The Lazarus Heart (12 page)

Joseph Lethe had brought one of his yellow legal pads and a mechanical pencil. He stood before each of the abominations hung from the pegboards, astounded and entranced that They would allow Themselves to be displayed so openly, Their

perverse likenesses put down on paper, flaunted. He made careful notes on the photographs, recording their titles and exhibition numbers, writing concise but careful descriptions of each and every one.

When he realized that someone was watching over his shoulder he turned around fast, one hand spread protectively over his notes. The intruder was a tall creature disguised as a woman, scarecrow-thin and pale as chalk, as if every inch of exposed skin had been airbrushed the same matte white. It was wearing a ratty black T-shirt with the sleeves and collar hacked away, skintight black stretch pants that revealed no evidence of its genitalia, if indeed it had any to conceal. There was a single red dot painted between its dark, thin eyebrows, like a Hindu woman's
bindi.

It smiled, showing perfect, even teeth, and said in a velvety voice that was neither masculine nor feminine, "Do you write for a newspaper?"

"No, no," he replied, surprised at how calm his voice was, no trace of the panic welling up inside, the fear that he had been discovered after all. "I'm just a student."

"Oh," it said apologetically, and blinked once.

Its eyes seemed wrong in no way that he could put his finger on. He looked quickly back at the photograph he'd been busy examining when the creature had interrupted him.

"He really is very good, isn't he?" the creature asked. "I mean, he's not just another bullshit wanna-be taking fetish snapshots for the lookieloo norms."

"Yes," Joseph Lethe agreed coolly, careful not to sound
too
enthusiastic. "He is good. He is, well..."

The creature finished for him. "Genuine," it said conclusively. "He is genuine."

Joseph Lethe stared intently at the photograph, praying the thing behind him would go away, that its curiosity was sufficiently satisfied. This print was titled
Skylla and Kharybdis.
Like most of the others he'd looked at so far, it showed two murky figures, one on either side of the picture. The figure on the left had both its long arms flung wide, its head back and its small breasts bared. The figure on the right had its back turned to the first and was curled into a hard knot of muscle and shadow. Something small and hard and indistinct hung between them, suspended on a taut piece of wire.

"'God or man, '" the creature behind him whispered, "'No one could look on her in joy. '"

"What?" he asked. "What did you say?" He turned to face it again, but already it was moving away from him, inserting itself seamlessly into a small cluster of bodies farther along the aisle of pegboards.

He wiped at his forehead and realized for the first time how hot it was in the warehouse, that there was no air-conditioning, only huge and ancient-looking fans rotating slowly high overhead. He was drenched in sweat. Joseph Lethe clutched his yellow legal pad and moved along to the next print.

This one was titled
The Pleasures of Teirêsias
and was the first that he'd

encountered with only a single figure, or what he at first
mistook
for a single figure. He leaned close and could see that it was in fact a double exposure, with two bodies occupying the same space. He thought perhaps there was a male body

superimposed over a female, but it was hard to be sure. Both forms were draped with strips of raw meat and the viscera of slaughtered animals, and the figures stood in a dark slick of blood that had run down their naked bodies and pooled about their bare feet. Only their faces were clear, unblurred by the photographer's trick, their two heads, male and female, turned in profile to the left and right, respectively.

And he realized something else then. All the photographs so far had shown the same couple, a boy and a girl whose features were so perfectly matched that they had to be brother and sister, maybe twins. He felt a small chill across the back of his neck like a sudden gust of cold air. Joseph Lethe wiped at his sweaty forehead again, wiped his hand on his pants, and wrote down the title of the photograph.

Past a final divider of pegboard, toward the back of the gallery, there was a folding table set up where wine was being served in Dixie cups along with dry-looking slices of a white cheese on wheat crackers. Joseph Lethe knew better than to eat or drink anything here, so he ignored his parched throat. But he did approach the table and the people gathered there, all talking excitedly at the same time. He hung back at the edge,

waiting for a good look at the artist himself, who was seated at the table. It had taken Joseph Lethe a little over an hour to complete his catalog of every photograph on display, forty-three prints altogether, and he held his legal pad tucked safely under one arm.

