Scissorbox

I ALWAYS THOUGHT HIS EYES WERE BLACK, but I was wrong. They’re red. I don’t know what fluke in nature or DNA allows an iris to flood itself with crimson, but that’s exactly what it is. Apparently, they call him Red for a reason. His eyes, like his life, are full of blood.

And I’m looking at him now, this creature, this man. A man cloaked in a murky, coal-black garb of flowing fabric, a hood lowered and tumbling over his upper back and neck. It is the first time I have seen his face, his eyes, the nose beneath bleeding to form two inky-slick holes. With the bleeding comes a steady stream of warm breath—calm but consistent, as if the thoughts produced steam as they churned in his mind. The chin and cheeks are tinted a rusty ochre, dried and stained skin looking as if the nose has bled for hours, with no desire from the man to wipe away the mess. A rouge of blood.

The empty, frigid classroom—our makeshift headquarters, if you will—feels as though it’s entirely made of linoleum. Crumbled chalk on the floor. Splinters of pencil and shavings in a rusted sharpener bolted to the nearby doorframe. Above a dusty chalkboard—a fractured mass of gray-black slate—are the remains of construction paper humanoids. Joined hand-in-hand in some places, tattering, browned, and torn in others. Smudgy eyes and crayon smiles.

The work of children, whose lives still remain: Faded chalk lessons on slate, a single shoestring spooled near my boot, broken pencils and chewed erasers. Artwork on the walls.

This place has a memory.

One of my hands is gripping the seat of my chair, near the back, scratching beneath at the chipping wood. I wait. The man with the hood goes by the name of Red. We sit facing one another upon age-old chairs with cracked backrests, an old desk and a thick tension our only companions. That name, Red, is most certainly a nickname, but with those eyes—it’s appropriate. He stares at me as if also waiting, waiting for me to speak, to offer an explanation, but so far I’ve kept my silence. I’ve learned to take my time with him.

Without parting my lips, I lick my front teeth, which feel gritty to my dry tongue. My eyes blink fiercely, fluttering like singed moths. I’m tired of waiting. Tired of the silence of this place.

I mumble indecipherably, but with a loose gesture of my hand, a motion that struggles to pull the words from my throat, I finally manage to enunciate a few words of coherent speech. “Maybe I should just get the hell out of here,” I say, realizing that I’ve blurted my thoughts at the precise moment that they sprouted in my mind. I promise myself to steel my voice. Let my guard down and this man will devour me. I’ll have to fight this weariness and think. But he sits silently. As it always is. Silent and contemplative. Inward looking. There was a point where I mistook this silence for disregard, sometimes even madness—that this man’s obsessions had consumed his rationale. I know better now. His intelligence is fully intact. Something else however, is not intact. Not even close.

“Trithian,” he says with eyes peering, though unchanging. His voice reminds me of a knife on leather. “Have you failed me?”

Me: “I don’t know. Victor, he’s…

(mutilated, chopped to bits, dead under your command)

…dead, if that’s what you mean. Killed down in the Flats. I was with Gareth Lutherford, but I think he got away. That or he’s dead too.” I place two fingers to my temple and press hard. Close my eyes. Victor was my partner, now dead by the hands of a beast whose name has escaped me, a man out of his mind with blood-hunger. Gareth Lutherford was our target, a reknowned and dangerous man that we were simply charged with keeping an eye on. A babysitting gig that cost Victor his life. I open my eyes as the pain in my temple subsides into the recesses of my skull. Then, finally, “Yeah. I’ve failed you. If that’s what you mean. Gareth’s gone.”

More silence. No surprise there.

So tired. My bones like the crushed chalk at my feet. The smudgy eyes of arts and crafts projects staring down at me. Grinning their crayon grins.

My eyes continue to flap in protest. Still sitting, Red’s gaze slowly turns to the browned windows to his left (my right) and through them into the waxing morning-light beyond. Those eyes of his are impossibly still, save for the illusion of movement that I realize to be the reflection of soft light and foliage from the outside yard. His hands lay upon the desk between us. They are scarred and aged. Cracked, like his chapped lips. His fingernails, I notice, are perfectly manicured and fresh, sharpened to pristine points. There is an absence of hair on his arms, face, and neck. The hair on his head is light and thinning, slicked back and tan-brown.

