The Belletrist, Page 4

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  Now I look down on the Tower from above. Across the street from it is the back of a large bank-building. We're on the roof of the high-rise, gazing down. It’s hot tonight, so a lot of the kids are outside, smoking. They’re about eight stories down. There’s a girl who calls herself Elora, bright red lipstick, more Rockabilly than Goth, sleeve tats and a mole drawn on her upper lip with an eyebrow pencil. I like her hair. She has it forties style, with the bangs and all. She looks like a pin-up, glossy patent red leather corset and all. It seems to work with her black cargo pants and doc martens. Kurt’s there with her, they’re sharing the same cigarette, bitching about something. Rebecca is inside the Tower, making out with someone else.

  She is beside me. She is fascinated with the place. She doesn’t speak of it, but if I need to find her, nine times out of ten, at sunset she’s here, gazing down at the Tower. She never goes in, but she likes it most when the occupants are outside so she can watch them. There’s a smudge on her cheek. I want to reach out to clean it off, but she doesn’t like it when I touch her.

  Behind us, the door to the roof utility shed is still open, and the light bulb is still swinging. It brings back the image of her face, only a few moments earlier. The swinging light made everything strange. Swing; her face is a skull, swing, she’s magnificent, swing, she’s a lost child, swing, she is God. Her eye-sockets looked so hollow for that second, it scared me. Her skin is so white it might as well be bone. Now in the full of the night, she’s back. She’s vibrant. Fresh from the kill. Our quarry is lying on the floor, on his side, his back to us. The pendulous light only seems to touch the folds of his clothing as it swings.

  She looks playful. A smirk on her unnaturally red lips. “Before we move him, let’s play a game, shall we?” Her voice is like the velvet from the Tower’s walls; older sounding than her face, husky even, with a lilt and maybe a shred of an accent I cannot identify. She doesn’t like to leave our kills here. She likes it here too much to bring attention to this spot. We usually move them to other locations where they won’t be found. My interest is piqued. I still like games too. She is wry as she looks at me. Her lion’s mane of shimmering blue-black tube curls frames her heart-shaped face and tumbles down to the middle of her back. Her eyes are ringed in long black lashes that would be the envy of any woman. She’s wearing smoky-eyed makeup tonight. Her eye whites pop, her irises look like hematite. She’s dressed in a simple white, billowy sleeved blouse with the buttons open to her cleavage. A jeweled pennant hangs just above the cleft, a rosette of filigree with small stones imbedded in it. She has slacks on with long cuffs that fall over a pair of black leather boots with a round forties toe and a thick heel. She could be any woman; except for her exceptional face. So beautiful. I catch just the tiniest glimpse of one of her canines as she smiles. She’s good at hiding them.

  “Follow my lead, grasshopper,” and without any notice she jumps off the edge of the building. My pulse would have quickened had my heart still been beating. I gazed over the edge just in time to watch her land right in the center of the street, between Karl and Elora and four other kids who were standing on the opposite side of the street. Her boots make a loud crack as she hits the ground. She hits it hard; I’m surprised her heels didn't break off. She lands in a squat, her hand touching the pavement, white like a snowflake against the tarmac.

  She rises with a smooth liquidity, eyes locked on Elora with an almost seductive gaze. She then looks up at me, and I see in a flash she wants me to follow. So I do. By the time I land, she’s gone; she is fast. Faster than any other one like us that I know of. I glance at Karl and look at him, but I don’t think he recognizes me without my dye and eye makeup. I’m in a pair of distressed, boot-cut jeans I paid $90 for and a striped dress-shirt. She told me that I should look more mainstream, pretty boy-like, she said. I pursue her, and leave behind a group of startled kids. Elora is weeping. As I run away, I hear her cry out; “I knew it! I knew it! Oh my God I knew it!”

  Our chase scene is over. We sit on the building’s edge enjoying the aftermath, our legs dangling over the side. Nobody can see us even if they are looking up and pointing at where they thought we’d come from. She is grinning. The whole patronage of the Tower had come out to the street hoping they’d get a glimpse. They were filtering back inside, Elora still weeping tears of joy. She sighs. I think sometimes, she wants to be down there with them. She wants to be like Elora. She wants something to believe in.

