CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ON THE KINGSHEAD EXPRESS, ELLIOTT stumbled onto the train, as flightless as a fox sparrow with its wings clipped, staggering past the rows of rich, velvet maroon compartment seats. He couldn’t catch his breath. He hyperventilated in rapid bursts. Lucien almost killed me.
Lucien Montclair almost drowned me alive.
A fear swelled behind his chest bone. We killed him and left the body.
All of the train passengers’ eyes seemed to watch Elliott, their judgment laid thickly on his skin from the hot gaze of their mass attention.
Don’t spiral, Elliott. No one is staring at you.
No one even knows you. No one here is from Banebury.
Elliott heaved a breath down his throat to steady himself.
Finally, he glanced around. No one bothered to look at him.
Cheerful holiday music rained down from the speakers across the festive train.
Merry families and couples celebrated the holidays. Brightly dressed, red-nosed carolers crowded the entrance of the train with happy clots of ruddy-faced children and spirited adults. “Oh what fun it is to ride and sing a sleighing song tonight!”
Lucien laid slain on the mountain snow, bleeding in rivulets–How could none of them even be affected by the ritual ceremony? How were they all so damned jubilant?
“Oh, jingle bells! Jingle bells!” Dozens of train riders drunkenly sang along. “Jingle all the way! Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh. Hey!”
Slain. Slain. Slain.
The train was overpacked. Elliott tripped over his polished shoes past the suburban parents with rowdy, high-sugared children grinning with fistfuls of candy canes; he shouldered around the packs of loud high school football players that complained about yesterday’s loss of the New England Patriots to the Minnesota Vikings.
Elliott blundered through them, gripping the snowy train ticket he’d purchased with his head low. His throat throbbed. Compartment 31A.
Lucien’s clenching hands were still tightening around his neck, and he begged his vomit to return to his stomach as he shakily unlocked the kingwood doors.
He wasn’t going to make it far. As soon as he tumbled inside, Elliott kicked off the stolen oxfords from his feet and he felt his way through to the sink, emptying the bile trapped in his chest between sobs.
“Oh, God. God, what have we done?” He cried out. “How could I do this again?”
Graphic images re-emerged of the grisly rainstorm, the careening vehicle, then Samhain night flashed before his eyes, James thrusting the knife into Lucien’s abdomen with dark fury. By Yule season, Lucien was a ravine of blood, his body ravaged apart. Repeatedly.
Then burnt.
Burnt human remains churned through Elliott’s nostrils, his mouth salty and watery with repulsion at himself. He stripped himself of the expensive overcoat that was tailor-stitched–property of Hán Callum韓–tangling the socks as he left a pile of clothes on the voluminous floors.
Elliott fumbled barefoot into the marbled shower, navigating aimlessly beneath the leonine statue of the shower head. Elliott, himself, didn’t feel as dignified and powerful as the lion statue at all. He felt like a lost, hopeless puppy.
All he could think of was Buck on the Thirty Mile River, stolen from the life he knew and afraid. He even still felt the brawny weight of the buck antlers on his head.
He slid down the granite shower walls that enveloped him, letting the hot water barrage him like artillery warfare, drenching him in heat and deluging him in water.
Bile vertiginously gorged his throat again as he suffocated beneath the water, throttled by Lucien’s brutish hands, submerging him in boiling-hot water. I will delight in the sound.
Lucien’s merciless grip was tattooed across his neck in inks of violent bruises.
The purpled bruises might ameliorate into faded-blue hues, then lighten to sickening-greens and flesh-yellows, however, the internal scars would be permanent.
Lucien’s explosive words still screamed around in Elliott’s head.
The honorariums aren’t merely slaughtered; they’re kept alive for weeks–dissected, exsanguinated, and examined in pursuit of alchemy.
As if breaching his thoughts like a silent serial killer in the night, Elliott heard the doorknob twist. He quickly rose to his unsteady feet like a newborn fawn in the woods, dazed as he remembered where he was before scouring and scrubbing himself with the complimentary citrus-scented soap.
He fervently washed out the pine stems, twigs, and dirt that clung to his curls.
He washed away any sign of Lucien on his body.
James’s voice found him. “Are you alright?”
Elliott’s skin was dampened with melted, gritted ice. Despite the fresh, hot water after he washed out the ice and grit, he was shell-shocked.