“Do you know who I am, Trithian?” he asks softly, plainly, the red of his eyes glowing from the radiant light. His voice sounds like the beginning of a brush fire. Crisp and scraping. He stares into the glow. “Not me as the man, but do you know who I’ve become, who I’m known to be? This city—Carthis—she has a name for me.”

“Yeah. I know now. I think I knew all along—you’re Red. You’re the Hooded-One.” I can’t help but notice the exasperation in my voice. And I had known, hadn’t I? The Hooded-One. Creature of the night. An urban legend.

Myth.

A fucking myth.

I feel myself shudder, not so much from the fear of this revelation, but from the radiating weariness emanating from my gut. My hands are drenched in cold sweat. I’m a pile of filth and grit.

After seeing Victor butchered in the Flats, I returned here with certainty that my employer, this man before me now, would offer up some answers. Not so much of where to go from here, but answers to my weariness, to this utter sense of being done. I say, “You’re going to kill me?” and I think there’s a trickle of hope in my voice. “No,” he responds simply.

My head lowers and I speak through my teeth. “And why wouldn’t you? Now that I know who you are. Now that I’ve failed to live up to all this.”

“Because I still need you,” is his return.

My head lowers more. If he was lying, if he wanted to end this, then let him be done with it. My pride was broken long ago. I’ve no room for games.

I begin to speak flippantly as if my mouth, not my mind, is doing all the work. This is something I’m used to. It’s part of my old self, one that apparently isn’t as dead as I imagined.

“Well, I’m here,” I say, and each word feels like pushing something large through a small hole, “whatever that means now. If you need me to keep going, I imagine I will. Because I need to do something, despite what’s happened with Victor, with everything. Without some sort of purpose I’m nothin’. I’m a dead man walking.”

But the truth is I’m already that dead man, and I want nothing more than to go to sleep, to eat a meal, to escape this old school building. To escape the presence of this man. To escape my skin. And I think this hopelessness is apparent in my voice, and I’ve decided that I no longer care so much about talking tough, or maintaining a demeanor, or sitting in some god-forsaken classroom.

My eyes are on the desk, but I know that Red is now standing. I look up to see his angular face saturated in morning light. Lines crease his features like slivered cracks, though they are taut and fine, as if dirt and grime were the cause rather than age. His skin is a polished ochre and his beard is shaved clean, accentuating the knobby cheekbones, the toned jaw-line. I see now that the blood from his nosebleeds not only stains his chin, but the entire length of his neck, which shares the red-stained tinge of old blood. He looks like a cannibal, like he has dined for months on hunks of flesh. I presume, however, that this is more a case of a man who has traded certain trivialities for fresh obsessions. Why he chooses to keep his hands in such pristine condition while the rest of his body degrades is only one mystery atop another.

He stands still, as if soaking in the sunlight, and those excessively clean hands are clasped loosely behind his back. He is uncommonly thin and uncommonly tall. In the sunlight his eyes look like molten, glistening fire crystals—burning orbs sitting deep within two caves. The fresh blood glistens in the corner of his nostrils.

His lips are thin lines, and the words produce puffs of air that quickly disintegrate in the warm sun. “Death will come,” he finally says. “For us both I’m sure. It is simply the nature of things, the nature of this city. Carthis, our city of rust. Victor Kandu—the monolithic man that he was—has fallen to her madness. But not you, Trithian. Stoic and calm, you have bested her. And for that, I believe I may have misjudged. I believe you can still serve a purpose.”

A brief contemplation, and then I ask, “Gareth? Gareth Lutherford? He’s gone now. You know that don’t you? I’ve lost track—” The words catch in my throat as Red looks down on me with those eyes of piercing flame, which cool into black coal as he turns from the sun. The crusted blood on his upper lips has begun to seep into the corners of his mouth, where it is re-liquefying with saliva. He doesn’t bother licking it away. It simply fills in the cracks.

