Dead End of a Circle, Page 4

  Mr. Tilger came back to the door and angrily shooed them out of the way. Immediately afterward he tried to act like a polite gentleman to me. I led him away from the house and out of view of his daughters, and then I knocked his wind out with a carefully placed fist to the stomach.

  "The fugitive is you."

  I administered a vicious beating and then dragged Mr. Tilger's effectively unanimated body into a dark alley that no vagrant would even defecate in. There I secured him in ropes and fixed a gag around his mouth. Before going back to the house, I felt for air under his nose to ensure that he was able to breathe. I threatened to kill him if he attempted to escape or draw attention to himself.

  I went back to the house and I could see that the girls were still standing in the threshold of the doorway. I stood under the eave and greeted them with kindness, but not so much kindness that they'd lose trust of me.

  "Your father is getting the bad man," I said. "Is your mother home? Can I talk to her?"

  "She sleeps with the angels now," the older one said, speaking for the both of them.

  "Did your father get a new mother for you?"

  "No; he says that it's our fault that she died and we have to take her place."

  There was something about them… they were so stoic and accepting of their own fate. It was infecting me, and I could feel my pity for them starting to slip away. It was like there was nothing inside of me, and it just felt like I didn't care at all. But this would've happened anyway because my love for them was not genuine. My love for little ones was nothing but hatred for the monsters that did harm to them. I could never love again because, long ago, I'd been broken.

  "What does that mean, 'take her place'? What do you have to do?" I asked.

  "We have to cook for him. He labors for his fee and then buys the food, and we just have to cook it."

  "Is there anything else that you have to do… anything else that your mother did?"

  "Sometimes we have to close our eyes while he hugs us. It hurts, but he says that's normal."

  "Well, your father will be gone for a very long time. He wanted to come back again, to you girls, but he is just so good at catching the bad men that the king needs him for a long time. Do you have grandparents that can watch over you for a while?"

  They both shook their head no.

  "Maybe an uncle or an aunt?"

  They again indicated in the negative.

  "How about this, then. After I go get rid of the bad man, I'll take you to a nice place where the food is always hot and the beds are always warm. How does that sound?"

  "That sounds good."

  "Thank you," said the younger one, in a much brighter voice.

  I just smiled, turned my back, and started to run. I ran slowly at first, while I was still on their property, and then I tuned it up to full speed. I was relieved to see that Mr. Tilger was still where I'd left him.

  "You are guilty of the highest of all crimes. Higher than murder. Higher than treason. Your punishment shall be death without a trial."

  I beat him again until his face was soup and his eyes were half-eaten strawberries. My love could be broken—I knew that much. But my hate? Never.

  Chapter 18

  "Father! Father! Save me from this madman!"

  Father Brahm and I shared a glance with one another and then looked back at Mr. Tilger coldly. And that's when he realized, as he was hanging there naked, upside down, and totally helpless, that he was going to die.

  "Father!" he begged. "What would God say?"

  "What would God say?" Father Brahm repeated in disgust. "What would God say? God has taken a vow of silence. The question is, 'What would your wife say?'"

  "Please, my daughters need me. Turning them into orphans is doing more harm than good. For their sake, let me go! I beg you!"

  "Your children are not a shield," I said. "You will not hide behind them." I stepped in behind the hanging man and held him in place so that he could not writhe. "You will be held responsible for what you have done."

  "Oh, I know what it is," Mr. Tilger proclaimed. "This is what happened to the two of you, isn't it? That's why you're doing this?" He quickly exchanged his fright and dignity-trampling desperation for a sadistic smile. "How did it feel to have another man inside you? How did it feel?"

  Father Brahm produced an ordinary dinner fork and gazed upon it with awe. "I've always felt that elaborate tools were unnecessary. You'd never believe what I could do to you with nothing more than this fork."

  There was blood and screaming. And Father Brahm was quite right—it was indeed very possible to do many horrible things to a person with nothing more than a dinner fork. The hanging man eventually lost consciousness, either from the intense pain or from all of the blood rushing to his head, but that wasn't enough to stop Father Brahm.

  And then I could feel the cold darkness of the vault rising up inside me and swallowing my guts.

  Chapter 19

  In almost every war, I was there. I enjoyed to fight for both sides in any particular war, unless, of course, my physical appearance forbade me from joining one side or the other; in most such circumstances, however, I found myself able to break through the ethnic barrier simply by supplementing my enrollment application with the presentation of several severed heads of enemy leaders.

  The America-Vietnam War was the last war that I fought in, and it would have been the last one even if I hadn't been stowed away in this vault: I had to stop participating in wars due to technological advances since my capture would result in a transfer to a maximum-security research facility or perhaps another vault like the one I was in now. Thus, in the America-Vietnam War, I fought only for the Americans.

  In addition to being my last war, the America-Vietnam War was also probably my favorite. The Americans were insane, and it spread to me. I began to act like my true self, hiding nothing, and there was a sick joy to it all. This was not how I had evaded detection all these centuries; I consequently had to murder many men in my companies if I suspected that they were gossipers.