Elliott parted his mouth, but words wouldn’t come. He swallowed his tears. How could James and Elliott have scorched a man’s skeleton? Why spare Elliott? How was that fair?
Elliott nodded, then he realized James couldn’t see him through the steamed shower door. “Sorry–I was freezing, I ran in the shower. Don’t worry, I won’t use up all the hot water.”
“I’m not worried.” James sounded exhausted. “Are you hungry?”
How could James think of dinner? We slaughtered someone. Lucien had parents, brothers, cousins. Exactly like…
Exactly like Mr. Newton.
The sugary aroma of hot chocolate poured merrily through the door like nothing was wrong. Soon, they would be out of Connecticut, heading southwest to Arkansas like it was a holiday trip. Lucien was gone because of them.
Adrenaline and endorphins still propulsively shot through his blood system, and before Elliott could stop himself, he opened the wintry window, letting in a shock of wind to catch his breath.
Elliott wanted to leap out of the window and into the snow and run until he couldn’t think or breathe.
Except, he dressed. The clasp of Elliott’s belt, the wet, fumbling fingers of himself kneading the buttons back together, were all clumsy movements as he forced himself to put on his clothes one sleeve at a time.
All of it felt like Herculean feats of effort.
Afterward, his heavy breaths were the only sound in the condensation-dense air.
Elliott left the shower in a haze of steam and stood by the wintry window on the other side of the doors. The towns grew smaller. The mountains became sparse. There were two four-post beds, a simple desk, and the massive windows.
Elliott’s words suffocated in his trachea in the tense air. He repeated himself for what felt like the hundredth time. “Stay in Connecticut. There’s a life for you here.”
James fixed Elliott with a hardened glance. “There’s nothing for me in Connecticut.”
A warm cloth ran over his ears as James dried Elliott’s drenched hair, and Elliott grasped his wrist to stop him.
“You’ve been invited to deliver a formal speech in front of Congressman Pittman.
His Head of Staff only hires one political aide every year.
His senior staffer has never recommended anyone out of college before. Take the shot.”
James’s voice lowered with a tint of solemnity. “There was never going to be a senatorial race for me. I have dark secrets everywhere, Elliott. The people deserve better. I was a campaign volunteer every summer. That is my legacy.” He exhaled a second time. “I need to make peace with it.”
Are you punishing yourself because you’re a torturer? Was Lucien right about what you’ve done? Elliott wanted to ask, but he couldn’t bring himself to even utter the words. It had to be wrong. Instead, all he could think of was one plead. Don’t follow me into the depths of the wasteland, James.
“James, there’s a part of you that would despise yourself if you didn’t even finish college.” Tears gathered in his eyes, and Elliott felt underwater. “Eventually you’ll regret killing someone for me and surrendering your entire future.”
“My political future died the night Arthur Newton died, Elliott. You know that. I only went to college for a chance to work for the congressman.” Maybe it all could’ve been different if that night never happened.
Maybe James could’ve gone to an honorable political college of high éclat, like Harvard or Georgetown, where the politics were cleaner without the sacrifice ceremony.
If he had, it wouldn’t have been over for him this soon.
However, that night did happen. There’s nothing they could change about that. “I’ve made my decision.”
However, Elliott refused to let James burn his life down for him. “We can’t be boys forever, James. You were right. Be an adult and look after yourself instead of me.”
What they did on that mountain…It couldn’t be undone by fleeing to the countryside with James. James still had a chance to live a normal life. To improve society.
To ensure there’s never anyone else selected for another human sacrifice.
James exhaled a final time in a strange, distant sound. “It should’ve been me, Elliott. I should’ve been the honorarium slain there. It’s what I wanted. You should’ve never been chosen.”
Those words. The twenty-one words drained Elliott in an exsanguination he couldn’t express beyond profound, bloodless anguish. James sacrificed a boy in Elliott’s place. All of this was Elliott’s fault. How could he subject James to suffer that guilt alone?
He didn’t mean to make it sound as if he was abandoning James.
The warmth from the shower water leached out of Elliott’s skin. Linen clung to his forearms in wet, freezing fabric. Soap dripped from behind his ear.
“None of this is your fault, James.” Elliott left a damp trail of footprints as he treaded forward, resting his forehead against James’s forehead. “It shouldn’t have been any of us chosen. Promise me you’ll at least finish college. Then we can meet again.”
James promised him, if only Elliott would leave the entire matter alone. However, bile stung the back of Elliott’s throat.