The Cult of Rohesia: Nicolas (3/3)

“You passed, right? You'll still graduate?”

Dora is older than Michelle realizes, but I'm sure she'll find that out soon enough.

“I already did that. They were college classes.”

“But you passed them?”

“Yeah, I passed.”

“That's good.”

Oh. Oh, she knows she's going to—

She knew she was going to die tonight. Did she know before she came here? I suppose I can't assume that much. Still, how impressive. I don't think anyone from my cohort—well. My first cohort. Anyway, I don't think any of them were so certain about it.

Thomas certainly didn't see it coming. David was very quiet. We were all wondering why no one had died, and then Cathy looked over at him leaning back in his seat and realized he wasn't breathing. Cathy herself landed face-first on her plate (which, luckily, had nothing on it). Ronnie landed on my shoulder. I was so startled I nearly jumped out of my chair.

None of them pushed their dishes out of the way like Michelle just did.

Right. I need to take her upstairs.

“Don't touch her!” Dora snaps at me.

“We have to get her upstairs.” Where did this come from? She didn't get like this when Mark died last month.

"She's not dead—don't fucking touch her!"

Do they know each other outside of here? They didn't seem to recognize each other in March. I don't know how Michelle could have gained Dora's trust, let alone loyalty, in two months. Not when she must look as suspect as the rest of us from Dora's perspective.

Well, no, actually, I can think of one way this could have happened in two months. Either they've been seeing each other, or Dora wishes they were. From how Michelle acts (she didn't even know Dora had finished high school), it must be the latter.

"She can't stay here, Dora,” I say, gently. “Why don't you help me carry her?"

"Where are you taking her?"

That wasn't really a question—she knows where—but answering is probably the most reassuring thing I can do. "Just upstairs. There's a couch she can stay on until she wakes up. It'll be much more comfortable than a chair at the dining room table."

"Dora, why don't I help you instead?" Mark suggests.

She looks at him and calms down a little. “Fine.”

I sit back down and watch them lift Michelle's body, then take her through the doorway. They'd better not drop her. Or bump her head on the wall.

What exactly does Dora see between Michelle and I? That defensive reaction was apparently as much about me as Michelle, since she had no issue with Mark helping. There's no reason for jealousy: Michelle clearly hates me.

That must be it, actually. Michael said something last month about her feeling like this was a cult, but he spoke carefully. What does she say about me to the others when I'm not there?

It's really none of my business. I shouldn't worry about it. Nothing is going wrong because of it. Not this week, at least. Worrying about it will only make me feel worse.

I hear feet pounding down the stairwell. Dora's the only one of us who stomps so loudly.

"Nicolas! You never said that could happen to any of us!" she says, a moment later.

"I never said it wouldn't.”

"That's not fucking good enough! We have lives, you know!"

Oh, I see. It was deceptive of me. Well, I suppose that's fair enough.

"Let's be clear," Emilie says. "We're all going to die at one of these dinners, and then come back to life the following Sunday. Yes?"

"As long as the five of you keep coming back, yes.” I thought it was clear enough, but now that I think about it, Jeanne did tell the others it would happen to all of them. I had already died by then, though. She never warned me.

"And if we don't?" Dora asks.

Well. I certainly can't tell her I'll die. It wouldn't be fair to the others. "What do you think will happen?"

"I don't know what to think. That's why I'm asking you!"

"Well, I have no idea how you'll prevent your mother's arrest in that case—"

"So you admit to leaving those notes?"

If I recall correctly, I already have. And I hate to “admit” to anything. There's little else to do, though. "Yes."

"Why the fuck have you been blackmailing us? What do you get out of this?"

Michelle likes to set traps with her questions. Dora, on the other hand, interrogates me like she's trying to stab a mouse with a knife. It hardly seems worth the trouble. After a few minutes, though, she does start to calm down. Is it because she's taking me seriously? That's refreshing, I suppose, but I don't quite dare believe it—

Oh. I probably shouldn't have mentioned the Rites directly. Now both Dora and Michael are questioning me about it, but—

—Dora might not come back, if I tell her. Even with her mom's arrest hanging over their heads. And I'm not sure how Michael will react, either. I don't yet know him well enough.

Perhaps I can throw him off if I act like I'm joking. "Michael, if I tell you more than you need to know, you'll run screaming.”

Dora reacts before he can. "Wow, that's incredibly reassuring! Since I already feel like running away and screaming, why don't you just tell us everything you know now?"

