The Forest Bull (The Fearless) Page 23

“Come in, Ring.” Elizabeth’s voice floated through the sanctuary of the shop. “Tell the blonde to leave her crucifix on the counter. I can only tolerate so much heresy at once.” She laughed to herself, amused by our silent discomfort. It was palpable. We stood, dripping slightly. Waiting.

  “Before you cross the Rubicon and come through that door, why are you here? I haven’t had the chance to ask you. Is it pride? Vengeance? I won’t patronize you with talk of détente’. So, please, come in. But done is done, and you cannot bring back the dead, no matter how intense your anger, and you will find me unwilling to go quietly to your particular kind of justice.” With that, she fell silent. We moved through the door, instantly fanning out. Wally was to my right, Risa on my left, slightly back, tense. We were all silent now, but the wind began to rise outside, wheezing and then slamming the outer door shut with a violence that shook the building.

  “The storm will return soon. So loud.” Elizabeth’s voice was full of a secret longing. “Could you see any stars? I’ve always found that to be unnerving, with such violence close at hand.” I wasn’t sure if she was speaking of the storm or us.

  Wally spoke, cautiously. “There was a bright one, by itself.” Elizabeth seemed pleased by that, for some arcane reason. “Well, now, you’ve seen two.” ” She bowed from the neck, smirking. “An unusual occurrence, given the situation at hand.”

  With a moan and a bang, instantly, Jenny returned, as the rains began to pummel the building like a demonic snare drum.

  There is a moment of balance before a fight begins, where I stand on the edge of motion, my body screaming for purpose, but my mind holds me fast. Blood roars in my head and the delicious chill of anticipation runs the length of my spine, like an angry secret I cannot contain. We were standing, knives out. There, framed in the weak light, sat Elizabeth, leaning carelessly in a creaking plastic chair. An empty wine bottle, her high-heeled shoes, and a single cup crowned the tabletop. She wore a simple dress of navy silk, her hair unbound over her shoulders. She was erotic and frightening in the same glance. She had been smoking, and the plumes curled lazily in the harsh interior light.

  “A Jew and a Catholic who kneel together in church. And, in supplication to you, Ring, leaving you squarely in the fleshy, sinful middle” Elizabeth laughed, richly. “Just as you want, although your cowardice will hold you from admitting the truth. Risa’s hungry mouth. Wally, looking back in lust, urging you to ride harder. Such dutiful sinners, beholden to each other as much as your own pleasure. I’m glad you brought your whores. Admitting you want them with you is the first honest thing you’ve ever done in your vapid life.” She rolled her head on her shoulders, slowly, like an athlete limbering for an event.

  “No wine? I had hoped that manners would win out, Ring, but you’ve regressed to a rather brutish state. Killing women. Harrying me about the coast. How distasteful.”

  Cat quick, she was standing, bottle in hand, broken on the exposed concrete wall behind in one seamless motion. She moved like angry water. I nodded imperceptibly to Risa. In moments, there would be no chance to talk, as the winds and rain began to rake the building again with mounting ferocity.

  “Wally. Risa. Stay in your lanes, and just like the British, right?” They both hissed in agreement.

  We attacked.

  I feinted low and straightened, blade whistling at Elizabeth, who turned to the right and pulled the table in front of her with a crash. Her heel leapt out and crunched into Wally’s midsection as the wine bottle caromed off her ear, slicing deeply behind her jawline. Risa stepped over the table and calmly lunged forward with her knife hand only to have it turned by Elizabeth’s hand. There could be only one ending, and Wally tried to make it happen with one vicious, loping sweep of her weapon. Elizabeth dodged back, her shoulders thudding into the wall, and then flicked the bottle out to cut my lead arm.

  It was a wound I was willing to take to get closer. The wound burned, blood roping off into the air as I rolled my body sideways and closed the gap. The storm was in full fury now, adding to our curses and grunts as we closed on Elizabeth. Wally hesitated and was struck again, a long, shallow cut that glistened sickly down her side, her shirt parting to reveal her ribs. In a decisive flash, Elizabeth spun and pounded the bottle neck into Wally’s temple, dropping her instantly to the concrete, groaning, as Risa rolled under me and came up swinging, naked rage on her face. Risa’s trench knife slammed forward but was brought up short as Elizabeth’s elbow rushed down like an anvil. With a muffled thump, the bone connected with Risa’s forehead, her skull cracking against the floor. Risa was dizzied by the blow, but still conscious. It was the opening I needed.