  Aside from my own side, I, of course, did my fair share of damage to the enemy. I ate the enemy and I drank his blood, but I didn't just do that. I'd strap a belt of grenades onto myself and run into a bunker, and then afterward I would collect their body parts as if there was some application for them. I'd take some of the prisoners that we had locked up and then run through minefields, dragging them behind. I would even sneak into a commanding officer's office at night to the spy the time and location of the next aerial strike so I could experience such an attack firsthand.

  My friends started to call me Phan because I'd killed a Vietnamese officer of that name and worn his uniform for a while. And they began to emulate my behavior as well, wearing enemy armor and clothing for fashion and other crazy things like that. Many of my psychotic friends were captured and tortured, and I let it happen because they deserved it.

  The atrocities that I'd perpetrated while in that frenzied jungle draped a haunting shadow over the next few years of my life, and I was in a decade-long melancholy spiral after my discharge. I cut myself off from the world, rarely surfacing, never feeding.

  I was in a den of vagrants—some of the other homeless men there might have been in the war, too—and I recalled to mind a particular Vietnamese man that I had killed. He was running away, he was trying to survive, trying to protect the flow of air that was going in and out of him, but I ran him down and overpowered him. The feeling I had when my hands were around his neck was indescribable. There was the world around me, and then there were my hands, and then in the space between my grasping hands there was this life that I was destroying. I could feel his throat vibrate against my hands as the air went in and out of his lungs, and then I squeezed harder and I couldn't feel the vibration anymore. I was killing him, and I looked into his eyes and he knew that he was going to die. And I didn't even remember why I was doing this anymore. His face became
blurry, and then I blinked and tears fell onto his face, and his neck was warm to my fingers now because his body and mine had established a connection, and my rhythm was set with his, and it was like I could see in his eyes his whole life and everything that I was taking from him.

  I deserved to be in this vault for all of the lives that I had destroyed and for all of the pain that I had caused, and Padempire would never forget the things that I'd done.

  Chapter 20

  As I brought yet another bloodied pedophile down the dark steps of the dungeon I could hear Father Brahm interrogating someone. It could not have been Mr. Tilger, as it was not physically possible for him to have been conscious at this point. The interrogated would not answer, and, when I laid eyes on him, I discovered why: the detainee was one of my men.

  "This one is a different kind of monster than the ones we usually seek," Father Brahm said to me. "This one is a bloodsucker."

  "As am I."

  "But this one is a killer."

  "As am I." I looked up and down Father Brahm's face as it glowed in the flicking fire, and I was able to see his fear from any angle. "You must let this one go."

  "But he is a devil!" Father Brahm protested.

  "As am I."

  Father Brahm looked at me very strangely and then formalized the accusation. "Blessed Mary, you really are the devil! You're no angel! You're the devil! Cursed be you, by the blood of Christ! The blood of—"

  I grabbed him by the neck and lifted him off his feet. "Reserve yourself, mortal," I hissed. "I am older than the ink in your Bible. I was there when Cain killed Abel. You will not edify me."

  "I—"

  "If you speak, I will cast you to the floor and crush you."

  "Begone, devil!" he piously shouted.

  So I violently threw him to the floor and put my foot on his throat. "I should twist my foot," I said. "But I won't kill you because I think you know, deep down, that you can't see heaven in the tip of a sword. You know that there is no pot of gold underneath your deathbed. You listen now. Your founders were outcasts, your saints are hypocrites, and all your prophets foam at the mouth. Even your messiah was executed for blasphemy. You will not act as though I am privileged to be in your company, and you will not concern yourself with what I am or where I come from."

  "As you say," Father Brahm acquiesced.

  "Now release the prisoner." I turned to address my soldier. "Lemniscate, you will not retaliate. I will compensate you for this."

  "As you say," he echoed. He looked at Father Brahm through the bars of the cell, laughing.

  Father Brahm raised himself up, retrieved the cell keys from the wall, and began to unlock the cell door as instructed. The door creaked open and Lemniscate approached in a natural strut, very cavalier and arrogant. As he neared, Father Brahm took a courtesy step backward to make room. When Lemniscate's back faced Father Brahm, the priest revealed a dagger from within his robes and jabbed it into the vampire's neck. He held the other side of Lemniscate's head with his other hand so he could jostle the dagger back and forth, and blood did flow out in mighty gulps. And as Lemniscate was growing weak, Father Brahm accepted the waves of blood into his mouth until there was nothing left in the dry vampire.

  Chapter 21

  The fledgling Brahm was a perfect display of why I was so careful in choosing my men. He could not control the new hunger, and—to make a long story short—he was responsible for us both becoming fugitives of the church. And, of course, in these times, being a fugitive of the church was just the same as being a fugitive of the world.

  Brahm was thrust through and beheaded in battle because he'd gone mad with the new blood that was in his veins; however, I, as always, surrendered when the overwhelming forces were upon me.

  I was largely glad that Brahm's time on this earth had come to an end, as he had become uncontrollable and unpredictable. Due to his loyalty to me that he'd had while he was still human, I was unable to kill him; it was, however, far from my duties to grieve his death.