Maybe all I need to do with her is talk more. She doesn't pick at things the way Michelle does. “Michael, not you. You don't have anything to worry about, Dora.”

Silence all around. Did I make a mistake?

Mark finally asks how much I've had to drink.

I laugh, mostly out of sheer confusion. How can he possibly think I've had too much? “It's been—” I check my watch to be sure, “—fifteen minutes, Mark. To answer your question, not enough.”

“What about Michelle?” Dora asks.

“What about Michelle?”

"Does she have anything to worry about? Like how Michael does, but I don't?"

Always back to Michelle with you, eh, Dora? Well, you two do seem to suit each other. "No, Dora. That much, I can promise you."

Satisfied, Dora leaves.

Unsatisfied, Michael asks me why he's different. Maybe I should treat him more like Michelle. He doesn't argue back as much as she does, but I can never be sure what's going on in his mind.

<<>>

I hear someone walking up the stairwell, all the way from the bottom. All the way up to the top.

Something isn't right. I can tell Louise heard it, too, from the way she's looking at me and glancing at the ceiling.

On my way up the stairs, I hear Michelle's voice, but not loud enough to tell what she's saying. Then a gasp. Probably not her—

As soon as I'm out of the stairwell, a woman I barely recognize shrieks in my face. Mrs. Simard. Michelle's mother.

"Mrs. Simard, I know how this looks, but I promise you you have nothing to worry about," I tell her. I tell her everything I can think of to get her to calm down. Nothing works. When she and Michelle finally leave, Dora trails after them.

I suppose I should be astounded that this is the first time anything like this has happened, at least in my memory. Even my father was mainly concerned that I was leaving the Catholic church when he disinherited me.

People remembered then, that the church of Rohesia had been founded by one of the people of this House. The sermons were even held in the basement, until the church joined a larger network of Lutheran churches and moved to its own building.

Its association with the House is little more than a shadow now, but still, everyone in the last cohort but David attended services there for our entire adult lives, whether we believed or not. We did so to maintain our humanity in the eyes of the community (or at least, I did. Thomas went out of piety). And it paid off, too. Who knows how the Olmsteads would have reacted to our interest in their grandsons otherwise?

Secrecy balanced with community involvement kept anyone from letting the way we didn't age or die when we should have scare them enough to do anything about it. If questions were asked, we would find something inane but charming to blame our good health on. If they persisted, we would tell them when we would die, and speculate as to whether their great-grandchildren, grandchildren, children, might take our place.

Once, I pointed out Michelle from the other side of the room. She was about six or seven. Thomas corrected me and said Michelle would take his place, because I'd be taking Jeanne's. Then I corrected him and talked about how much better he was with young people than me. The person who asked me if I was really over a hundred and how that was possible moved on, probably sick of our affectionate bickering.

And Michelle might have just brought it all crashing down. Time will tell.

<<>>

Like Mark, I was the first person in my cohort to die. And like him, I had no idea what had happened when I woke up.

Unlike now, the others were all there. Jeanne had promised them I'd come back to life, and they all wanted to see. Had I not been so stiff, I would have hit the ceiling in sheer surprise at the sight of the four of them peering at me. As soon as I found my voice, I demanded to know what was going on in spite of my sluggish tongue and the cold pervading my body.

“It's Sunday, Nicolas. Your heart's been still since Friday night,” Jeanne told me from further away, a little triumphantly. “How do you feel?”

“Like an exhibit at a zoo,” I told them all.

Cathy and Ronnie immediately looked sheepish and backed away. David did the same but pretended not to care.

Thomas asked me if I wanted some coffee. I wasn't thinking. I said I did. He went to get it for me. As soon as he was gone, I came back to myself and regretted accepting his offer. Small as it was, it created a sense of intimacy, which I was particularly sensitive to at the time. I would read too much into it, I told myself, ignoring my own self-awareness. I was getting attached. By the time he came back, my heart was pounding.

It's probably for the best that Michael and I are the only ones here. He's not as awestruck as the others were over a century ago, but I think I can see a subtle change in the way he's acting. It might be more relief than anything else, though.

There's no need to say I told him so. And Mark doesn't seem to have even noticed my presence. Any questions he has in the time it takes me to make a pot of coffee, Michael should be able to answer. Come to think of it, he may want coffee as well.

I've barely been back upstairs for a few minutes when Michael's phone buzzes. “She's here,” he says, looking down at the screen.

“Who?” Only one possibility crosses my mind. I'm not sure I believe it, and if I do I definitely don't like it.

