew what it meant or how to use it. Under six different names he had bank accounts in twenty cities across America, totaling four million bucks. The long green, the big spinach. But he couldn’t remember any of the names, and now he had a head full of different people.

Faust had wandered the streets of New York until he passed out from exhaustion. He lived in the alleyways eating scraps out of garbage cans for months, with twelve thousand bucks on him, until he was rolled by a couple of upscale teenagers from the suburbs who liked to come into the city to beat the crap out of the homeless. He managed to survive while the people in his head tried to scratch their way out.

Eventually he got on the nerves of the corner grocery store owner who felt Faust’s presence in the alley outside was driving off business. The cops rounded him up along with a dozen meth-fiends and schizophrenic homeless folks. They all took a van ride up to Garden Falls and wound up in group therapy together.

A year later he was the last one left from his original cluster of city jetsam. Sitting in his chair waiting for something to happen when Pace voluntarily committed himself and took the seat between Faust and Pia, across from Hayden, and said, “Hello, does Dr. Brandt stick needles in your necks too?”

thirty-two

Pace carried Faust back to the tomb, where Pia lay nearly unconscious draped over the polished stone.

Hayden came limping down the tunnel, totally drenched. He took a quick look around, and said, “Jesus, what happened. What’s that smell?” Sniffing like a dog. “What’d you do, man? Is he dead? Is she dead?”

“No.”

“They look dead. Sorry it took me so long to get here, but there was lightning all over the place. How did you run down the mountain? I couldn’t do that. Nobody else could ever do that. I think I broke my ankle.”

Pace stared at Hayden and asked, “What do I need to do with you?”

“What?”

“Tell me. You got some grievance with me?”

“Are you eating paste?”

“No.”

“Don’t eat paste!”

“I won’t.”

“What the hell happened to you? You’re all burned up again, man!”

Faust began to come around. Pace set him down and Pia worked her fingers through Faust’s hair, soothing him like a child. She caught Pace’s eye and gestured to Hayden.

She said, “Go on. Go do it, Will. It’s not for us, you know, that’s not why you’re doing it. It’s for you.”

Hayden said, “Oh no, oh no, what is this? You’re not going to hurt me, are you, man? We both hate tuna. We are brother tuna-haters! You can’t hurt one of your own!”

Pace didn’t need to hug him or make any contact with him at all. He reached down and took Hayden’s endless letter to his mother—the paper soggy and pulped together, the ink washed away—and again felt the sense of other people entering into him, leaking from the pages, the will behind all that writing, Hayden’s flesh, through his cells, and across Pace’s body, being absorbed into his skin. Crumble danced in circles, moving closer and closer to Pace’s leg. Sister Lurteen took her Bible and the broken pieces of her yardstick and followed.

Hayden was holding out his arms to them, going, “Wait...hold it...wait! Don’t! Don’t go! What’s happening here? This...this can’t...what’s happening? I don’t want to be lonely!”

“You won’t be,” Pace said. “You’re going to go out into the world and find a job, rent an apartment, and get yourself a girlfriend.”

“Oh Christ, oh Christ no!”

“I’m sorry, Hayden.”

“No!”

Too full of sorrow to even cry, Hayden’s knees gave out and Pace caught him before he fell. He knew the feeling—the fear of becoming a whole person, of living only a single life. All three of them in the dirt were looking up at Pace, who stood above them carrying all the many wraiths of their stolen histories.

Pace led them single file through the tunnels. The three of them staggered after him, Pia occasionally calling for her father, Hayden for his mother, Faust stuffing his finger into his scar trying to push something back into his skull.

When they came up out of the underworld, the storm had broken. The black smooth night, heavy with promise and charged with possibility, seemed endlessly wide and empty around them, through which their small and forlorn passage meant everything and nothing.

~ * ~

In the morning, Pace sat on the beach and thought about going to look for the pit that Stavros...the second Stavros...had told him about. You dive in and go straight through the island and you don’t stop.

Are you cured
?

It was a trick question.

Was anybody, ever?

He would not give up his place. As ugly and ridiculous as it might seem, even to himself—to all the many
hims
—Pace simply enjoyed life too much.

Eventually Cassandra came down to the sand.

He wasn’t sure if he could cure her of the affliction. He didn’t know if he’d infected her or if she’d infected him, or if it mattered at all.

She stood over him and said, “The others are leaving. They don’t want to see you.”

“All right,” he told her.

“One of the pilots will fly them to Voros in the helicopter. I’ve given them each one hundred thousand dollars.”

“That was nice of you.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

Pace asked, “Why wouldn’t you take your father’s money, Cassandra? When you came to the States?”

“Because I wanted to prove myself. That I could stand on my own and be my own person.”

Pace turned away and stared at the sea again.

She said, “They wish to return to Garden Falls, but Vindi, our attorneys, and the accountants believe we can force the state to shut it down, so we can buy the land. I want it closed. I want the others to leave and go somewhere else, anywhere else. I want it
ended
.”

He didn’t have the heart to tell her, It will never end.

“Why did you steal pocket change from
Emilio’s
?”

“To show that I was independent. That I could pay my tuition by myself.” She tried to take his hand but it was like trying to grasp rock. “Please, let us go up to the house.”

“I’d rather sit here a while.”

“I want you to see the baby’s room.”

“I’m sure it’s beautiful,” he told her.

“You shouldn’t look so sad, you’re one of the richest men in the world now.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” he admitted.

“It will one day.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Anything you want is already yours.”