The Theocracy - The Blackened Cross - 26. Chapter 26

Bazzelthorpe was in the middle of pouring his third cup of coffee for the morning when a scream made his spine straighten up so hard that coffee spilled over the edge of the cup; this started a chain reaction of events that led only to imminent disaster. Almost at the same moment he turned to face the direction of where the sound was coming from, the scalding hot liquid burned the Astorathian’s flesh. The cup tumbled from his hand, before spreading out in a black puddle that went in all directions across the carpet.

He found Vanus half-bent half-stooped over the top of a filing cabinet, head cocked at an angle. “Damn you,” the death magician mumbled. “I swear nothing is going right today, nothing…”

The Astorathian took a moment to catch a glimpse of the death magician’s pert, round little rump sticking up in the air before crossing the room to lend his assistance. “Kaufman, just pull the cabinet away from the wall,” he said patiently.

“I know Bazzel. Must you talk to me in that tone of voice, like I’m five years old…?” And like that Kaufman was on his feet again with the offending file in hand, spinning on the balls of his tiny shoes like a top. To watch him was to be a complete in a conflicting state of fascination and exasperation. “I swear, I’ve been circling around this room for the past hour looking for this damn thing…” Vanus brandished the manilla folder at the empty air. A red blood vessel pulsed in his forehead.

The Astorathian bounded across the room in three steps, intercepting the death magician. He caught Van’s arms one in each hand, so that Van’s arms were swallowed whole in his grip. Gently he eased Vanus back towards the desk.

“What do you think you’re doing? Let go of me you horned bastard!” Before Vanus could put up a fight, he fell back into his chair. Bazzelthorpe pulled him around until he came to a stop, until their faces were but inches apart. Bazzel’s tail swayed gently in the air.

“I’m trying to keep you from going back to the hospital. Don’t think I don’t know about the problems with your brain bleeds. I may not be a doctor or as smart as you…” Bazzelthorpe held up a Styrofoam cup of freshly brewed coffee. He passed it gently beneath Van’s nose, cradling the death magician’s head so as not to spill anything on him. “But I am starting to pick up on things here and there. Like how much you love coffee.”

“Yes,” Vanus murmured drowsily. He sank down into the chair in submission.

“Just take a minute before you push yourself to the point of collapse. For the sake of the Good Mother, drink your coffee.”

“I should have known you got off on bullying folks who are smaller than you,” Vanus muttered. He looked away, but Bazzel caught the flicker of a grin.

“Just mouthy little magicians who don’t know how to take care of themselves.”

“Get on my nerves later when we don’t have a serial killer and possible cult activity on the loose. Until then we don’t have the time. In thirty minutes we are supposed to be at the ceremony for the people who died in the fire. Something is telling me we’re going to want to get a word in with Jaffe Curry…and if I’m wrong, sue me, I still want to have our bases covered. Make it at least look like we know what we’re doing because so far we have fuck all to show for it…”

“What do you want to do?” Bazzel asked.

Vanus scoffed. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I was able to dig up some data about past cases that dealt with Chokmah. And you won’t believe what else came up: a cult by the name of the Sacred Brotherhood of the Blackened Cross. Bad gang, as I’m sure you’re starting to pick up by now. The last time a group of them were truly active was just over thirty years ago. There was a practicing chapter here in the city and in a town just a twenty minute drive away. Theocracy agents worked hard to squash the fire before it spread, but that’s the thing about Inferno. Its veins spread like the blackest of cancers.”

“You’re so motivating to listen to in the morning, Kaufman.” The Astorathian tossed a doughnut across the table. “I am not in the mood for one of your long drawn-out history lessons.”

“Fine.” Vanus ripped a chunk out of the doughnut. “It gets exhausting trying to entertain myself in the wake of your staggering witticisms.”

“Half of what you say sounds like farts coming out of a fly’s ass,” Bazzel said.

“Exactly.” Vanus grinned bitterly. “So why continue this conversation when we have a funeral to attend to brighten up our day?”

For someone who was renowned for attracting the attention of the restless undead, Vanus made for grim company at the funeral. He skulked in between the tombstones, looking more ghostly than ever in a black three piece suit, accompanied with matching shades. To Bazzelthorpe he looked as he had on the TV, not a single hair on his head out of place even if he wasn't feeling his best.

"Spread out a little," Vanus said. He waved a gloved hand impatiently at the Astorathian. A pink plastic bottle gleamed in his hand; something medicinal from the looks of it. "They're not going to bite you, Agent Bazzelthorpe. Besides, you don't want to stand too close to me."

Bazzel stepped closer to him, leaning in slightly. “Are you sick?”