  And so, having yielded to the church's knights, I was taken to the deepest, darkest depths to which man could have possibly burrowed, given the technological infancy of the time, and there I would dwell for a short time.

  Chapter 22

  Padempire opened and I saw the surface of the sun, and it was like it was alive. It moved like a morbid fluid, like a slosh of substance that was wounded and bleeding, and I reached out to touch it. And just as I did, Padempire's metal melted and washed over me with the burn of ice water.

  In the next moment, the scorched earth and her billions of graves were consumed. I knew in my mind that it was actually a process that took a long time, but it was still only an instant. And then the outer parts of the sun swept through the rest of the planets in a massive wave, and I was left floating like a space rock. I was gravitationally ejected away from the sun, destined to drift through the blackness until the extremely improbable, yet extremely inevitable, fate of falling into a star.

  And then something very unlikely happened. It was like a flipped coin landed on its edge and anything was possible now. After the infinity of time it wasn't a star that I fell into, but rather a planet. A rock-solid planet with 0.004 Jupiter masses.

  I was the mother. I was the mothership that brought a world's population of microbes to the salivating planet. The organisms shed off of me like dust and accumulated on the ground, and they began to multiply, and they were multiplying inside me, too, and the life flourished. They consumed the nutrients of my body and my consciousness was swallowed up by the soil, and I watched the centuries pass as the life increased in complexity until it was walking upright and fighting wars.

  My children left for the stars, perhaps in search of me, and, soon after that, my world was again consumed by the heat of a star. And I was in the vault and I was screaming, and I might as well have been in the vacuum of outer space because there was no one around and I did not make a sound.

  Chapter 23

  This was why I'd stopped ruling over humanity.

  Back in the land before time I could simply pummel them under my fist because they could not build cages of iron to confine me; as man slowly began to wade through the secrets of metal, I began to realize that I could not continue to brutalize them—I could not even rule over them at all because they would eventually learn that the legends of my immortality were very much legitimate. I could never allow metal-working man to learn this secret because if the terror of my name once again swept through the land—except this time through a land of metal—then, eventually, the insignificants would band together and come to take me away. My only choice was to live under the shadows.

  "Under the shadows" would be my exact address for the next few years, as I was taken to a firelit dungeon wherein all of the other heretics were held captive. It was a bleak place that was damp and dark, and you could always hear muffled screams of agony. The particular area to which I was taken was a circle of cells surrounding a middle open area that was used for persuading the prisoners to convert.

  What was going on here was something that probably wasn't legal, not even in this age when interrogation was synonymous with torture. I say this because most torture devices will have some kind of complexity to them, such complexity that the device could be used for only one specific purpose, thereby legitimizing its usage. Instead, in this dungeon there were torture tables—nothing but metal beds to hold you down while a very, very sick person satisfies his sadism.

  There was only one table in our cell block. It was a long metal bed upon which you will lay your body, and there was room enough for your arms to be outstretched into L shapes—elbows out at the side, hands at head level. Your legs would rest in their natural position. There were attached dungeon cuffs that would be fastened around your wrists and ankles, and there were similar things to hold down your waist and neck.

  The living conditions in this prison were truly as horrific as the torture. Fo
r one thing, you were never let out of your cell unless you were free to go—that is, either through clemency or torturous execution; I never once saw or heard of an inmate being removed for a court appearance. Inmates were able to take care of some parts of their bodies, but atrophy of certain muscles was inevitable. There was also atrophy of the mind: over the years while I was there, I saw many prisoners who were unable to walk when they were being taken out of their cells because they'd gone so many years without walking more than four paces in any one direction. They could walk quite fine inside their cells, but when presented with a vast openness before them they could not remember how to take more than the amount of consecutive steps that they were able to take while inside their cells.

  It was quite bad for the prisoners here, but for me it was hardly anything at all. I had no sorrow for the fact that a few years of my life were being taken away since I, unlike my unfortunate friends, had so many to spare. I was also unaffected by the poor quality and quantity of food, and the physical problems resulting from this form of incarceration were impotent against me. There was, however, my bloodlust: I needed to inhale the fumes of fresh blood.

  I know that I probably alluded that I drink blood, or perhaps I even said it outright, but that's not the case; I needed only to sip the aroma of the blood, as this was where I could find the residence of the soul. If ever I endured a prolonged period of time without this satisfaction, my mind would begin to unravel; however, I will not be driven to madness in this tale, for I had always been capable of sustaining myself for quite a few years without any crimson gratification.

  Chapter 24

  If there's one thing about human nature to which I can wholeheartedly attest, it is this: humans are clever. When locked up, men have very ingenious ways of doing things that need to get done.

  There was a market for all kinds of things here in the prison, and this market thrived without anyone ever leaving his own cell. I donated much of my daily food to this market, and in exchange I received all of the feces that I'd ever need. Yes… feces. There was indeed a demand for this waste substance since the prisoners were so creative and so talented at using such a small amount of tools or goods to do so many things; the demand for dung never met the demand for food, of course, and so I was entitled to more than just fecal matter for my edible contributions.