  I was in arm’s reach of Elizabeth, who began to wheel the bottle up in a slash that would have cut me from navel to neck, but I drifted right, and then spun under her angled attack to rise nearly chest to chest with her. I head butted her between the eyes and buried my knife in her ribs, the blade slipping between bone and sinew until it struck her shoulder blade and stopped. She bellowed, an unearthly, chorded shriek of tenor and bass voices, all crying to the violation of my blade.

  I held her, blood streaming from the lurid cut on her beautiful face, now frozen in a rictus of pain. She splashed wetly against me, her breath trickling out in a long, mournful whisper. Dropping her body to the floor with a thud, I turned to the girls. Risa waived me off as I kneeled before Wally, her hair a caked mass of blood. One ear was nearly severed, and her ribs showed through the longer wound. I found a pulse, weak but present. She would live.

  “I’ll get the car. We need help now. We can say she was hurt in the storm.” Tearing open the front door, I stepped into the frigid rain and howling winds to back the Wagoneer closer. My hands were shaking from the adrenaline, and it took me three tries to get the damned key in the ignition. I needed the hospital and a dry bed, far from the killing ground. After laying Wally in the back seat, Risa held her head, talking quietly to her as the rain pounding the metal roof drowned her words into mere sounds of comfort. It was enough. One look into the rearview mirror revealed Risa’s face, blanched in fear and sudden recognition.

  “What? Is she okay?” I panicked, my hands fighting to hold the wheel steady. The wind pushed us like a toy from one lane to the other. We had six dangerous blocks to go.

  “Elizabeth. Her body. It was still there!” Risa looked sick, and not just from the fight. It was true. Her corpse had lain there, rent. Bloody. Broken.

  And very, very human.

  It took too many minutes to get to the ambulance entrance to Hollywood Memorial, and the staff rushed out even as I rolled to a stop. A whirlwind ensued as Risa and Wally were bustled in through the doors with hectic efficiency. Nurses and doctors fired questions at me and the girls as the triage progressed. No one assumed any dark cause for the wounds; the hurricane raging around us assured that line of questioning would be overlooked. In a matter of seconds, I became superfluous, to be left standing, soaking wet, exhausted, and angry. The white floor was spattered with blood and rainwater, leaving the room in four lines where the gurneys rolled. I was alone in the waiting room. Three televisions overhead showed beautiful newscasters grimly urging residents to stay cowering inside, their practiced tones of concern repeating the same mantra, get down, get down, get down. A backdrop of weather radar outlined an enormous pinwheel of colorful violence spinning west over the city. It wobbled like a dizzy child and slowly surged to the edge of the screen.

  I sat on a frigid plastic chair and hung my head. A murderer, not an avenger. I had become Wrath and I felt the weight of sin’s fingers squeezing me tighter with each gusty sigh.

  Light, blazing and painful, hit my face from the window of the girls’ hospital room. My beard itched abominably, four days of growth that had seen neither water nor soap. I could smell my own breath, never a good sign. Risa lay supine on the left in her bed, Wally on the right. I had curled like a junkyard dog between them, threatening anyone who even looked in the room without my personal invitation
. A rotation of visitors had spelled me for a few moments as I wandered to the cafeteria for a listless bite of food twice each day. Suma, Boon, Pan, even Glen, accompanied by his nearly identical brother Gabriel, who inexplicably sported a British accent, had each done a turn. Angel had visited, too, a glowering hulk who watched every hospital employee with suspicion, only to be spelled often by Liz, who adopted a cracking tone of authority and ordered anyone in scrubs about without a moment to breathe.