“Michelle,” Michael says, shoving his phone back in his pocket. He pauses and looks at me. “You know, she's probably more scared of you than you are of her.”

Scared? “I don't know what you mean.” Unpleasant as she was last night, there's nothing she can do to hurt me. Only remind me of the pain that's already there. I have no reason to be scared of her.

And yet, here I am, watching Mark follow Michael downstairs and not going with them. It takes me until Emilie emerges from both her room and the bathroom to finally go down to the kitchen.

“Michelle. Good. You can come to church with us,” I say while I rummage through the fridge. Eggs, but I don't want to end up making them for everyone. Jelly. What else do we have?

Right. I left half a bottle of wine here. That'll help.

I hazard a glance at Michelle, but not enough to tell me much. When I look again, she's looking away, reticent if not shy—

And she's eating her cereal with her fingers. No milk. That isn't breakfast. “You don't like milk?”

Nervously, she meets my eyes. “I'm lactose intolerant.”

“Can you eat these?” By which, I mean the English muffins I found on the bottom shelf of the fridge. Honestly, cold cereal even with milk is barely substantial enough to be breakfast. I'd try to goad everyone into eating one, but there are only three left. Michelle nods.

Mark breaks the silence while I heat the muffins up. "Michael and I should go home and change, if we're going to church."

He was the one I woke up early for. I should be paying more attention to him. Talking to him about nothing of importance calms me down. It helps that Michelle is being quiet, too. Maybe she feels guilty about Friday. Maybe this is more normal for her.

Maybe, we can start over. Chat civilly over what's left of breakfast. We don't know each other well, after all. All I have to do is start a conversation. “So you're a morning person, Michelle,” I try.

“Not really,” she says.

She must be tired. Michael seems alert, though. Maybe as long as there's conversation happening around her, she'll join in when she feels like it. “Michael, did you wake her up?”

Michael is no help at all.

“You know, if you reward behavior like that, Michelle, he'll probably do it again.” Maybe she'll respond to sympathy.

"So why exactly did Mark have to die for the stuff you were talking about on Friday to kick in?" she says, crisply, after a few minutes.

I don't know why I expected anything different. No matter. I can play that game, too. "As you can see, Michelle, Mark's not dead."

“I didn't say he was dead. I said he died.”

"Hmm. You admit there's a difference, then—"

Mark requests clarification. He doesn't seem to have any awareness of the state he was in. What did Michael tell him? I suppose it would be more what he didn't tell him.

Michelle twists the conversation back toward me. She expects me to be able to explain what happened.

"I told you on Friday I didn't have an explanation, and that hasn't changed."

“So you won't explain anything. We're supposed to just go along with this and not ask questions.”

What do I have to say to get her to believe that I can't? No, wrong question. She's obviously already decided what to believe. I should try to work around it instead of contradicting her directly. “That is the only way you'll have any chance of understanding what you saw on Friday, yes.”

“That was what you did, but you don't seem like you understand.”

Good lord. So she does understand that I can't explain, but only when it's convenient to her. I wonder, does she even care about any of this? Appreciate the magnitude of what I'm trying to show her? Or does she only care about winning arguments?

Next, she questions my motives. Trying to come up with ad hominem arguments, from the sound of it. I suppose assuming there are any future discussions to be had between us might be too optimistic of me.

I may as well not hold back, then. “You have friends, Michelle, yes? Parents who care about you and encourage you to pursue your own interests? A bright future, all planned out already, no room for any—” how do I want to phrase this? “—disruptions to what you thought was real?”

Nothing to say to that, eh?

“I didn't,” I continue. “That was why. Don't worry about eighteen-year-old me. He was nothing like you.”

“What about now, then?”

You're only asking because you don't want to look callous for pushing back against what I said about when I was younger. “An obligation to the woman who saved my life, to pass on everything she taught me now that she can't,” I tell her. “Nothing more.”

“What happens if we turn you down?”

I'm glad you asked, Michelle. "You'll get to turn into the wrinkly old crank you so clearly aspire to be and die forty or fifty years younger."

"And what happens to you, Nicolas?"

Bloodthirsty, aren't you? "I get to go into the ground and be with Thomas. Which is exactly where I belong." That was what you wanted to hear, wasn't it?

<<>>

Since the moment Michelle first laid eyes on me, she's looked like she wanted to bolt. It's difficult to imagine why. My clothes are clean. I washed up this morning. Shaved. I did everything I could to hide that I've spent most of the past month completely alone, barely even leaving my house, let alone the property it's on. I even paid someone else to start the nursery plants this year.