“Not Gareth,” he replies. “That one is taken care of, for the time, and you did exactly what I needed you to do. Now, I require you to unearth a different target, this one being a young man named Chance—”

“Oh. Lagraw,” I interrupt. But what I’m thinking is What the hell happened to Gareth? What did Red mean by ‘taken care of’?

“Yes. Chance Lagraw. I gather that you’ve made his aquaintance.”

“I know’m. I met him a while back when I was watching over Gareth. He’s with Malia now—Chance I mean, not Gareth.” I stop momentarily, weighing my words. “I believe the girl has betrayed you. She was with us until Gareth went through with the murder. Always a pain. Always challenging. You…heard about the assassination? The mayor’s dead now. Carthis is a mess. People are rioting. Gareth took him out in plain daylight, in front of a good portion of the population.”

Red closes his eyes and nods. So he’d heard. “Well, the kill was over and Malia left with Chance. I think she’d been with him for a while behind our backs. Victor and I had no idea. I’m not even sure if Gareth knew. He was probably a bit preoccupied. I think he was torn about the mayor—”

“Betrayed,” Red says coolly, then pauses as if stuck on the thought. I had nearly forgotten Malia’s role. At times, she was Red’s lover, though I have no idea if feelings were shared. Hell I don’t know if such things are capable to this man.

Malia was a snappy, confident young woman from over the river in East Town—an overgrown orphan in the wrong business. She and Chance Lagraw, a friend of my target, Gareth Lutherford, had fallen into a passable form of companionship. To me it looked a lot like a lust-charged coping mechanism, but it seemed at least somewhat genuine. Malia herself had been the reason I’d met Red, how I became part of his now defunct sect of—what? Bounty hunters? Assassins? We call ourselves hunters, but I’m not sure if that’s quite right either.

I’m pulled from my reflections as, to my utter surprise, a chuckle emits from Red’s blood-chapped lips. It’s maybe the most foreign sound I can imagine in this empty place.

“It’s unimportant now,” he says, his patterns of speech hardening into something almost militaristic. “Malia has made her choice, and she’s betrayed no one but herself. Locate Chance Lagraw and report his location to me. Like your previous assignment with Lutherford, don’t touch him. Find him. Report back. Do you understand?” His voice shifts with his latest words—no longer a brush fire but now two rocks gritting together, chipping off bits of speckled blood instead of stone. His demeanor changes instantly, as if he has come to some sort of internal conclusion. He clears his throat, snorts loudly, and spits a large mass of black to the linoleum floor, then reverts again to that smoother, dryer version of his voice. “I asked if that was understood, Trithian.”

I nod, unable to decipher his concern or intent with Malia and, honestly, not caring. If I find Chance, I would find the girl, and I’m sure Red knows that.

And I will find him, this Chance Lagraw. Smart as that kid may be—and he’s incredibly smart, that much I’ve already learned—I can be smarter. It’s my only option, as it was earlier with Lutherford. I’ll find my mark, and if I fall in doing so, then so be it. My life is no longer mine, no longer in my control. I don’t even consider it a sacrifice.

I rise to meet that bludgeoning gaze of my associate, and it’s nearly impossible to maintain. “I’ll get goin’ then,” I say, turning to greet the new morning. The old chair grinds linoleum in my wake.

“John,” he says. The rare sound of my first name makes me stop mid-step. I turn to meet those eyes again, waiting. He pauses, staring at me for what seems like an eternity. Then, finally, “You’re different somehow, aren’t you? —From before.”

My gaze falters and something inside me feels as though it’s twisting. Like a man sewn into a sleeping bag. “Yes, I’m different somehow.” I look through the top of my eyes to see him cross his arms—his gaze a firm mask void of emotion, his jaw-line taut.

“Oh,” he says, and his eyes flutter. “I’d almost forgotten,” and with this, he reaches into the depths of his seemingly endless cloak, and produces what appears to be a small cell phone. He tosses it to me sleepily.

As I clutch it from the air, he tells me that he’ll be in touch. I simply nod, letting the phone drop into the front pocket of my wool coat.

