Please Don't Go (49 page)

Zephyr recoiled at the hot aroma that came from between her rotting yellow fangs. Turning sideways against her blitzkrieg, he could see maggots and assorted vermin burrowing beneath her skin, searching for something that they could not find. She bit back her vitriol for a moment. Releasing her grip on Zephyr, her talons started to shake, gripped tight against her sides.

The house caught fire, as if an extension of her rage that she could not control.

It was not so much the house that took to flame, but the air in the house, bubbling off the plastered walls and simmering the woodwork, charring the furniture. The curtains danced with wild, fiery madness. The books, every last one of them, ignited in an instance of fury, derived of the mind and heart of Lilith. Dickens and Kafka screamed for mercy, as did the rest of their writing stable, a thousand voices pleading for relief. They were being burned alive, every last one. Zephyr watched the burning air with wonder and he became entrapped in a wall of fire that surrounded them, smoke billowing in the open spaces that did not contain red and orange flames, licking every last square inch of Rattup’s home like a happy puppy.

Lilith drifted backwards, her eyes rolling into the back of her repugnant head.

Zephyr pulled the shirt from his back, wrapping the fabric around baby Charlie, whispering apologies to him.
A hell of a way to start a life
, thought Zephyr as he barreled past Lilith-slash-Jackie, keeping his head down and his eyes on the hallway that he had just come from. It seemed strange to him that Lilith was opting to destroy the world that enshrouded them. If she wanted Charlie, plain and simple, she could have him. This troubled Zephyr as he dashed through the kitchen, into the unkempt back hallway, and set off for the end of the hall. Her motives felt unclear amidst her rage. She was losing sight of her mission, the image of Charlie’s tiny penis haunting her ancient soul.

Zephyr’s eyes were burning from the blanket of smoke that filled every nook and cranny of the house, but he could make out the faint light of the greenhouse at the end of the hallway, Lilith ranting for justice behind him. There, he could escape the burning timber and fabrics that composed the house. A brief thought passed through Zephyr’s mind about why ancient civilizations always built from stone, brick, and mortar. Modern Americans lived in timber boxes, waiting to fry and bubble and simmer and die. Apple pie and third degree burns.

Kicking through the swinging screen door with his foot, Zephyr breathed in a gust of relief, looking down at Charlie. Thankfully, his son was still breathing from what he could feel through the blanket. There were traces of smoke in the greenhouse, but it was not as condemning as the inside of the house. Though it was a hermetically sealed environment, the previous emotional explosions of Lilith against Rattup had left broken openings and fissures in the glass of the greenhouse. The smoke that was emanating from the indoors was being sucked through the broken greenhouse roof like a vacuum. “We’ll be okay in here,” he whispered to Charlie between raspy coughs, wiping away a smutty gray layer of filth from his cheek, exposing his son to the open air once again.

From indoors, he could hear Lilith shrieking, in the grips of her own dementia, the upset of being deceived still coursing through her. Zephyr could hear the house being bashed as if a lumberjack was in the living room, laying into every flat surface with axes, mallets, and hammers. Lilith was systematically destroying the place, and so it seemed the most opportune time for them to escape her wrath. Perhaps she would forget all about them in her fits of venomous disdain.

Perhaps. But not probable.

Zephyr trudged through the dead, smoldering weeds in Rattup’s neglected petunia garden, leaning up against the glass wall. Keeping Charlie tight against his chest, Zephyr kicked hard once, twice, and three times. The glass cracked, but not as easy as he thought it would have. The material was reinforced with some form of poly-material, not purely glass as it had first looked. “We’ll be out of here in just one second, Charlie.” When he tried to kick a fourth time, he stopped as he heard Lilith snarling behind him.