Shortly after he'd realized that the same two models had posed for all the photos, he'd begun paying attention to the titles. There was clearly a pattern, and patterns were always the key to understanding, to putting a new part of the intrigue into context. Most of the titles had been taken directly from Homer,
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey,
the rest named for other random bits of Greek mythology. Only one broke the pattern, so he knew it must be the means of access to this cipher of light and shadows. The crucial photograph had been given the incongruous title
The Raven,
a reference to the poem, he assumed, and a pun as well-Jared
Poe's The Raven.
But Joseph Lethe also suspected that indicated that the poem would prove to be the Rosetta stone for the entire exhibition.

The Raven
showed the male model only, his face made up like a woman's. His hands had been bound with electrical tape and insubstantial wings somehow had been made to sprout from his skinny shoulder blades. It was the only photograph in which either of the models had been permitted to look into the camera. One corner of the boy's rouged lips was turned up in a snarl or sneer, an animal expression of threat or defiance, and his eyes sparkled with a wicked, secret glee-like the eyes of the creature that had spoken to Joseph Lethe minutes ago, simply
wrong
in a way he couldn't yet explain. He'd made a note to concentrate more on Their eyes in future examinations.

A breach opened in the crowd and he could see that Jared Poe was busy talking to a plain-looking woman taking notes. He was nothing like the monster that Joseph Lethe had prepared himself for, none of the expected cross-dressing or physical modification. The photographer appeared to be in his mid-thirties, maybe a little older, dressed simply in a black T-shirt and blue jeans. The only notable thing about his face was a two- or three-day growth of beard. However, there was only a fleeting second or two for Joseph Lethe to wonder that a man who appeared so normal could be behind the profanities he'd just witnessed, a moment of surprise before he noticed the figures seated just behind and to either side of Jared Poe.

They were the strange brother and sister from the photographs. There could be no mistake about that, and he felt as if he'd seen something he wasn't supposed to, as if he should look away or hide his eyes. He prayed that the shock of seeing the pair in the flesh had not shown on his face.

The woman was seated on the left and the boy on the right, holding the photographer's hand tightly. The models were wearing matching black dresses, simple clinging things that showed off the lines of their bodies, the scant differences of muscle and fat that distinguished one from the other. They
were
twins. He was certain of that now, and he was almost as certain that they were identical twins as well, although he knew that natural opposite-sex identical twins were a biological impossibility. Then the woman raised her head and looked straight at him and there were those eyes again. That indefinable wrongness in her outwardly friendly glance. The sudden heat he'd felt earlier in the evening returned, washing his skin in goose bumps. He flinched, barely managing not to look away. He felt as though she were peeling him with those eyes, removing the onion layers of clothing and skin and deception to see what lay underneath. Joseph Lethe felt sick and dizzy.

"You don't look so good," a voice said. He knew it was the creature that had spoken to him before, knew that there were
two
pairs of those terrible eyes on him now, probing his body and mind and soul, and that knowledge made him want to run. The sensation of those eyes made him want to take steel wool and borax to his skin to be rid of their touch.

Instead he stood very still and kept his eyes on the female model. She smiled at him, a gentle smile that he knew was meant to put him at ease, to lull him into a false and treacherous sense of security, but he knew also that she'd seen the truth. She understood precisely who and what he was, and in a moment she would stand and point, or whisper into the photographer's ear...

"You don't look well," the creature said more loudly, somewhere very close. "Would you like something to drink?"

"I'm
fine,"
he replied, turning away, pulling himself free of the female twin's gaze. He imagined fishhooks imbedded just below his skin yanking free as he moved away from her, tiny bits of himself clinging to rusty metal. She would reel them in, would have them as proof of his existence. As he walked quickly back through the aisles of pegboard the photographs seemed to peer out at him now like accusing gargoyles, hungry sentinels that might spring to life at any moment to tear him to ribbons.