  Slowly, they healed. Risa was the first to sit up, the first to walk. Wally floated in and out of consciousness, her body working hard to throw of the grave slashes that were healing at a rate which puzzled the doctors. I did not invite questions, and, after a day, they stopped asking. When Wally was smiling at me, a sweet, kind look on her face, I knew that I had not lost my family, my partners. I sat on the edge of Risa’s bed, one hand holding hers and the other laying on Wally’s leg. I could breathe again, and that meant I had an errand to run.

  I kissed Risa lightly, then Wally, and told Boon “No one in or out. And then, the same when they are home. Spare no expense, no feelings, and no chances. I’ll be back in two days.”

  Risa’s sadness was too great to address. I could not look at her directly. To do so would be to lose my nerve. It was hard enough finding the strength to leave them at all.

  “Ring? Where are you going?” Wally asked, sleepily, although she knew.

  I walked to the door, and, without looking back, said “I’m going to return some jewelry.” And, without another word, I left to hail a cab, fat hot tears on my face at what felt like the last betrayal of my life.

  I have with me two gods, Persuasion and Compulsion - Themistocles

  The Forest

  Tadeusz drove without fear. He also drove without brakes because the autumnal scenery blew by in a smear of browns and yellows as his ancient rust bucket of a car banged along a rutted track in a spine-crushing series of skids, stops, and wild accelerations. I had found him by searching on my phone while in a cab to the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood airport. My simple search of Guides: Bialowicza: English Speaking led to a phone call, a hurried negotiation while I purchased my ticket and, thirteen hours later, a hale greeting at the airport before he whisked me, jet lagged and bewildered, towards the looming green of the forest.

  “This I think is far enough, Ring.” Tadeusz told me, pointing with emphasis at a double row of odd mounds on either side of the track. “That is the edge of the estate. No one will go here, so I will not go here, but if you must be a stupid hero American, then you will go alone, and I will be here, drinking the delicious Nalewka my wife has given me for this trip.” He brandished the bottle of herbed liqueur and pointed to the growing gloom. “Not much light left for your walk. You must go.”

  I looked meaningfully into the backseat, where a well-cared-for rifle lay under a blanket. Gleaning my intent, he shook his head. “I cannot let you have that. But this, this is okay.” He handed me a savage-looking hunting knife, honed to a mirror edge. It looked brutal and functional, a mankiller. I took it and thanked him. Its weight comforted me.

  The door creaked and closed with a bang, and I was surrounded by a forest of such depth and silence that I could not tell I had been caroming through it seconds earlier. No birds called, no wind. Nothing. Just the crunch of my boots over inert leaves as I walked to a paired row of hulking shapes, nearly covered with mosses and grime.

  Cars. Two rows of cars, cast aside, forgotten, rusting into the soil. Like cedars lining a levy, they sat, immobile, their state of decay greater as I moved forward towards the location of the lodge, according to Tadeusz’ directions. Here a Syrena, tiny and globular, sitting next to a Polish Kredens, its entire side stove in from some mysterious disaster. Further along, I passed not two but three of the once-feared Crows, their government plates ripped off by some unseen collector. The majestic remains of a Zil limousine lazed on an embankment, state flags that were once brilliantly colored now a faint, bloody pink. It was a parking lot made by something incredibly lethal, filled with the remains of the greedy or the stupid. I was choosing freely to walk towards this unknown killer, but, a knife was in my hand and in the dying light of the primal, filtered sun, I stalked with supreme confidence. The Baron, whether he wished it or not, was about to have a houseguest.

  A slight incline announced the manor proper, where three oaks large enough to hide a small home squatted imperiously before me. I lay against the nearest, bark as old as time rough against my face, and peered around the massive trunk to select my path.

  There was no need for stealth. Only then did a bird call, a laughing, raucous jay, piercing the quiet in the growing dusk. The ruin had once been magnificent. Even looking at the bones of the home, it was easy to see what was lost. Logs tumbled in upon one another in a jackstraw of abandonment and the ravages of time. Jewel green mosses slowly pulled the remaining height of the structure toward the soft earth, with mushrooms quietly breaking the wood into soil, while spilled slate announced the former shapes of walls, and a wood pen, and perhaps a fire pit.