The smoke intensified and the dead weeds of the garden spontaneously combusted. The hole in the roof was no longer big enough to usher the increasing mass of smoke away from Zephyr and Charlie’s tender lungs. Zephyr pressed his face against the fissure in the cracked glass, breathing as best he could. He could not do the same with Charlie, though. Wiping the tears from his burning eyes, Charlie kicked the fabricated glass again but could not see the results of his attack through the thick acrid smoke, falling to his knees with Charlie at his side. If he was going to die, it would be with his son by his side. He would not relinquish control of his baby to Lilith. Not now, not ever. Even in death, his grip would not falter.

She spoke to him from the layers of smoke, a disembodied voice. “You’ve made me feel hatred that I cannot forgive. When I learned of you, I realized that there were new options for my path towards returning. That you, and your seed, would be my savior. But that was a lie.
You
were a lie
.
And for that, you’ll be swallowed,” Lilith taunted. He could feel her near him, swimming like a diseased fish in the stream of gray smoke that drifted around them. She was hovering, watching his demise, reveling in the dread that she was delivering him to. She had brought him to death’s doorstep and there was a ticklish satisfaction in that. He had ruined her plans. “Think about me in Hell, my lover. Think about me and your baby boy, cuddling by the fireside. I’ll make him in my image, regardless of his being diseased by the presence of a rapist’s dick. I’ve got all the time in the world. When you’ve seen as many lifetimes come and go as I have, waiting is part of the chess match. If it sounds like I’m apologizing for my earlier outburst from your deception...
Do you think me weak, human?
” she queried inside of his mind.

Zephyr blinked away the stars and dizziness. It engulfed him.

Pressing his lips against Charlie’s forehead, he offered an unspoken apology.

He pictured Charlie’s squinting face, riddled by smoke, and drifted into another place.

Charlie cried for the first time as his father lost consciousness.

***

Zephyr awoke with a pounding headache. He was back on his mattress, where he and the possessed Jackie had spent so many sweat-soaked evenings, where she had given birth to their son. Sitting upright with a jolt, he looked at the sheets of the bed. Gone was the mucus and bloody discharges that had tainted that location. Warm white sheets were neatly folded into place.

He felt his body, clean and naked. His face was shaven. There was no hint of a rattle in his chest from the smoke inhalation. He stared at the ceiling, sniffing the air for traces of smoke as he attempted to piece together what had happened after Charlie’s birth, wondering where his son was, where his girlfriend Jackie was, and where the rotting imp Lilith was.

Had it all been a dream? It seemed possible. Calm washed over him.

He stood, feeling an ache in his knees and back. Zephyr felt as if he had been sleeping for decades. For all he knew, he had done just that.

The quiet of the house disarmed his nerves. There was a thought that started to roam through his head, of the greenhouse, of the fire, of the smoke, of his death. He had passed to the other side of the world, where angels sung and demons laughed. He was dead. Dead as a doornail. No, not dead.
Dead people don’t get back aches
, he thought to himself as another surge of ache trundled up his spine.

Somebody was whistling in the kitchen, and so he approached with hesitance.

She was a sight that he could not believe with his own two eyes, an epiphany of wonder. A magical image that enthralled his every sense, his being composed of something new and optimistic. Her face glowed with a tenderness that he had thought would be altogether lost when she returned to him. It was better than he could have hoped for.

Jackie. Beautiful and sweet.

Jackie had returned to him.

Her loving eyes were exactly as he had remembered, from before her temporary possession, from before he had ever known of the conniving bastard Charles Rattup, majordomo to the slobbering whore Lilith. Jackie whistled quietly to herself, a modern June Cleaver at work, spooning cookie dough on to a flat black baking pan. “You’re awake!” she cheered, her impish glimmer once again returned to her once empty eyes. She was
real—
flesh and blood and standing before him with an aroma of woman all about her
.
There was no doubt.

“
Jackie,” he said in relief.

“
Zephyr.” She clutched Charlie close to her waist, bouncing him as she worked her matronly hands over the stove. She wore a long dress that descended almost to her ankles. Her hair had changed as well, into that of a proper 1950’s housewife, pulled up in a modest bun, the way modern women often do when attending weddings. Regardless of her anachronism, she was the most riveting thing he had ever cast his eyes upon. She simply swam with magnificence.