Kaufman smiled, another attempt to hide his discomfort. Even now, even after everything they’d been through together, Kaufman was still afraid to show himself for who he truly was. Be patient, Bazzel reminded himself. Santino said it would take time for him to come around. I must be ruthless in my affections.

“Not exactly. Just stomach cramps. They make me fairly gassy.” Van’s eyebrows drew together. “Did I mention I hate funerals? They’re everywhere here. I can’t hear a damned thing that’s going on over all the chatter.”

It felt like a betrayal to leave Vanus standing by himself with his little pink medicine bottle. Bazzel had to keep reminding himself, Kaufman was never alone. He would always be able to see and perceive things Bazzelthorpe could not.

Bazzel tried to regain his focus. They were here to do a job after all, not just take in the scenery. Concentrating on the procession proved to be no easy task. Bazzel's attention kept slipping away from the vicar's monotone voice. He scanned the faces of the crowd standing before him, the faces of people he did not recognize; the faces of people who had never existed before this moment. Humans and their endless rituals, he thought. Will I ever truly be able to fully understand them?

His eyes kept falling back to one human. One death magician in particular with a silly pink bottle.

As the funeral was at last drawing to a close - the priest closed the book, the gatherers dispersing in a mournful silence - Vanus drew closer. "There he is," he said with a keen look in his eye. "The famous architect."

"What architect?" Bazzel craned his head around in hopes of catching a glimpse of whatever the death magician was seeing.

Vanus nodded at a well-dressed man in a suit. The man looked to be towards the end of his life, signified by the snowy whiteness of his hair. He kept his hair combed and his suit tailored. Bazzel's tail curled in on itself. He growled before he stopped himself. I know a tyrant when I see one, he thought. "I don't like him."

This drew out a smile from Vanus. "Trust me, Bazzel, you wouldn't be the only one. That's Jaffe Curry. You're looking at the wealthiest man in Roc City."

Bazzelthorpe found himself watching Curry the same way he might watch a particularly repellant rodent. His nostrils flared with frustration. "I don't understand your kind's fascination with wealth. What do you gain from it?"

Vanus led them closer to the center of the crowd, moving as smoothly as an eel slipping through water. Bazzelthorpe could only hope to achieve such grace. He pulled at the collar of his jacket. If he had his way he would yank it off and leave it in the grass for the squirrels to shit on. He looked down when he felt something brush his hand gently. Vanus looked back at him, lips quirked in a wicked smile that immediately found its way to Bazzelthorpe’s groin.

“Agent Bazzelthorpe,” he said teasingly. “I think you’ve been in this business long enough to realize all of existence is a power struggle. A teeter-totter. The sides aren’t defined by who’s good or who’s evil, but by who's on the bottom and who is on the top."

"Like a death magician at odds with an Astorathian." Bazzel nudged Vanus playfully, ready to grab him should he accidentally send the sorcerer flying. As such Vanus maintained his footing. Now at the back of the group, Vanus cleared his throat. Bazzelthorpe hung back, eager to watch the death magician work his craft.

Almost at once Vanus had everyone's attention pulled in his direction. It was as if someone had flicked a switch and he was on the television screen again. He nodded apologetically before turning his full attention to the architect. "Sorry for interrupting you at such an inconvenient time, especially given your loss…My name is…"

"I know who you are," the architect said appraisingly. He stepped towards Vanus, his hand outstretched. Bazzelthorpe had to dig his heels in the dirt to keep from barring the way. Remember you are an agent of the Theocracy, he reminded himself. Act like it. "The man who caught the Astorathian Butcher. It is not you who inconveniences me, but me who inconveniences you. I wish I could be shaking your hand under different circumstances."

If not for the way his eyes shifted downward, Bazzelthorpe would have said Van’s chuckle was almost genuine. With the exchange of a few more pleasantries, Vanus was able to move the conversation to a private location at a bench. “You’re going to want to sit down for this,” Vanus said in a kind way, and this time Bazzelthorpe was certain of his sincerity. “We have not come here to discuss pleasant business with you today.”

“My wife of almost ten years, whom I just finished divorced…a very expensive, very emotionally exhausting divorce in of itself I might add…died with five hundred and eighty-three people. That’s the official body count. What do you have to tell me that could be any more unpleasant than this?”

"Yesterday my partner, Bazzelthorpe and myself,"...Vanus nodded in Bazzel's direction while flashing his badge. "I did a reading on the place. Mr. Curry, the dead do not lie. Depending on the circumstances of their death and the emotions they were feeling at the point of their passing, their memories and perceptions of things are never false. Your wife knew the killer, Mr. Curry."