Finally I turn to make my exit, wanting no more than to escape this haunting building and the ghostlike remnants of children. A slice of sunlight cuts the room as I open the door, and I look back one last time to see Red raise his hood, shrouding his face in thick shadow. Those red eyes are all I can see from the depths of the newly formed blackness. Red eyes atop a flowing and endless nothing. He has earned his name well.

Red—My bleeding associate.

As I pass through the threshold my hand brushes against the rotting door—bluish metal covered in rust—and it’s all I want to focus on—the decay, the growth of some foreign residue that slowly, inevitably eats away at its once-strong host. I want to feel the cool metal and its resilience. I want to feel the rust as it destroys something pure. Rebuild it in filth.

The rust is mine to love, and I feel its itchy fingers laced within my own. But I hate the rust.

(Destroy and rebuild.)

I exit, crisp shadow in tow. The door closes with a resonating clap, a sound that transfuses seamlessly into the aromatic morning air.



Sunlight. The crisp scent of a fruit-laced breeze. The door closing behind me with a suctioned hiss. In the distance, a meandering row of fresh-blossoming pear trees outline the schoolyard, as if like a border to hold the outlying city at bay. Their newborn scents ride the cold morning breeze deftly to my hesitant, quivering nostrils. The sweetness of this air is like a distant memory rediscovered. A buried time capsule. I’ve only smelled blood and filth for so long now.

Timberlane Elementary. It’s an ancient building—nearly a hundred years old. Word is that there was an old coal-burning furnace deep in the basement, one that had been updated to a boiler-room, and then to a gas-based heating system some twenty years ago. Today, the school stands abandoned entirely, its fate seemingly sealed to the judgment of the elements and the cruelty of time.

I look out into the yard and beyond, the breeze sliding over my face and finding its way down the neck of my collared shirt. An old billboard stands at the far edge of the schoolyard just beyond the pear trees, and in faded blue letters one can still make out the name of the school. Timberlane Elementary. Beneath that, the phrase “Go Timberlane Polar Bears!” and beneath that: SC OOL REG STRY EGINS THIS W EK! in large black letters. The letters are cracked, tilting forward in a once backlit frame, now long burned-out and yellow with decay. The solitude of this desolate schoolyard, the spanse of dead grass and snow stretching between me and that distant sign, is almost palpable.

Similar schools in the city had long been abandoned after a series of assaults and drug scandals involving both faculty and students. Timberlane in particular was closed when a teacher was arrested for being a suspect in a series of child abductions. I never got the heavy details, but news broadcasts had informed me that the last child-victim had been found in this very school building, which also happened to be where the suspect taught first grade. Apparently the tunnels beneath ran so deep that no one could hear a young girl screaming for help, not during summer vacation anyway.

What had her name been? Allison? Abigail?

The man, unflatteringly dubbed “The Teacher” by the press, has been in Authority custody since I care to remember. One twist I remember is that the arresting officer also happened to be the victim’s father. He had been filmed arresting the man in a manner that the Defense had called “overly abusive”. This film--a grainy slideshow captured on a cell phone--seemed to confirm it. Somehow a bystander had caught it all on record. And somehow this evidence had made its way into the case. As far as I know he’s still awaiting a verdict.

You see, the missing girl (and I do think her name was Abigail) hadn’t been found by the time of arrest. She was technically listed as missing. As they took The Teacher into custody, there existed a chance that she still lived, was still out there waiting to be rescued and reunited with her family. Only problem is that no one knew where. The officer—once he got a hold of the man who presumably knew the location of his young daughter—attempted to beat the information out of him. He didn’t succeed. Instead, he gathered himself and made the arrest. It wasn’t until a month later that an elderly school janitor found the tiny body. Why he was so deep in the old tunnels one could only guess. Maybe it was the smell.

Abigail’s body was found in a ten by ten room, which was used to store coal in the early years of Timberlane Elementary. With no signs of trauma, even after an autopsy, it was determined that this iron-gated room had held her captive until she’d starved to death. Her fingers were still laced through the grating when the old janitor had found her. Or so the story goes.