“
And Lilith?” he asked, wondering if she would even remember what they had been through.

Was this for real?

“
She’s gone,” Jackie replied, a nerve twitching at the corner of her mouth that made Zephyr’s own last good nerve bundle into a tight wad. “We don’t have to worry about her anymore. We’re just a happy little family, just like we always wanted, right?”

“
Right.”

“
The world is our oyster.”

“
Right.”

She turned away from the oven, kissing Charlie on the cheek.

Charlie looked to his father, his eyes as white as snow, gurgling little noises to himself. The baby started to laugh out loud, throwing its bald head back in delight, not as a baby would in its cooing, but as a tainted pervert of an adult would at the thought of his greatest enemy’s demise.

12.

Jackie brought Charlie his lunch with Zephyr’s assistance. They held, from either end, a long silver tray coated in a slab of bloody meat. As their son wanted, so then he received. “Say thank you,” Jackie advised, but Charlie stared at the food without expression, studying the pinkish pool that it basked in. He looked from the epic steak, then at his mother, and then back at the meat again.

“
I’ll say whatever I please,” he retorted. He had started speaking at three months old, and even at the age of two he was already using words that frightened Jackie. Though she knew it was a direct result of Lilith’s toiling and interference, she could not help but hope that he would turn out as loving and intelligent as his father before him. That seemed impossible now. Their baby was lost.

“
Okay, son,” Zephyr said to his boy, patting him atop the head.

The boy sniffed at his meat like a king, forever fearful that there were treacherous deeds afoot. The boy feared poison above all else, at Lilith’s advisement. “I sense something is wrong,” Charlie stated bluntly, glaring at his parents. He put his tiny brown-haired head down and lapped at the blood with his tongue. “You’re trying to poison me,” he accused, staring at his mother with vengeance stirring inside of him.

“
I’ve done no such thing, Charlie.”

“
Father?” he asked, looking to Zephyr with frigid eyes.

“
She hasn’t. Neither have I,” Zephyr shuddered, studying his son’s face. “The meat is fine, just as you like it. I swear.” It felt to Zephyr like he was the child in situations like this, that his son was more of an adult at the age of two than his father had ever been in all of his life. Zephyr had been stunted by Lilith, trapped in the moments of early adulthood forever. He had never even married his love, though they had a child together. His life had been shattered by Lilith.

Charlie looked down at his bloody fried meat again, wriggling his nose. “I don’t trust her, Father. She’s never done us any good, and you know that.”

“
Please!” she cried out, her face contorted in worrisome glances around the room. “Don’t speak like that. That’s Lilith talking, not you!” she added as the color drained from her face.

“
What did you say?” Charlie asked, standing from his tiny chair (adorned with a cartoon elephant, pink and smiling) and walking towards the fire place with the drunken stagger of a toddler. His body aged normally, though his mind drag-raced into the future.

“
Nothing. I didn’t say anything,” she answered her master, clutching tight to Zephyr, observing her son, who was wise beyond his years. She had never tried to poison him and the thought made her want to vomit. She loved her child more than anything, as any mother would. Though she could not recall the birth, every moment since that glorious day had been filled with treasures, both glimmering and abundant. She loved her life, as did Zephyr. They looked to each other and smiled, trying to coax themselves into believing that everything was now serene. They had never acquired a white picket fence and Jackie couldn’t cook a tasty dinner for a hill of beans, but their family was complete. Dysfunctional and malignant, but
complete
all the same.

Charlie withdrew the fire poker from its leaning position against the golden guard that squared in the fireplace. He nudged at the simmering fire with the poker, holding the pronged end between two fiery dancing flames. Charlie loved the mysteries inherent in fire, for in it he could see the glory of destruction. He was born in fire, and he would die in fire. All of humanity, in fact, had that path set before them. In time, they would know that bit of information, that they are but kindling and flint in waiting. But first he needed to start at home. Everything started at home. If you cannot do for yourself, then how can you do for others?