Bazzelthorpe watched all the blood drain out of the architect's face and found he pitied the old man. He hadn't expected the old man to start crying and neither had Vanus judging by the way he kept looking at his own shoes to avoid watching Curry. "I don't know," the architect sobbed. "I don't know who would want to killer unless it was to get to me. But not like this. Not by burning down a whole building full of people to do it."

Vanus took the next minute to soothe Curry before continuing his interview. "You're doing very well, Mr. Curry. I have just a few more questions. Is there anything over the past couple weeks that was strange? For you, I mean. Has anyone around you been acting in a way they wouldn't normally behave?"

"My assistant. There was an incident last week. He does field work for me…mostly just keeping an eye out for restoration projects that might be of potential interest. He was attacked surveying a place…He just quit after a decade of working under my employ."

Van's heart sped up. His face remained calm except for the slight widening of his eyes. Bazzelthorpe tensed, ready to spring into action. "Would the building happen to be a church?"

Curry sighed. The first hint of impatience graced his liver-spotted features. "I don't know. I do think it was a church. One of the old Christian churches that had been shut down a while. Why do you ask?"

Bazzelthorpe could see the sweat bloom in Van's forehead, see the excited flutter of his pulse at his neck. Even now he worked to maintain composure. "Mr. Curry, I am going to need any information you have on this assistance of yours. Please, it could prove to be very useful." Again, the death magician's hand brushed up against Bazzel's; again the Astorathian marveled at how soft his skin was.

"I think we have a lead," Vanus said. "Our first honest lead."

"What do you think we should do?" Bazzelthorpe resisted the urge to bring Van's hand to his mouth and kiss it. Not because Curry was standing close by or because he cared what Curry thought, but because he didn't know if Vanus would like it or not.

"I think we should pursue it before the trail goes cold," Vanus had an avid look on his face where he was looking at something Bazzelthorpe could not see. Too distracted, too focused on his job to be aware of anything the Astorathian might be thinking or feeling; or to even care. Even in the midst of a funeral he was impeccably dressed, his hair swept back from his brow, the beginnings of a five o'clock shadow beginning to mark its imminence around those soft, silky lips.

He is everything I'm not, Bazzelthorpe thought. Methodical, patient. Kind. He takes every little thing into consideration while I barrel through life without giving anything a second thought. What is wrong with me? How could I fall for someone so different from myself? How can he stand to be in my presence for even a minute?

Such were the mysteries of Vanus Kaufman that kept him coming back for more.

"Then we pursue it," he said.

…

"Brad!" Dan Anderson cried. "Brad, stop this! This isn't you…"

This is me. This has always been me, from the very beginning, it just took me until now to see it, he thought.

The longer he held onto the lighter, the more things became clear to me. Memories that had been locked in a cage, silenced from speaking, broke free and whispered their terrible truths to Brad. This has always been your destiny, your purpose.

With the truth came changes, and not just small ones either. It wasn't just his mind that was changing, but his body as well. He wasn't just Brad any more…he was slowly but surely turning into someone else. Something else. The old dweeby Brad - the one who had discovered the lighter on the bridge and walked away as something else, yet to be transformed but already beginning the transformation - would have never been able to drag his father kicking and

screaming up the hill single handedly.

Halfway up the hill, Dan Anderson changed tactics. His guttural pleas for mercy turned into slurred insults of rage. “I knew there was something wrong with you…Your mother didn’t want to see it, but I always knew. When we found you in the woods after what you did to those animals, I knew you were no son of mine…”

Brad dropped his father to the grass.

“What are you…?” Dan started to protest.

Brad didn’t let him finish. He whirled around and lashed out with a savage kick that made his father curl in on himself. He remembered now, racing through the trees. I was young…just a boy. A blur of green and brown, the smell of nature all around him. And nature never smells sweeter than when it burns.

He could hear voices screaming behind him, the sound of dogs barking as they crashed through the heather.

Life never smells sweeter than when it’s dying.

He kicked out again. His father rolled over again, his mouth a yawning cavern of agony.

“Yes,” Leonidas encouraged him from the bottom of the heal, watching with gleamy-eyed fascination. “There is no greater act of love, no greater act of devotion than to spit on the degenerate who birthed you.”

He was running because he knew they wouldn’t understand. Adults were stupid and often did not understand the greater way of things. They would find his church out in the woods, they would find the lighter - Chokmah’s lighter - that he had found in the street by the gutter and they would take him away for his crimes. Freak, they would call him. You need help, they would tell him. We can help you.

We can fix you.

