* * *
When Cyrus drove us to the perfumery, it was just as I expected. Despite the lights being on, no one had investigated the place, or called the police, and there were still glass bottles all about the floor. If it had been a painting, I would have called it, "Alcoholic's Rampage."
"Where's the body?" Cyrus asked.
I pointed round the counter, while I covered my nose to breathe. As we walked towards it, though, I suddenly knew with all my heart that the body would not be there. It would have disappeared, or never originally been there. Maybe I have gone insane, I thought. But then we rounded the corner, and I saw feet, ankles, shins, stomach, throat.
Yes, Jim was as dead as could be.
"Mm," Cyrus hummed softly, and he squatted near the body. He touched the man's tweed jacket, running the backs of his fingers up towards the collar, and then he took the tip of his forefinger and ran it across the bloody laceration, and then finally plunged his fingers deep inside. When he pulled them out, they were covered in red, and Cyrus said to me, "No knife did this."
"So I'm not crazy."
Cyrus didn't respond. He opened the man's mouth, looked into the maw, and then pulled apart the man's shirt and examined his chest.
I stood behind Cyrus, watched his back as he undid his own jacket, and then as he pulled out a knife. The blade was not particularly long. Five inches or so. He twirled it between his fingers, until, as though writing with a quill, he cut into the man's chest a series of perpendicular lines. On the last line, just as soon as Cyrus's blade left the skin, the laceration in the man's throat grew bright. Almost instantaneously, the body was covered in flames. I was in awe.
"That's a neat trick," I whispered, absolutely entranced. The heat rose up against my hands like puffs of wolf's breath.
Cyrus placed his hand gently against my arm and guided me back. "Return to the car," he said. "I'll be there in a moment." I nodded my head and turned to go.
As I walked through the broken glass door and out into the night, across the expanse of parking before me, a sudden bright glow fluoresced, and my shadow stretched out very long. I flipped around.
The entire perfumery was burning now, from concrete floor to parched, wooden roof. It was like a brilliant star had poured its blood upon the building. I felt the heat come to me as would an explosion, and my whole body shivered in exhilaration. Yet, the night was absolutely quiet. There was no crackling, sizzling, popping, moaning, hissing usually inherent in such giant flames.
I walked towards the building, feeling my eyelids and cheeks scream against the blaze. Yet, no matter how close I came, all I could hear was the wind. The inferno didn't even whisper.
As I stood there, out from the milky orange whips of flame walked Cyrus's cloaked figure. There was a case in his left hand, a bottle in his right, a smile on his face. The fire had left no mark on him. He appeared as dapper as the conductor of an opera.
His pace was hot and I bolted to keep up with him. In just a flash, we were both in the car, and he was driving away.
"Maybe you're right," he said, turning onto Connor Street.
"About?"
"Maybe there is a correlation. Maybe there is something threatening there." He looked at me, but I could not discern just what emotion his face evoked, if any. He turned back to the road and continued. "I wonder what it could mean... when there is a disconnect between what you do and what is done."
In these seconds I realized that perhaps I had made in irreversible and grave mistake in telling Cyrus anything. For the first time in my life, I vaguely wished I had lied to him, even if it had killed me. "It's not necessarily a bad sign."
"No, it's not. But the box deals in traitors and outsiders. It's what the box is implying, Jack."
"Fuck that," I said. "I have always been there for you. Always. In whatever you've asked. I..."
"I know." He stopped me by placing his hand on top of mine and squeezing it briefly. He let me go. "And I'll never forget it. Ever."
My breath paused. This was not a soothing answer to me. It was not what I wanted to hear. But then, as if knowing this, he added, "Besides, that's not what I was thinking. Not what I was thinking at all."
"What is it?" I said.
He peered at me in the dim night. "There is something I have never told you."