I shouldn't have done that. It leaves me with nothing to do but sit around, looking against my will for things that remind me of my late lover. “Lover” doesn't do Thomas justice. He was my partner for life. My husband, though the word still feels strange in my mouth. For too much of my life, husbands were only for women, and I wasn't one, no matter how much more I tended to sympathize with them.

I've survived, somehow, to see a world where most of the people around me would accept Thomas as my husband. But only in time for them to recognize me as a widower.

I'm making this sound worse than it is. I'm—anyone else would say I'm lucky to be alive. Two months ago, I turned one hundred eighteen. A little over a year before that, Thomas did the same. Then a month after that, he died.

Not only did we live well over a century each, we died in good health. Completely able-bodied until we weren't. Well, until he wasn't. Anything I can't do right now is my own fault. I'm letting my grief get the better of me.

I survived for a reason, and the reason was tonight—and all the nights that will follow. A new cohort is coming of age, and I'm the only person left who can connect them to the Power that's allowed me the life I've lead so far.

Michelle doesn't care, though.

The only reason this matters, is that we need six people for the Power to work for any of us. And it has to be the six people the House chose. Michelle is one of them. Irreplaceable.

This is what she wants to know:

“If you're really a hundred eighteen, that must mean you don't have anyone left from when you were our age. Even the others from the last group are dead now, right?”

No. She doesn't want to know. She already does. There's a malicious glint in her eye that betrays her.

“Is your world still worth living in without them?” she asks.

How does she know? How can she tell? I was so careful to be presentable. Personable. As warm as I could manage. Where did I go wrong?

No, why is the House doing this to me? Why this girl? Why Dora, who's even less interested than she is?

Am I being punished? Did I accept too much good fortune? Maybe there is a god and he does indeed hate people like me.

"I got a century with Thomas, thanks to the Power,” someone else tells her. They're using my voice, but I feel so far away from all this. “It was more than we would have gotten otherwise."

They're not wrong, though. And now they're gone. There's nothing more I can say. I'm going to leave.

<<>>

I woke up in the guest room today and wondered why I was there. Then I remembered. And it felt like the world fell out from under me.

Thomas is gone forever. I'm not myself without him. I don't recognize myself in the bathroom mirror, no matter how hard I look.

My hair looks terrible. I can barely even see my own face. I don't think I actually want to see it, but I hate to continue looking like this. I know I'm not going to comb it today, let alone wash it.

There's a pair of nail scissors in the drawer. I take them out and cut the end off a strand of hair. It doesn't come off right away. Closing the blades is not enough. They're too dull. I have to work at it to get through the hair. But after a few seconds, I manage. And I keep going.

It distracts me. I'll take distraction anywhere I can get it.

If Thomas walked in right now, he'd be afraid for me. Maybe even yelp in fear. But he won't. He can't.

I need to call the morgue. It's been a day.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon outside, even though it's freezing cold and the snow is calf-deep. I stayed out well past dark. My feet felt like they were full of nails by the time I came in. My hands burned. I ran a hot bath and thought about drowning myself. You can drown in as little as three inches of water, no?

I need to call the morgue, but I don't want to. Then this will all be real.

Instead, I'm going to keep cutting my hair. Even though it's making a mess on the floor. Even though I'll probably track it around the house. It'll get into the upholstery, and my clothes. It'll itch. This is so stupid of me. I'm not going to stop.

I'm not even going to stop when I run out of hair. I'll cut into my scalp, too. Maybe I'll even cut into my skull. I wonder if I could get past it, with just this blunt old pair of nail scissors?

No. No, I won't do that. Too much effort.

Oh, god, I'm out of hair. There are clumps of it, but I don't think I'll be able to shave them off with these scissors. I could use my razor, but it's too much work. I look even less human now than I did before. Why did I do this to myself?

I know why. I know why.

I don't know how long I've been sitting on the toilet lid by the time the doorbell rings. Long enough to shift positions a few times.

Emilie screams and stumbles backward when she sees me. For a few seconds, she trembles and stares at me, wide-eyed. I see her car behind her, at the side of the driveway.

Why is she here? Is today New Years' Day? It must be. Yes, that was when she was planning to visit. I remember.

“Nicolas!” she finally exclaims.

I haven't moved this whole time. I don't think I've even blinked.

Emilie pushes past me and into the house. I let her. She's heading for the back bedroom.