“I don’t need fixin’,” he heard himself say out loud. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

In the end they did find him. They found his church of dead animals and they took it all away. They took the lighter away. They took him away. They locked him away in a room with white walls; a room from which there was no escape.

“I don’t need any more poking and prodding and tests.”

I lost the lighter, but then it found me again. It gave me a second chance. This time I won’t waste it. This time I won’t fail.

He kicked the door to the house open. It banged against the wall with a crash that tore a hole in the floral-print wallpaper. His father, now unconscious, no longer kicked or fought him. His breathing was a phlegmy rattle in his chest. He wouldn’t be going anywhere any time soon. Brad had all the time in the world to do what he wanted.

He took his time going up the stairs, pausing at family photos. Here was one in the early 90’s of his eighth birthday, when his parents had bought his first real big-boy bike. “Look at the simpering little shit in the photo,” Leonidas said from over his shoulder. “Gap-toothed smile and all. Don’t think I’ve seen anything more disgusting in my life.”

Brad laughed, the sound catching like needles deep in his throat. “Don’t like you weren’t a worm once, too, Leonidas. We all start out as worms. Some of us grow into butterflies. Others grow into something infinitely more disgusting.” He knocked the picture off the wall with a swipe of his arm. The picture frame bounced off the step at his feet, spinning end over end. By the time the frame landed at the bottom of the stairs, the pane was frayed with a spider web of cracks.

A light came on in the house followed by the startled rustle of blankets from the master bedroom.

“Dan! Damn it, what are you doin’, makin all that racket down there?” His mother spoke in that same tone she always spoke with for as long as he could remember: soft, slightly whining, never aggressive. Any form of aggression, of resilience had been stomped out by the man he’d dragged up to the house. She appeared at first only in shadow, a feminine-shaped shadow cast against a milky yellow backdrop. In it he recognized the strap of her bathrobe that held it to her hips and the towel wrapped around her head like a turban. The thought of making her scream made his heart race like a horse doing victory laps. Those screams echoed in his mind, forming a bridge between the past and the present as he lunged forward with the butcher knife in hand. He didn’t give her a warning, he didn’t even call her, “Mama,” as he’d done since he was a child.

She saw him coming for her in the mirror. The confusion on her face lasted for a split second and then instinct took over. She let out a shrill, piercing scream that echoed inside his head like breaking glass. He reached for her, meaning to grab her by the shoulder. Instead the heel of his hand collided with her shoulder. Like a shelf tipping over, Brad’s mother flew forward. She collided with the dresser before Brad could prevent it from happening. Her towel flew from her head at the same time the front of her skull struck the mirror attached to the dresser. This time the sound of glass sprinkling the floor was real, not just sound effects popping in and out of his ears. There’s no going back from, he reminded himself. But then when has there ever been an option to go back? When has there been another option to go anywhere but forward?

Roberta Anderson rose to her feet, lips trembling. She turned her head enough he could see she’d cut her face in several places, but not nearly as bad as she could be. She’ll look worse by the time I’m done with her, he thought.

“Brad…?” she sobbed. “Brad, what are you doing?”

He probed at the numb feeling that blocked him from feeling remorse. That blocked him from feeling human. He felt nothing except the rush of adrenaline to ruin her. “I’m going to break your face into a thousand pieces!” he howled in rage.

He lost all sense of time as he seized her skull in his hand, her screams an echo as he rammed her face against the edge of the dresser until her face was slick with red. He threw her limp body to the floor, breathless with exertion. For a moment he was lost in the memory-sensation, the rush that came after a long run. When he looked up it was not the master bedroom of his parents’ farmhouse he saw but the cul-de-sac of the neighborhood he lived in. The place he used to call home until recently. Or better yet, the bridge where he found that fucking lighter.

Time skipped.

Now he had Roberta Anderson by the ankles and was dragging her down the stairs. Her head and arms made hollow thunking sounds as they bounced off the steps.

"You are doing the best thing a person can do for themselves," Leonidas said. He circled the scene like a hungry predator marking his territory. "They think they helped you. They think they saved your soul. They didn't free you from the lie, they fed you to it…"

Brad shook the fog from his head. Time had skipped again, making him feel like the victim of a date rape. Now his parents were bound to the two armchairs in the living room with tape and rope he'd found in the garage; he'd gagged them with strips of cloth. He didn't want to hear anything they had to say. The smell of lighter fluid made him think of gas stations and barbecues and house fires.

"And now," Leonidas said, his voice popping as if coming through the speakers of a radio.

Brad struck the match. The flame bloomed bright, warming his skin.

"...Look your destiny in the face and set yourself free."

Brad lit the flame.