All this after a string of affairs involving the school’s campaign to boost child protection and awareness, promising safer walls and a danger-proof education. It wasn’t long before things went south for the school district. After the suspect was arrested, government and local funding ceased, and parents understandably withdrew children not only from the school, but also from the city itself. They escaped to the south—the only way out of this naturally walled city—beyond the thick forests and to the more peaceful plains of the southern countryside and Low Town, the small village down south.

Presently this sociological evacuation left only the wallowing, dingy husk of a building now overgrown with crabgrass, timothy, and other seemingly miniscule plants that have managed to push through concrete. Common weeds have overrun the place and turned it into a terrarium. Not long now and the earth would overrun it entirely, like an ancient ruin.

Surrounded by frozen dandelions and weeds, suddenly I can’t seem to get the thought of that little girl’s fingers out of my mind. Had she tried to escape? Had her throat gone raw from crying for help? Had she cried for her father?

Tiny. Broken. Fingernails.

Outside, here where I stand, the morning sun is breaking the membrane of horizon. Its pinkish-orange grasp spreads over the distance with a soft yawn, as if the earth is blinking its tired eyes to shrug away the deep slumbers of winter. Icicles fall in my peripheral vision, and the earth, in its entirety, is now white and brown and covered in a fresh coat of warmly accented hues. Birds, fluffed within their bodies of feathers, chirp cautiously in the distance, as if unsure of the morning’s sincerity. It is a new day.

The playground is only a few feet away from where I stand. It is an empty, swollen knot of gravel and wood-chips complete with the requisite slide and swing set. Beside these are three rusted coils, each topped with molded, happy animals (handlebars jutting from their brains) standing at about three feet tall. Not always dead, this place, but once bouncing and alive and bringing smiles to small children. I still hear their laughter. Haunting this place. Indeed, there’s a memory here, and it’s a strong one. Vivid in its recreation. Photographic even.

At my feet is snow, frozen mud, and fossilized plant life. Crystals of ice have risen from the hardened mud, transforming the leaves and petals into gnarled approximations. Naked dandelions and weeds. I take a deep breath. I’m a statue in this place. A statue of deep, brown flesh that feels more like crumbling stone. Despite the sunlight and scent of distant flora, the cold is still very real. Still biting.

I had one of my own, you see, once upon a time. A kid I mean. He went to this school before the instance with The Teacher, before things really went to shit in Carthis, this miserable town. He was six, and I was twenty-nine years old. This was a lifetime ago. He was six when he and his mother were taken from me. Because of this he’ll be six forever, and my wife, twenty-five. I will no longer be able to love them. I will no longer be able to call out their names. To see their faces.

I close my burning eyes. The sun is orange now, and it is falling on my face. I feel as if its weight will cause me to crumple. I don’t feel its warmth. I look down to the mud and brittle plants as they engage in a slow-thawing dance—instigated by the slowly melting ice that seems to deflate and shrink into the earth below. This slushy mix blends pink with dripping blood, which I notice is trickling from my fingertips. I unfold my right hand to see that fresh blood has been drawn, and it is mixing with the dried blood of my dead friend that is still crusted over most of my upper body, arms, and hands. I have clenched my fists so tightly that my fingernails have gauged my palm with the shapes of four crescent moons. The sight of my own blood is hypnotizing. So bright compared to the scab-like crust that covers me.

For a moment I think I’m going to collapse. I haven’t slept in days, and it’s been a scant few hours since I tried to save my partner, Victor Kandu, from death by the hands of a monster. I don’t even know his name, the one that did the killing. He simply arrived, slaughtered, and made his exit. I have no means of avenging my friend.

Only hours after Victor’s death, and I am lost. My head pounds like a sledgehammer on brick. Crushed chalk.

However, and despite these things, I have a job to do. I take a single step, which crunches the soft ice at my feet, and then pause. I swoon as I feel a sharp buzz in my mind. A brain-zap. My breath surrounds my face like a halo, then dissipates in the cold air.

It’s been over a decade since the death of my family. I realize, to my horror, that the name of Victor Kandu’s murderer is not the only name that has escaped me.

I have forgotten the name of my dead wife. I have forgotten the name of my son.
Scissorbox: Next Chapter Posted Under THE HISS OF BUTANE Prologue: The Bleeding Associate