  I leave her there, she always lingers until they close and kick everyone out. She can move the kill on her own. She's strong enough. Oddly, she never kills from this group--the Goth kids of the Tower. Except me. I feel angry for a second, but it quickly fades away. She treasures them. Maybe she treasured me. All those times Rebecca and I came and went, I imagine she was up here, watching me. Maybe I am her part of the Tower. Her part of that world. Now I look nothing like it. I look like those kids who I could never relate to. The ones I wanted nothing to do with. A pretty-boy. It’s hard not to laugh at that. I glance back and she’s still sitting there, the breeze picking up some of her curls. “Sleep tight,” I whisper, and she hears me. A nod. “See you tomorrow night.” She’ll be here. As long as the Tower is. Little deity, watching over her flock.

  Jacob

  They weren't simpletons. They knew deep down he wasn't really their son. They had to know. But their misery and their loss had afforded him a place with them, and for all intents and purposes he was Jacob McVeigh. It simply didn't matter to them. For him, for this Jacob impostor, despite having entered this situation with less than stellar motives, it somehow worked out--it changed him, it made him better. Somehow. He acclimated. He settled; something he'd never done before in all his days. He actually liked being Jacob. Liked it enough to let it become him.

  He'd learned about them through Brian Walsh; the man who killed Jacob--the creature that had made him disappear. Brian was huge man. Elephantine in a compact way, broad, thick shoulders book-ending a wide, dense chest. He had a round head with shifty green eyes, with tiny ears; his blonde hair was chopped into the standard buzz-cut all the inmates got. He had surprisingly small feet for a giant frame like his. He stood at 6'10"; he had to duck through the metal grate of the cell door to get in and out. ‘Jacob' had made him take the lower bunk.

  Jacob making any man that size do what he wanted was part of what made him different. He wasn't a small man; but one of decent height. In a fight, he would have been snapped like a twig by the likes of Brian, but Jacob's special ability for manipulation made the monster his pet. Brian, the heartless murderer, the simpleton, the ham-handed buffoon, was Jacob's personal bulldog. He had to only gaze into the beady, vacant eyes with his own piercing laser-blue gaze, and the tiny mind within would roll over and bare its belly to him. Brian saw a mightier beast in that gaze, a deeper, darker, angrier creature than he could ever hope to be. And far, far smarter.

  "It's gotta be the weirdest thing..." the giant would mumble in his oddly high-pitched voice, "...you look just like him, I tell ya. Jus' exactly like him. It's either that or I'm just seeing you this way ‘cuz I did what I did to him." Brian had starting listing his victims to Jacob the moment he was shoved into the cell with the huge man. Brian was in prison for killing a young man he'd picked up on the streets. Jacob... the real Jacob was a similar victim. He arrived in the city, a young and confused runaway-and immediately his innocence was dashed so terribly, he never recovered; never found normalcy, or goodness. Just a life of drugs and prostitution. He just ended up one of many unknown victims of the darkness; dead in some ditch, not even given the dignity of being recovered. The buffoon could do one thing right; and that was hiding a body.

  At first, the fake Jacob didn't really care. He counted Jacob among the other victims the beast boasted about killing... the ones he'd "gotten away with"; the ones that were never proven or never found. He confided in him all of his conquests. And Jacob-the-false sometimes listened sometimes didn't. He stared pati
ently at the ceiling. Time was of no concern to him. He wasn't in for so long. As his sentence began to wind down, he knew it was time to find that persona, to discover his identity. And then the assertions of his similarity to this Jacob came back to him. He used his library time to find information on the victim doppelganger, Jacob McVeigh. And he found a plethora of information; and a sad little website made by friends and family with pictures of him just before he ran away and disappeared... and yes, the ox was right. The kid looked like a seventeen year-old version of the man Brian shared his cell with. Jacob-the-false had more angles on his face, a gruffness to him... but the same piercing blue eyes, the same crooked smile, the same swarthy tones. He realized he could easily pass as the boy... all grown up--weathered a bit, maybe by life, but nonetheless, he could do it. And so he decided he would become Jacob McVeigh. He would become him and live the life the boy might have had if he hadn't left, if he hadn't been destroyed by his own desperation and murdered by a massive lumbering pile of very stupid flesh.

  He set up an email address through a free service, and clicked on the contact link on Jacob's website.