But he made it past them, through the door and out into the warm and sticky night. Joseph Lethe kept moving until he'd put a full block's length between himself and PaperCut, the things gathered inside, and those hideous photographs. Then he

stopped, breathless, leaning against a telephone pole, his sides aching and the panic beginning to fade by degrees. He looked up into the summer sky, past the halo of streetlights and into the dim splash of stars, pinpricks so far away and all that hellish nothing in between. He shuddered, remembering the twin's eyes, her expression of smug triumph. It would come back to him again and again as surely as the constellations spread out above the delta and the winding Mississippi. It would be with him forever.

He'd fucked up, had allowed curiosity to make him careless, had walked straight into a trap set for him and him alone. It was so plain now, so fucking
obvious,
an elaborate banquet of misinformation and red herrings that They'd known all along would be irresistible to him. They'd drawn Their one nemesis out into the open, and now They'd seen his face, knew the smell of his fear.

From now on his work would be different. It would no longer be the simple game of him picking Them off at his leisure. He had become, in a single reckless evening, the hunted as well as the hunter. That They had allowed him to escape was an indication of nothing more or less than Their deserved confidence that They could take him whenever They were ready.

Joseph Lethe closed his eyes and became Stanley Hudson, hoping that the switch might buy a little of the time he needed. He kept his eyes shut until his

breathing and pulse had slowed almost to normal again. Then he removed the folded sheet of yellow paper from his pocket and stared down at the photocopied excerpt from the
Voice
article. It only took him a moment to find what he was looking for, the brief mention of the photographer's studio apartment on Ursulines Street.

Stanley Hudson refolded the flier and returned it to his shirt pocket. He glanced once last time in the direction of the gallery and disappeared into the night.

Stanley Hudson spent almost a whole week locked away in his tall, dark house by the river, eating nothing that he had not purchased in a can and carefully microwaved first. He spent a week studying his explicit notes on Jared Poe's photographs, a week trying to find some way to turn the tables back to his advantage, to unravel the net that had been cast so expertly over him.

Maybe, he decided, the photographs weren't entirely useless after all. The exhibition itself was an act of misdirection, of that much he was now certain, but the individual photographs might still prove useful-
if
he could read between the lines, if he

could even discover which lines to read between. He suspected that the answer lay in the placement and composition of the last print he'd seen,
The Raven.
It was meant to throw him off the track, but maybe in that act of bravado They had shown something far truer of Their nature than all of his experiments could ever hope to reveal. If he only had the actual print in his possession, or even a Xerox, if only he didn't have to work from memory and his ultimately inadequate notes, he might begin to understand its significance.

When he felt that he could wait no longer, that every day he spent huddled over his notes was another nail driven into the lid of his coffin, Stanley Hudson packed the simple, deadly things he needed into an old leather satchel he'd bought years ago in a junk shop, all the sharp and shining things that would be required, all his needles and wire and surgical thread. But because this move against Them was not meant merely to demonstrate his superiority, not meant merely to eliminate the immediate threat to his life and mission, he also packed an assortment of specimen jars and preserving fluids. Because in Their desperation to entrap him, They had carelessly revealed one of Their most terrible perversions of the natural order, and his work required that he must never forget his role as a scientist as well as a soldier.

The very last thing that went into the old satchel would serve no greater purpose than to show Them that he was not the fool they'd mistaken him for, that They had given him the clue that in time would be Their downfall. He laid the two pages he'd sliced from his thick paperbound edition of
The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe
on top of the rest. Then Stanley Hudson snapped his black bag shut.

He waited until he was sure that the photographer was gone, that he wasn't just
pretending
to have left the apartment, before he stepped out of the recessed doorway where he'd spent most of the morning and crossed Ursulines. It took him only a couple of minutes to pick the lock on the wrought-iron security door, would have taken him half that long if he hadn't had to keep checking to be sure no one watched. The tumblers clicked and rolled beneath his skillful ministrations, and he eased the door open slowly so it wouldn't clang against the wall of the small entryway before the stairwell, shut it even more carefully behind him. The stairs were wooden, so he slipped his shoes off and climbed them in his sock-clad feet. There was only one door at the top, and he breathed a hushed sigh of relief that there was no chance he'd be breaking into the wrong apartment. He pressed his ear against the door and listened, past discordant strains of rock music playing loudly inside and the thumping of his own heart, for some sign that he'd guessed correctly, to be
sure
he hadn't gone to all this trouble for