  Gone, and long ago, perhaps centuries. Another fallen house of lies, slowly slipping beneath the verdant waters of the forest, one wavelike season at a time. I walked forward to where the massive doors had once hung, now only collapsed hints of a stone arch left among the jumble of relics. Lies. What else did I expect? Blackness yawned to my left, tucked under the angular remnants of a roof joist made of waist-thick beams, dissolving under the attentions of the weather. I stepped carefully over the fallen majesty of the ceilings that had held the aurochs horns aloft. The hole was lit by the last rays of the weakened fall sunshine, a last hurrah of joy to let my eyes see into the seductively open stairway. Carved from stone, each step angled slightly down and away, a curling invitation glistening with dew and uncertainty. I stepped forward once more as the sun spangled off the jeweled eye of a silver horse, spinning gently in the moist air pushing lightly from the unknown pit. The necklace hung just out of reach. To secure it would mean taking several steps into the dark. Clever girl, oh very clever, indeed. I stood erect, backing away silently. The breeze from below carried such a wealth of scents--mosses, time, mystery. And perfume. One perfume I have smelled before and will always remember--and not worn by any human. Stepping away, I thought I heard her laughter welling up from the depths, mocking me.

  Inviting me.

  Epilogue I

  One Month Later

  We healed. We stayed close, fighting the urge to slash at shadows; we learned to sleep again, to live, to find solace in the comfort of one another. We became more of a family and emerged, like a ship fighting through a rogue wave, battered but whole, cleared to go forward.

  I was hot, and that meant that the girls were scorched, so I found myself walking to get the car after a recuperative day at the zoo, where we had walked and eaten and circled about, while pretending that we had chased every spirit and echo from the corners of our minds. The parking lot blazed like an airport tarmac, nearly empty during the peak heat of the day. A lone grandmother braved the heat, fruitlessly waving a brochure at her florid face, sweat beaded on every inch of her skin. She smiled at me in commiseration, the unspoken, scorcher, ain’t it unsaid between us, but understood.

  It was a small hole in the concrete, not more than the size of a tennis ball, but it caught her birdlike, ancient ankle perfectly, snapping the bone in a sickening crack that sent her chin first into a graceless arc. The impact made her breath leave in a surprised oof as she rolled over, laughing, before I could get to her.

  She spit two teeth at my feet, connected with a stringy gobbet of flesh that sent them into a bolo spin to land on my shoe. I moved quickly to her, reaching for her to help. She slapped my hand, hard and pulled herself to her feet, leaning on her ruined ankle without notice.

  “That will be enough touching from you, Ring. You save those hands for your whores.” She smiled, gap toothed and bleeding. I knew. This was no grandmother, not at that second. “My mistres
s wants to tell you to stop being so fucking jumpy. You’re going to ruin the surprise!” She put her hands on her hips, chastising me. “She will call on you soon enough. It’s just that she’s been so busy with you and your common-law sluts being laid up and all. Can’t have you out and about when she had business to attend to, right, lover?” She cackled once and spat again, spotting my sock with her bloody saliva. With a series of grotesque cracklings, she walked away, each step making her lean in more pronounced fashion until her shoe ran red from the bone shearing through the remaining papery skin.

  I turned to the gates, where the girls would be waiting. I felt the heat of the macadam, the glare on my face. I thought of the blackness. The laughter.

  I thought of revenge.

  Epilogue II

  Two Months Later

  Herr Kreiger was thrilled to have the collection back in its rightful place, although his professionalism was such that he betrayed nothing to the client. Lovingly, he placed each piece on the velveteen lining of the deposit box, tucked in a specific order according to usefulness, size, gem quality . . . oh, so many variables in the three hundred tiny works of art. Occasionally, he polished an item before returning it to the box, even removing the odd spatter of blood, which hinted at a less than forthright retrieval. The owner was not known as forgiving, and who was he to question the gathering of something so unique? So valuable, in so many ways?

  There, the last one. I have always loved that horse, even when I was a boy. How it prances in the silver, its eye daring you to look away!

  He cleared his throat in an unobtrusive manner, gesturing respectfully at the heavy lid.

  “May I close the box at this time?” His voice was laden with respect, fear. Even awe and love.